Background: Influence is at the very core of physical education and sport pedagogy. Indeed, a large and growing body of work has focused on the (inter)actions of sport pedagogues which "are" deemed to be influential in terms of shaping the thoughts, feelings and actions of others. In comparison, little attention has been paid to the…

Introduction: Researchers exploring how coaches can best support the development of their players decision making within team invasion sports have often been conducted from a cognitive or ecological approach, which differ in their views regarding the presence and absence of memory representations. This difference has, in turn, resulted in…

Background: Provided that coaches play a key role in shaping the sport experiences of athletes with a disability, they represent an important point of intervention for enhancing the quality of athletes' participation in disability sport. Despite the importance of their role, few evidence-informed learning resources are available to support the…

Background: Touch has emerged as a social taboo rather than as an educational tool among sport pedagogues, especially in the #MeToo era. Believing that minimising physical contact will protect themselves from sexual allegations, instructors (coaches and PE teachers) are increasingly opting for hands-off practices, which transforms sport into a…

Background: In basketball, children's main reason for playing is to have fun, whereas outcomes such as skill acquisition and long-term development are often perceived by adults as the main motive for children's engagement in sport. However, no studies have yet examined whether the game outcome could influence motivational variables longitudinally…

Background: Specific learning experiences are vital for athletes to continuously interact with developing "knowledge of" the performance environment, through the refined design of representative learning contexts (ecological paradigm), and appropriate didactical interventions (constructivist paradigm). Although there is a…

Background: From a sports perspective, pedagogical researchers have suggested questioning is an effective instructional tool and pedagogical strategy for developing critical thinking, problem-solving and decision-making skills. Questions enable coaches to contextualise athlete learning by encouraging and guiding them to identify and explore…

Background: Invasion team sports such as soccer require teams and individual players to understand the game and problem solve. One aspect of problem solving that has recently been more prominent in team sport literature is the role of metacognition. Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to examine how high-level youth soccer players…

Background and Purpose: Participation rates in many organised sports are stagnating, yet a rapid growth in participation, commercialisation and institutionalisation has been observed in self-organised sports such as surfing, snowboarding skateboarding, BMX racing and rock climbing over the past five decades. These sports are continuously…

Background: Motor control and skill acquisition research have contributed greatly to understanding the learning process in sport, but very little of this knowledge has been applied in practice over the past fifty years. The characteristics of expertise in the two major cricket skills, batting and bowling, are well established but the training…

Background: Female learning of movement in elite combat sports has not been studied enough to date. Literature on movement learning and teaching of complex skills has not, to date, focused on karate, and the scarce literature on the learning of elite karate practitioners mostly does not focus on women. Nevertheless, women fighters participated in…

Background: Coach observation studies have been a mainstay of coaching science research for decades, with a major focus on the use of instruction and feedback by coaches. However, relatively few studies have investigated feedback provided in a live competition setting, with a majority focussing on the training environment. As such, little is known…

Background: Several student-centred and game-based approaches have developed in the last 40 years. Publications intended to describe the underlying theory and/or mechanics of each particular teaching/learning model have usually focused on modalities related to teacher-student interactions, taking into account the particular pedagogical content…

Background: Skill acquisition is still a relatively new and emerging specialist discipline in the sport sciences. Like other disciplines, current service support in Paralympic sport is limited, often based on theory adapted from able-bodied sport, or findings from research programmes that are not representative of elite sport contexts. The…

Background: There are deeply relevant questions concerning how to integrate and organise various nonlinear pedagogical strategies and methods in order to structure training in the professional development of Physical Education (PE) teachers and sport coaches. To promote the emergence and development of innovative and adaptive performance…