Posted: March 9th, 2016

Motor Skill Acquisition and Performance

ALL lab report assignments are required to use either Times New Roman or Arial font, 12-point font, double-spaced, and all margins being 2.5cm. Deductions will be incurred if these criteria are not followed OR a marking criteria sheet (found at the back of this course description) is not included with the assignment.
Referencing
Students should incorporate APA referencing into the lab report assignment. Each lab should involve at least 3 academic references.

To successfully complete a lab, students must complete the experiment activity and answer the result questions and discussion questions provided.
The result section must include both a written summary of the results as well as a graph. It is important that you interpret the data presented in any graphs.
The Discussion sections consist of a series of Discussion questions. You must answer all assigned questions. Your responses should include discussion and critical analysis of the related research and refer to the findings of the lab. The student needs to support their responses with academic references.

The total word limit per lab report is 1000 words.

It is important that in completing your assignment you support your answers with reference to skill acquisition and motor control literature. Each lab should involve at least 3 academic references.

Laboratory 1: Performance Curves
Aim: To demonstrate one way of measuring learning.
It is important that practitioners be able to successfully distinguish between performance and learning when working in the field. Performance refers to the behavioural act of executing a skill at a specific time and in a specific situation. Alternatively, learning refers to changes in the capability of a person to perform a skill. The difficulty with distinguishing between learning and performance is that learning must be inferred from a relatively permanent improvement in performance as a result of practice or experience. That is, learning cannot be directly measured and we must use things like performance to see if someone seems to be learning the skill. When working with an individual we want to make sure that the skills we are teaching are being learnt, and that the performance is not being misrepresented.
One way we can assess learning is to record performance during the period of time a person practices a skill. A common way to do this is to illustrate and analyse performance graphically in the form of a performance curve. For any performance curve, the levels of the performance measure are always on the Y-axis (vertical