MOTOR SKILL LEARNING AND ADAPTABILITY IN PRIMARY SCHOOL CHILDREN

This thesis aimed to advance our understanding of motor learning and adaptability in primary school children aged 8-12 years. The present series of studies asked how primary school children’s motor skill can be enhanced and monitored, not only in terms of performance levels but also in terms of adaptability in motor performance. Starting point for this dissertation was the manipulation of task constraints to induce variability during practice, which would allow learners to search for individual solutions. From the perspective of the constraints-led-approach, in this thesis two main questions about manipulating task constraints are studied. First, as providing instructions can be considered a task constraint, should educators aim for minimizing instructing prescriptive solutions as much as possible, thus allowing children more freely to explore to enhance motor learning? Secondly, should educators of young children deliberately stimulate variability through manipulation of the constraints, so that the learner must search for adaptive solutions? This thesis also explored how manipulating task constraints can help monitoring motor skills and stability and adaptability in children’s motor performance. It was shown that minimizing prescribed solutions led to an improved motor learning, and that this was -under the constraints used here- independent of individual differences such as age and verbal working memory capacity. Also, we demonstrated that performance of children can be improved by training with modified equipment that enforces more variable movement execution. Next to that, our findings also suggested that manipulation task constraints may be invoked to monitor adaptability. This thesis has important ramifications for practitioners, especially for (youth) coaches and teachers working in sports and physical education