Seyed Mohammadreza Mousavi; Nahid Shetab Boushehri; Rasool Abedanzadeh
Abstract
The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of external focus of attention instruction and autonomy support on learning of an aiming task in mentally retarded children. Therefore, 48 children (age range: 10-14 years, mean age 11.81+1.2 years) were selected from all mentally retarded children ...
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The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of external focus of attention instruction and autonomy support on learning of an aiming task in mentally retarded children. Therefore, 48 children (age range: 10-14 years, mean age 11.81+1.2 years) were selected from all mentally retarded children of Ahvaz city by convenient sampling method. Participants performed 10 trials as a pretest and according to their scores of the pretest, they were assigned to four groups: external attention, autonomy support, external attention-autonomy support and control. The task consisted of throwing 100-gram beanbags into a goal that was mounted at a distance of 2 meters from the participants on the wall. Participants performed 40 trials including 5 blocks, 8 trials each block in the acquisition phase. 10 minutes after the last acquisition block, the participants performed 10 trials as the posttest. 48 hours after the acquisition phase, retention test (10 trials) was performed to examine the learning effects of the participants under the same conditions as the pretest. The data were analyzed by mix ANOVA 2×2×5 in the acquisition phase and two-way ANOVA 2×2 in the retention phase with SPSS22 at significance level of P≤0.05. The results showed that all four groups had a significant improvement in their performance during the practice blocks. The external attention+autonomy support group gained the best scores in the acquisition phase (P≤0.05). The external attention+ autonomy support group presented the greatest performance in the retention test (P≤0.05). Therefore, it is suggested that a combination of autonomy support and external attention should be used to improve the performance and learning of aiming in mentally retarded children.
Hamide Jahanbakhsh; Parvane Shafienaya; Seyede Nahid Shetab Booshehri
Abstract
Normative feedback is a kind of feedback which involves information about an individual's performance in comparison with other peers unrealistically (positive or negative). The aim of the present study was to determine the effect of normative feedback on throwing aiming task learning in children aged ...
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Normative feedback is a kind of feedback which involves information about an individual's performance in comparison with other peers unrealistically (positive or negative). The aim of the present study was to determine the effect of normative feedback on throwing aiming task learning in children aged between 9 and 11 in Ahvaz city. For this purpose, 90 right-handed children were selected with convenience method as the statistical sample and were divided into three groups (each group 30 subjects) of positive normative feedback, negative normative feedback and control based on their age, height, weight, hand length, arm length and pretest scores. Acquisition phase included 6 blocks of 10 trials. In this phase, all groups received real feedback after each trial and positive and negative normative groups received normative feedback after each block in addition to real feedback. The transfer and retention tests were carried out immediately and after (delayed) the acquisition phase respectively. After checking the data normality and homogeneity of variances, data were analyzed with one-way ANOVA with repeated measures, one-way analysis of variance, and Bonferroni post hoc test (P≤0.05). There were significant differences in all three phases among the three groups and positive normative feedback group showed better performance (P=0.001). The findings showed that positive normative feedback had a facilitating effect on motor learning.