The A, B, Cs of physical activity, play and motor learning

A substantial amount of international research has documented children’s need for explorative, experiential and challenging physical play. Through versatile and all-round varieties of play forms and play environments children will develop basic movement skills and learn how to master their body in different and challenging situations. Children’s play is motivated through curiosity and fantasy of exploring the environment and this allows them to master their own bodies and learn to move in a variety of different ways. This symposium will consider how the abilities of: agility, balance and coordination (‘the A,B,Cs’) are stimulated and developed through different and open-ended affordances of play within four different European countries. The purpose of this is to share how the same early movement abilities (A,B,Cs), are developed according to context, culture and environment. The four countries have been chosen as their natural or adapted environments are varied, but they are all used to enhance and help the children to explore, engage in movement that develop their A,B,Cs. Different kind of A,B,C’s will be demonstrated: Finland through focusing on the use of snow and ice. Belgium through focusing on the use of water and aquatic activities, using the specific CEReKi approach. Norway through focusing on the use of the woods and forest environments and England through the use of beach, sand and indoor environments. The use of tools and equipment to help support the children’s development will be examined as well as the role of the teacher to help aid the early movement skills within each different natural or adapted environment. Photography and illustrations will demonstrate how the A,B,C’s are developed differently within each country. Paper one - Finnish perspective The purpose of this presentation is to concretize affordances of Finnish nature during winter – ice and snow. Ice is fascinating slippery surface. It challenge children’s balance and agility constantly, when they are moving or playing on the ice. Children need to activate all their neuro-muscular systems to coordinate their body limbs to keep their balance. Controlling their bodies in different postures while standing or moving helps motivate their play. Therefore, moving on the ice can be seen as playing with own body and trying to keep the balance. Beautiful white snow is free mattress for children: children are attracted to jump, run, throw, dive, cave, lay, roll, spin and use their creativity and desire to make whatever they imagine to try. These physical activities are excellent stimulation for the movement. Moving in the snow slows down children’s movements and they need to use more strength than without snow. Nordic children are lucky to have attractive winter affordances, ice and snow to tempt them physically active play. Challenging surfaces and materials demand concentration, which is prerequisite for development of physical abilities and motor coordination. The seasonal variation with changing affordances may be one reason causing good motor competence of Nordic children. Paper two - Belgium's perspective The aquatic environment is generally for children a source of pleasure and fulfilment. However, water presents physical characteristics for which the humans are not fundamentally constituted. The ability to move in the water is governed by different rules that the child must appropriates in a progressive way. For example the child has to move from the vertical position to the horizontal position in water. Propulsion uses more the upper limbs than the lower limbs. Water resistance changes the speed of segmental movements and breath must be controlled. The aquatic environment should be discovered in a suitable, progressive and fun way. This is what is proposed with the CEReKi original water familiarization method developed in Belgium. The purpose of this presentation is to illustrate how an original arrangement can stimulate the agility, balance and coordination (ABC’s) of the child in the water through active play. Specially adapted equipment is introduced into the pool to provide a stimulating environment, allowing children to evolve according to their desire and level. This presentation will show how a synthetic fibre net, bars, floats, a metal cage or slides can be used to develop children's aquatic ABC’s in an adapted and affording environment. Paper three - Norwegian perspective Children learn movements and gain bodily experiences by exploring different environments. Through bodily experiences, children explore details and quality of movements such as balance, coordination, speed, agility, force and endurance Children develop perceptual-motor skills through natural spontaneous interaction with the environment. The materiality of the environment affords challenges and experiences that promote motor learning and the children respond by exploring, discovering and face the challenges by mastering perceptual motor skills in context with the environment. This presentation will demonstrate how children’s physical play is stimulated and developed through different and open-ended affordances of play “How to encourage explorative and problem-solving play” “How do landscapes promote motor learning and mastering of bodily competence?” Approaches: * Children’s play and learning through experience will be demonstrated through a video of a natural play space * Open-ended affordances of landscapes will be presented Literature and case studies showing the contextual environment- child relationship in learning fundamental motor skills will be discussed. Multifunctional and challenging environments seem to have promotive effect on children’s physical and explorative play and should therefore be encouraged as a pedagogical approach in motor learning. Paper four - English perspective. Nowhere within the UK is further than 70 miles (113 kilometres) from the coast, and England is made up of 2728 miles (4,422 km) of coastline. The coastline has a variety of natural textures from flat sandy dunes to steep white cliffs such as those found at Dover. The beach and coastline offers English children an almost Jurassic exploration, as it is the place that is full of beauty, history and fossils, with many schools having weekly or daily ‘beach school’ in which the children, learn, explore and play on the beach environment. The photographs and illustrations provided in the paper will show how the abilities of agility, balance and coordination are developed through a variety of ways using the sand and beach environments. For example the fine and coarse sand are ideal for sensory touch development with children from very young age. Both the actual outdoor environments of the beach and rock pools as well as sand pits, sand boxes and water boxes within indoor settings are used to develop physical curiosity, through hiding objects that the children have to use fine motor skills to dig out, to use pincers to help develop their grasping, reaching and coordination skills

Pictorial scale of perceived water competence (PSPWC) testing manual

The Early Years Special Interest Group have completed a technical publication, ‘Pictorial Scale of Perceived Water Competence (PSPWC) Testing Manual’. This publication is the first to specifically focus and develop an assessment tool appropriate for young children aged 4 – 8 years old. It aims to address the following specific needs 1) to be accessible to this young age range, 2) to be suitable for children of different swimming levels, 3) cover all the aquatic fundamentals – water entry, breath control, buoyancy, balance, propulsion, immersion, water exit, gliding and vision. The idea to develop the PSPWC started during the Early Years Special Interest Group meeting at Laramie 2016 AIESEP, which then developed into a larger group of experts in order to develop and present the assessment tool. A four year process of critical analysis, preliminary face-validity, face-validity and content validity were completed in the development of each version of the PSPWC until the final testing manual was completed. Within the testing manual all aquatic skills and test items are represented through visual methodologies of drawings by a professional illustrator. In order to engage young children’s interests and to keep their attention to facilitate their understanding and to obtain more meaningful responses. The testing manual includes 3 level progressions for each situation, skill or test item, level 1 = “not able to do the skill”; level 2 = “skill in progress” and level 3 = “able to do the skill. The 3 level progression was developed as the expert group considered it more appropriate to have a process orientated scale showing a child’s developmental progression. The PSPWC can be applied for use in children (measurement of their own perceived water competence), in parents (measurements of their perception of children’s water competence) and/or in teachers (measurement of their perception of pupils’ / students’ water competence. The testing manual is accessible to all through open access publication

An evaluation of the reliability of the pictorial scale of perceived water competence and its relationship with actual water competence

In its recent development, the Pictorial Scale of Perceived Water Competence (PSPWC) showed good face and construct validity. However, additional reliability and validity research is needed, including test-retest reliability and a demonstration of the relationship between PSPWEC test scores and actual water competence. Toward that aim, we administered the PSPWC to 124 children, aged 5–8 years. We repeated this test administration after one week for a subset of 55 children to determine its test-retest reliability, and the remaining 69 children also performed the fully aligned Actual Aquatic Skills Test (AAST) in an indoor swimming pool to provide data for our investigation of the relationship between PSPWC scores and actual water competence. We found good test-retest reliability, both at the global level (ICC = 0.81, n = 55) and at the level of individual skills (Weighted kappa coefficients from 0.58 to 0.90), with no significant differences between these two test scores. We also found a moderate positive relationship between PSPWC and AAST total scores (r = .64, n = 69), with no significant difference between total scores of actual and perceived water competencies. Children overestimated their competence in three specific skills: the back star, swimming on the front, and diving in deep water. While these results underline specific situations in which children’s higher self-perceptions of their water competence are a risk factor for their water safety, these data confirm that the PSPWC is reliable for measuring children’s perceived competencies in aquatic education and drowning prevention, and there is further support for its validity through a moderate correlation with actual water competencies

Face and content validity of the pictorial scale of perceived water competence in young children

An international group of experts have developed a pictorial tool to measure perceived water competence for children aged from 5 to 8 years old: the Pictorial Scale of Perceived Water Competence (PSPWC). The aim of the present study was to verify the validity of this tool. In the first part of the study, 120 children were interviewed to investigate face validity of the PSPWC to ensure that all pictorial items were understandable. In the second part of the study, 13 scientific and/or pedagogical international experts were invited to assess the tool's content validity via an online survey. Face validity results revealed that children were able to understand and sequence correctly the aquatic situations in 92% of the cases. The average Content Validity Index (CVI) of the PSPWC ranged from 0.88 to 0.95, showing acceptable content validity. Feedback from experts and children resulted in a major improvement of the "exit water" situation and minor improvements concerning some other items. Experts confirmed that the PSPWC was globally appropriate for different countries and cultures, except for the situation "water entry by slide" which was not considered usual practice in some countries. The PSPWC opens up to new fields of research; useful both for the prevention of drowning and for the support of children's aquatic education

Differences between young children's actual, self-perceived and parent-perceived aquatic skills

As drowning is a leading cause of unintentional injury/death in children worldwide, perceptions of their actual aquatic skills are of critical importance. Children’s self perceptions may influence the risks they take, and parental perceptions may influence the degree of supervision deemed to be necessary for children in and around water. Accordingly, we examined the differences between young children’s actual, self-perceived and parent-perceived aquatic skills. Using a three-way repeated measures ANCOVA, we analyzed data from 134 child-parent dyads (56.0% boys; M age ¼ 7.1, SD ¼ 1.1 years; and 71.6% mothers). We measured self and parental perceptions of the child’s aquatic skills with the ‘Pictorial Scale of Perceived Water Competence’ (PSPWC), and we applied the exact same 17 test items of the PSPWC to assess the child’s actual aquatic skill level in the water. Controlling for years of swimming school experience, within-subject differences between the total scores on the ‘Actual Aquatic Skills Test’ (AAST) and both the child- and parentcompleted PSPWC indicated lower than actual estimates of the children’s aquatic skill level. The degree of disagreement against the AAST was more pronounced in parents than in 6-7 year-old children but was similar between parents and 8-9 yearold children, with these patterns being evident regardless of the children’s sex. Our study contributes to an ongoing validation of the PSPWC and represents a key advance in assessing and comparing children’s actual and perceived aquatic skill competence, using perfectly aligned instruments. Future research and practice might explore children’s actual aquatic skills in different contexts (e.g., open water), include perspectives of non-parent caregivers and assess perceived and actual water competence across development

Movement velocity as a measure of exercise intensity in three lower limb exercises

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between movement velocity and relative load in three lower limbs exercises commonly used to develop strength: Leg Press, Full Squat, and Half Squat. The percentage of one Repetition Maximum (%1RM) has typically been used as the main parameter to control resistance training, however more recent research has proposed movement velocity as an alternative. Fifteen participants performed a load progression with a range of loads until they reached their one repetition maximum (1RM). Maximum instantaneous velocity V max) and mean propulsive velocity (MPV) of the knee extension phase of each exercise were assessed. For all exercises, a strong relationship between V max and the %1RM was found: Leg Press (r2adj=0.96; 95% CI for slope is [-0.0244,-0.0258], p<0.0001), Full Squat (r2adj=0.94; 95% CI for slope is [-0.0144, -0.0139], p<0.0001), and Half Squat (r2adj=0.97; 95% CI for slope is [-0.0135, -0.00143], p<0.0001), and for MPV, Leg Press (r2adj=0.96; 95% CI for slope is [- 0.0169, -0.0175], p<0.0001, Full Squat (r2adj=0.95; 95% CI for slope is [-0.0136, -0.0128], p<0.0001), and Half Squat (r2adj=0.96; 95% CI for slope is [-0.0116, 0.0124], p<0.0001). The 1RM was attained with a MPV and Vmax of 0.21±0.06 ms-1 and 0.63±0.15 ms-1, 0.29±0.05 ms-1 and 0.89±0.17 ms-1, 0.33±0.05 ms-1, and 0.95±0.13 ms-1 for Leg Press, Full Squat and Half Squat respectively. Results indicate that it is possible to determine an exercise-specific %1RM by measuring movement velocity for that exercise

Autoregulation in resistance training : addressing the inconsistencies

Autoregulation is a process that is used to manipulate training based primarily on the measurement of an individual's performance or their perceived capability to perform. Despite being established as a training framework since the 1940s, there has been limited systematic research investigating its broad utility. Instead, researchers have focused on disparate practices that can be considered specific examples of the broader autoregulation training framework. A primary limitation of previous research includes inconsistent use of key terminology (e.g., adaptation, readiness, fatigue, and response) and associated ambiguity of how to implement different autoregulation strategies. Crucially, this ambiguity in terminology and failure to provide a holistic overview of autoregulation limits the synthesis of existing research findings and their dissemination to practitioners working in both performance and health contexts. Therefore, the purpose of the current review was threefold: first, we provide a broad overview of various autoregulation strategies and their development in both research and practice whilst highlighting the inconsistencies in definitions and terminology that currently exist. Second, we present an overarching conceptual framework that can be used to generate operational definitions and contextualise autoregulation within broader training theory. Finally, we show how previous definitions of autoregulation fit within the proposed framework and provide specific examples of how common practices may be viewed, highlighting their individual subtleties

Validity and reliability of an inertial dynamometer using accelerometry

Introduction : the purpose of this study was to investigate the validity and reliability of an inertial dynamometer using accelerometry. Methods : fourteen subjects were tested during three successive sessions at four increasing loads (30, 50, 70 and 95% of the 1RM). Maximal force, velocity and power performances were simultaneously assessed by the Myotest (Myotest S.A., Switzerland), an inertial dynamometer using accelerometry, and by another control valid dynamometer witch combine accelerometer and linear position transducer. At three first loads, only minor differences appeared between both dynamometers, correlations were excellent and coefficients of variation were good and similars. However, at 95% of the 1RM, Myotest validity and reliability became insufficient. Conclusion : Bench press inertial assessment with accelerometer appeared valid and reliable at 30, 50 and 70% of the 1RM, but not at 95% of the 1RM