MODELING AND VERBAL FEEDBACK INFLUENCES ON SKILL LEARNING

Learning motor skills requires solving the problem of how to coordinate and control the body and limbs in order to achieve the goal of the skill being learned. An important issue here concerns what information can he used by the learner to facilitate this problem solving process. Two sources of information that are commonly used by the learner and are typically involved in skill instruction are visual observation of an expert model and verbal feedback. Unfortunately, we know very little about what information each source conveys to the learner and bow the information from each source relates to each other when both are used in the same learning situation. These two concepts are addressed in this article in three sections. In the first section, an experiment is discussed that investigated the interactive influence of visual demonstration and verbal feedback on learning a rhythmic gymnastics skill. In the second section, the question of what information is picked up by observing a demonstration is considered. The third section presents an example of some empirical evidence from an experiment involving learning a slalom ski simulation skill. Results of this experiment support the contention that modelled information facilitates the acquisition of appropriate coordination of body an limbs.