Warm-up effects in the learning of discrete motor skills

Three experiments were conducted to determine the influence of warming-up activities on performance and on learning in two discrete motor tasks. During initial trials on the criterion task, Ss were given various types of warming-up activities having an activity-set that was either the same as or different from the criterion task. Test trials followed in which all groups practiced the criterion task only. No significant differences in performance on the criterion task were found regardless of the appropriateness of the warming-up activity during initial trials. The results suggested that warming-up properties are not a factor in original learning of discrete motor skills.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/22014/1/0000429.pd

Introducing an online community into a clinical education setting: a pilot study of student and staff engagement and outcomes using blended learning

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>There are growing reasons to use both information and communication functions of learning technologies as part of clinical education, but the literature offers few accounts of such implementations or evaluations of their impact. This paper details the process of implementing a blend of online and face-to-face learning and teaching in a clinical education setting and it reports on the educational impact of this innovation.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>This study designed an online community to complement a series of on-site workshops and monitored its use over a semester. Quantitative and qualitative data recording 43 final-year medical students' and 13 clinical educators' experiences with this blended approach to learning and teaching were analysed using access, adoption and quality criteria as measures of impact.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The introduction of the online community produced high student ratings of the quality of learning and teaching and it produced student academic results that were equivalent to those from face-to-face-only learning and teaching. Staff had mixed views about using blended learning.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Projects such as this take skilled effort and time. Strong incentives are required to encourage clinical staff and students to use a new mode of communication. A more synchronous or multi-channel communication feedback system might stimulate increased adoption. Cultural change in clinical teaching is also required before clinical education can benefit more widely from initiatives such as this.</p

Testing Multiple Coordination Constraints with a Novel Bimanual Visuomotor Task

The acquisition of a new bimanual skill depends on several motor coordination constraints. To date, coordination constraints have often been tested relatively independently of one another, particularly with respect to isofrequency and multifrequency rhythms. Here, we used a new paradigm to test the interaction of multiple coordination constraints. Coordination constraints that were tested included temporal complexity, directionality, muscle grouping, and hand dominance. Twenty-two healthy young adults performed a bimanual dial rotation task that required left and right hand coordination to track a moving target on a computer monitor. Two groups were compared, either with or without four days of practice with augmented visual feedback. Four directional patterns were tested such that both hands moved either rightward (clockwise), leftward (counterclockwise), inward or outward relative to each other. Seven frequency ratios (3∶1, 2∶1, 3∶2, 1∶1, 2∶3. 1∶2, 1∶3) between the left and right hand were introduced. As expected, isofrequency patterns (1∶1) were performed more successfully than multifrequency patterns (non 1∶1). In addition, performance was more accurate when participants were required to move faster with the dominant right hand (1∶3, 1∶2 and 2∶3) than with the non-dominant left hand (3∶1, 2∶1, 3∶2). Interestingly, performance deteriorated as the relative angular velocity between the two hands increased, regardless of whether the required frequency ratio was an integer or non-integer. This contrasted with previous finger tapping research where the integer ratios generally led to less error than the non-integer ratios. We suggest that this is due to the different movement topologies that are required of each paradigm. Overall, we found that this visuomotor task was useful for testing the interaction of multiple coordination constraints as well as the release from these constraints with practice in the presence of augmented visual feedback