Davids, K., Araújo, D., Vilar, L., Renshaw, I., & Pinder, R. (2013). An ecological dynamics approach to skill acquisition: Implications for development of talent in sport. Talent Development and Excellence , 5(1), 21-34.

🚀 Article in 3 Sentences

1. The article starts by giving a nice overview of Ecological Dynamics and the underpinning principles
2. The article then explores Representative Learning Design and why it’s crucial for practice design and talent evaluation
3. Gives a principled approach to designing Talent Evaluation Tests from an Ecological Dynamics point of view.

🤝Impressions

This is a great paper and there’s lots to take away from it. There is so much going wrong with current Talent Pathways. The Framework for designing evaluation tests could also be used by coaches to design meaningful practice tasks.

🎾How Article will influence my coaching

• “Key aspects of expert performance in sport: attunement to affordances, harnessing neurobiological system degeneracy, and exploiting metastability during learning” (Davids et.al, 2015)
• Degeneracy and why it’s important for coaches to understand
• Focus on developing the ability achieve consistent outcomes in different ways
• Affordance based control is a nice way to look at how skilled behaviour emerges
• When working with children you need to be aware that their action capabilities and body dimensions are changing quickly
• Setting the intentional goal is crucial because this will determine how performers should act if they want to achieve a particular outcome
• Perception and Action sub-systems are so tightly bound that merely adopting an intention can influence the way that you perceive the information in the environment
• To achieve representative learning design the information variables from the performance environment need to be sampled so that the learners can functionally couple perception-action processes when looking to achieve task goals in practice
• Good evaluation tests are based on the principles of good practice design and visa versa

🥇Top Quotes

<aside> 💡 These ideas from ecological dynamics propose that, as expertise in sport is enhanced, informational constraints designed into practice tasks can progressively direct an individual to the specifying information sources that support the organisation of actions and enhance the capacity to adapt to changes in a performance environment (View Highlight)

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