Measuring game understanding in sport: A Skill Theory application to cognitive descriptions of actions on the soccer field.
Résumé
Although expert performance can be achieved through different combinations of psychological and motor abilities, research has consistently shown that expert athletes outperform non-experts on their perceptual-cognitive skills.For instance,Mann, Williams, Ward, and Janelle (2007) show in their meta-analysis that expert soccer players anticipate faster and more accurately on future events (e.g., predicting the direction of a penalty kick), and make more appropriate decisions (e.g., choosing the most appropriate next move), than non-expert players. Researchers assume that having a complex representation of the sports situation―a high level game understanding―is key to anticipate and select correct and effective responses (e.g., Roca, Ford, McRobert, & Williams, 2011). While this assumption has been put forward in various studies, we are currently lacking a scale to measure game understanding based on a cognitive developmental theory. This study proposesthat Skill Theory (ST), developed by Fischer (1980), can serve as a framework to study game understanding in sport. In general, ST is a theory of cognitive development, which assumes that (cognitive) skills can be characterized on a hierarchical scale of complexity, distinguishing sensorimotor, representational, and abstract levels. Based on this scale, verbal behaviors can be assessed with a domain-specific, content independent coding system. Although this theory has been used to measure cognitive understanding in different domains (e.g., Van derSteen, Wielinski, Steenbeek, & Van Geert, 2012), it has not been applied to sport psychology. In order to test the value of ST in the field of sport psychology, this study compared professional, high amateur, and low amateur soccer players―who are assumedto have different levels of perceptual-cognitive skills―on their ST level of game understanding.