Seminar #2 : Performance Improvement Programmes  Part 1: Introduction:  What to expect from a Scholarship exam  Basis of the question on Performance Improvement Improvement  Students given 2007 paper to look through and discuss question  Questions and Answers  Reading for background

What to expect from a Scholarship exam What to expect from a Scholarship exam  What do I do in the Exam? ??  Get the paper, read through each question and select the questions that best suit the course of study that you have done....  Now, have a look at last year’s Paper.

Knowledge  Knowledge for this question will have come from materials covered when working towards completion of 3.3 and (some of you may not have covered all of these aspects yet, others may have forgotten already!)  Based around a central premise:  How can I optimally improve myself and/or others when working to improve overall level of performance of a skill or set of skills for an applied performance?

In this question you will be asked to consider the fact that final performance is the product of a number of contributing factors. The key to performance success is:...determining the relative importance of these factors and then constructing a development programme that allows for each of them to be optimised in the perfect world this will ALWAYS produce an optimal performance at the desired time. So it should be pretty EASY

... but it’s not! Why? Because of the interaction of all of these different factors for the athlete; Biophysical (bio- mechanical faults, physiological demands, anthropometric/genetic advantage, coaching techniques, nutritional influences, injuries and illness) and... Socio-Cultural (education, goal setting and motivation, other psychological factors, economic constraints, hegemonic constraints, personal support networks)

 Each will be influential to varied degrees in different athletes, and so...  to OPTIMISE performance we would need to not only understand the significance of each factor but also... ...know how best to set up practice for the athlete that would best optimise all of the performance enhancers and minimise any performance barriers...  And all within a specified timeframe. ...and in a team sport you need to factor in the interactions between all individual team members  So would you like to be the All Black Coach??????  Or the NZ swim team coach???  Much easier to be an armchair critic eh!

Look again at the paper... Which is the right question for performance improvement?  Look carefully to see what it is that the question is asking from you?  Often the question is a means of unlocking the information that you already have.  But you also need to be specific and ensure that you cover the specific aspects that are asked of you.  (Remember the principle of specificity... it applies to writing essays as well!)

Question Time:  What is required for the question in the 2007 Paper?  What do you think this question is asking you?  For Scholarship you will need to show a greater Depth of understanding of these factors and of the relative implications of their interactions.

DEPTH  To generate a depth of understanding, keep in touch with ideas and issues to do with performance improvement...  you will have to investigate some of the factors in more DEPTH than what you may have done for level 3.  This means that you will have to do READINGS and you will have to consider viewpoints and angles that you may not have consideredbefore.  It is often good to read from a variety of sources... from academic publications to popular newspaper articles and TV commentaries... Other sources???????