Predicting undergraduate students’ learning from a lecture: The role of self-control, motivation, and mental effort.

For the first time, the present study investigated the combined role of selfcontrol, motivation, and mental effort in predicting undergraduate students’ learning from a two-hour presentation-format higher education lecture. The study comprised 62 students, in a final-year BSc undergraduate Sports Coaching lecture, who completed questionnaires measuring: state self-control during the lecture; mastery approach and performance avoidance motivation towards learning the course topic; mental effort invested during the lecture; and content retention immediately after the lecture (i.e., learning). Moderated mediation analyses revealed that greater levels of state self-control (W variable) were necessary for students to transform their motivation (X variable; mastery approach or performance avoidance) into mental effort (M variable) to benefit their learning (Y variable) during the lecture. Avenues for applied interventions to motivate students and increase their self-control resources within higher education environments are discussed

Capturing the holistic profile of high performance Olympic weightlifting development

Recent expertise development studies have used retrospective recall methods to explore developmental biographies and/or practice histories of current or past athletes. This methodological approach limits the generalizability and trustworthiness of findings. As such, a gap exists for research exploring key multidisciplinary features in athlete development using prospective longitudinal research designs. The present research aimed to holistically model the development of talent in Olympic Weightlifting using such a design. We observed the holistic profiles of 29 junior weightlifting athletes longitudinally over a 10-month period, and subsequently classified six of the 23 athletes as high performing based on their performances in competitions up to 12 months following the study. This holistic profile was based on a framework of expertise development themes: (1) demographics and family sport participation, (2) anthropometrics and physiological factors, (3) psychosocial profiling, (4) sport participation history, and (5) weightlifting specific practice activities. A summary model was produced which selected a critical set of nine features that classified group membership with 91% average accuracy. Odds ratio calculations uncovered discriminating features in the holistic profiles of performance groups, from which empirically derived logical statements could inform the description of high-performance attainment

Relative age effect? No “flipping” way! Nuanced evidence of an apparatus dependent inverse relative age effect, in elite women’s artistic gymnastics

In contrast to research on team-sports, delayed maturation has been observed in higher-skilled gymnasts, leading to atypical distributions of the relative age effect. Recent studies have reported intra-sport differences in the relative age effect and given the task demands across gymnastics apparatus, we expected to find evidence for the influence of apparatus specialism. We examined the presence of a relative age effects within a sample of elite, international, women's artistic gymnasts (N = 806, Ncountries = 87), and further sampled our data from vault, bars, beam, and floor major competition finalists. Poisson regression analysis indicated no relative age effect in the full sample (p = .55; R2 adj. = .01) but an effect that manifested when analysing apparatus independently. The Index of Discrimination (ID) analysis provided evidence of an inverse relative age effect identified for beam (p = .01; ID = 1.27; R2 adj. = .12), a finding that was corroborated by a marginal effect in our vault finalists (p = .08; ID = 1.21; R2 adj. = .06). These novel findings can be attributed to the integrated influence of self-fulfilling prophecy upon coach and gymnast expectations, as well as the technical mechanisms underpinning skill development involved in the underdog hypothesis

Testing anxiety's effect on movement planning and correction: Online upper-limb corrections are not completely automatic

Via three experiments, we investigated heightened anxiety's effect on the offline planning and online correction of upper-limb target-directed aiming movements. In Experiment 1, the majority of task trials allowed for the voluntary distribution of offline planning and online correction to achieve task success, while a subset of cursor jump trials necessitated the use of online correction to achieve task success. Experiments 2 and 3 replicated and elaborated Experiment 1 by assessing movement-specific reinvestment propensity and manipulating the self-control resources of participants. This allowed more detailed inference of cognitive resource utilisation to tease apart the effects of conscious processing and distraction-based anxiety mechanisms. For the first time, we demonstrate that: anxiety-induced online-to-offline motor control shifts can be overridden when the need for online correction is necessitated (i.e., in jump trials); anxiety-induced online-to-offline shifts seem to be positively predicted by conscious processing propensity; and optimal spatial efficacy of limb information-based online correction seems to require cognitive resources. We conclude that long-standing definitions of limb information-based online correction require revision, and that both conscious processing and distraction theories appear to play a role in determining the control strategies of anxiety induced upper limb target directed aiming movements