The effects of form training on foul-shooting performance in members of a women's college basketball team

Evaluating peer-implemented video feedback to improve weight training form

This study evaluated the effectiveness of behavioral skills training (BST) to teach peer-trainers to implement video feedback (Study 1) and evaluated the effectiveness of peer-implemented video feedback to increase proper deadlifting form across 3 participants (Study 2). A nonconcurrent, multiple baseline design across participants was employed to evaluate BST and peer implemented video feedback. Results demonstrate that BST was effective for teaching peer-trainers to implement video feedback and video feedback led to improvement of deadlifting form across all participants.

Participants in Behavior-Analytic Sports Studies: Can Anybody Play?

Participating in athletics confers a wide range of benefits, regardless of participants' gender or disability status. Our review of 95 behavior-analytic sports-performance articles revealed that over half of them included at least 1 female participant, but only 5 included at least 1 participant with a reported developmental disability. Given that females are often underrepresented as research participants, and that female athletes face unique barriers, it is heartening that so many articles involved female participants. Moreover, there were more female than male participants overall. However, it is surprising and distressing that so few articles involved participants with a developmental disability. Participating in sports can be a lifelong source of fitness, friends, and fun. Practitioners should encourage people of all ages, races, and genders, and from all disability categories, to find a sport they like, to learn to do it well enough to enjoy it, and to do it regularly. Researchers should give them the tools necessary to make those efforts as easy, and as fruitful, as possible. Nothing but good can come from these efforts.

Precision Teaching and Tap Dance Instruction

The purpose of this study was (a) to use a precision-teaching (PT) framework to design, train, and evaluate a tap-dancing training sequence and (b) to evaluate fluency outcomes as a function of training tap dance components to optimal frequencies. The study trained a series of 8 tap-dancing steps to 4 novice dancers and evaluated the effects on untrained components and probes of retention, stability, endurance, and application. The study also included a control participant who only completed application probes. Weekly probes examining the facilitative effects of training on the untrained components revealed improvements for some untrained steps, but not all. Retention probes revealed little difference in frequencies from the last data point in training. Stability and endurance probes revealed marked increases in the frequency of corrects and decreases in the frequency of errors. The results of application probes showed improvements to some degree for experimental participants; however, the control participant also made gains in performance. This makes it difficult to draw conclusions regarding application. The study demonstrates how a PT framework may be useful to those interested in enhancing sports performance training. We discuss limitations and future directions.

Chaining Functional Basketball Sequences (with Embedded Conditional Discriminations) in an Adolescent with Autism

Individuals with developmental disabilities successfully participate in fewer recreation activities, including sports activities, than their typically developing peers. Although a functional basketball-playing repertoire might increase social opportunities and physical health for these individuals, no research has outlined a behavior-analytic strategy for teaching this sport. In our study, we taught a 13-year-old male diagnosed with autism to play basketball. During phase 1, we employed discrete-trial training to establish proficiency with nine fundamental basketball skills (i.e., recruiting attention, passing, dribbling, etc.). During phase 2, we used a forward chaining procedure to teach-specific sequences of these component skills that are appropriate for playing offense and defense and for participating in a full-court basketball drill. The participant learned all pre-requisite skills and response chains came under the control of contextually appropriate discriminative stimuli.

Review of sports performance research with youth, collegiate, and elite athletes

This brief review summarizes translational and intervention research in the area of sports performance. We describe studies with youth, collegiate, and elite athletes; identify recent trends; and propose recommendations for future research.

Studies using single-subject designs in sport psychology: 30 years of research

A prominent feature of behavior-analytic research has been the use of single-subject designs. We examined sport psychology journals and behavioral journals published during the past 30 years, and located 40 studies using single-subject designs to assess interventions for enhancing the performance of athletes and coaches. In this paper, we summarize that body of research, discuss its strengths and limitations, and identify areas for future research.

Promoting response variability and stimulus generalization in martial arts training

The effects of reinforcement and extinction on response variability and stimulus generalization in the punching and kicking techniques of 2 martial arts students were evaluated across drill and sparring conditions. During both conditions, the students were asked to demonstrate different techniques in response to an instructor's punching attack. During baseline, the students received no feedback on their responses in either condition. During the intervention phase, the students received differential reinforcement in the form of instructor feedback for each different punching or kicking technique they performed during a session of the drill condition, but no reinforcement was provided for techniques in the sparring condition. Results showed that both students increased the number of different techniques they performed when reinforcement and extinction procedures were conducted during the drill condition, and that this increase in response variability generalized to the sparring condition.