This investigation examined the effect of model similarity on girls’ acquisition, retention, transfer, and transfer strategies of a novel motor task. Forty girls (mean age = 10 years) were randomly assigned to conditions in a 2 (model skill level) ✓ 2 (model sex) factorial design using four treatment groups: (a) male skilled, (b) male learning, (c) female skilled, and (d) female learning. Quantitative data were collected throughout all phases of the investigation. ANOVA results for transfer strategies revealed a significant main effect for model skill level and model sex. Participants observing a female model or a learning model transferred significantly more learning strategies than did participants observing a male or skilled model. After quantitative data collection, qualitative data were obtained via structured interviews and assessed through content analysis. Results from the interview analyses underscored the need to include models of similar sex, as well as learning models when instructing girls in motor skills.
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The Effect of Model Similarity on Girls’ Motor Performance
Karen S. Meaney, L. Kent Griffin, and Melanie A. Hart
Do You Hear What I Hear? Overweight Children’s Perceptions of Different Physical Activity Settings
Karen S. Meaney, Melanie A. Hart, and L. Kent Griffin
Social-Cognitive Theory (Bandura, 1986, 1999) served as the framework to explore overweight children’s perceptions of different physical activity settings. Participants were children (n = 67) enrolled in an after-school and summer program for overweight African-American and Hispanic-American children from low-income families. To gain insight into the children’s thoughts encompassing their participation in both the after school/summer program and their physical education classes at their respective elementary schools, all of the children individually participated in semistructured interviews. Children enjoyed their involvement in the after-school/summer program and described social, physical, and cognitive benefits related to their participation. Interview data also revealed children’s ideas and suggestions for adapting physical education to enhance participation in physical activity. Based on these results, instructional and management strategies focusing on promoting a nurturing environment in physical activity settings for all children (overweight and nonoverweight) are presented and discussed.
Examining the Mechanisms of Internal and External Focus of Attention With Donders’ Subtractive Method
Jarrod Blinch, John R. Harry, Melanie A. Hart, and Denis Cousineau
The goal of the current study was to measure the processing demands on the stages of information processing with internal and external foci of attention. Participants completed simple and two-choice reaction time tasks with internal and external foci of attention. Donders’ subtraction method was used to isolate the cumulative duration of stages unique to simple and choice reaction time tasks. Mean reaction time was comparable with internal and external foci of attention in simple and two-choice reaction time tasks. These results suggest that processing demands were comparable with internal and external foci of attention. We hypothesize that there was not a processing advantage for an external focus in simple reaction time because the required movements had low movement complexity.
