Expert–novice differences in gymnastic judging: an information-processing perspective
✍ Scribed by Diane M. Ste-Marie
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1999
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 123 KB
- Volume
- 13
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0888-4080
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The expertise paradigm has been used within the sport domain at the level of the athlete (e.g. and the coach (e.g. . Research into the qualities of expertise and its development in judges of sport performance, however, has been very limited. The present research examined various sport-speci®c cognitive attributes that were predicted to lead to an expert advantage in gymnastic judging. Twelve novice and expert gymnastic judges were compared on a number of domain-speci®c tasks. Expert judges were signi®cantly better at perceptually anticipating upcoming gymnastic elements from advance information. Also, gymnastic elements that were correctly anticipated were judged more accurately than those that had been anticipated incorrectly. Experts also exhibited signi®cantly greater depth and breadth in their declarative knowledge base. These ®ndings are consistent with other expertise research that has shown the expert advantage to be related to acquired processing strategies (e.g. ). An information-processing perspective is adopted to discuss these advantages in terms of training strategies and changes to the current gymnastic judging system.