Category: Research

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Coach expertise development – what prompts accelerated learning?

Andy Driska

I recently commented on an article regarding coach expertise development, written by Richard Bailey (“Talking Education and Sport”).  The big question: do coaches move through “stages” of expertise, or is their development completely linear?  Most researchers speculate that development is generally stage-like.

I am particularly interested in the events that happen right before a rapid increase in coaching expertise.  What are the triggers that cause rapid learning to occur?  Some suggestions…

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Go fast, turn left: brain changes result from complex motor skills

Andy Driska

Researchers in South Korea found that short-track speed skaters have sizable differences in the parts of their brains that control high-speed cornering.  Question: are great skaters genetically pre-disposed to having more adaptability of brain size, or does performance literally make this part of the brain grow regardless of genetics? Go fast, turn left: brain changes result from complex motor skills Posted on my course blog for KIN 360 at Michigan State Continue reading Go fast, turn left: brain changes result from complex motor skills

Research, Teaching3 Comments

Book Review: Blended Learning in Higher Education

Andy Driska

As an instructor, how can I make the most out of limited contact hours with students? A semester seems like a long time… between 28 and 30 hour-and-twenty-minute meetings. But in reality, that time goes quickly, and when the end of the semester rolls around, I often ask myself, “did my students actually learn anything meaningful?”

To make learning experiences meaningful, I struggle with a basic question that most collegiate educators struggle with daily. Do I go broad, and attempt to “cover” lots of material? Or do I choose core concepts, and go into depth, giving students the time and scaffolding to ask deeper questions about the knowledge itself. This deep thinking is the gold-mine that all instructors are trying to find, but sometimes students need some “surface knowledge” before they can start digging deeper.

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My Information Diet

Andy Driska

I’ve been prompted to examine my “information diet,” which includes all of my sources of information throughout the day.

I typically wake up around 6:30 or 7:00 in the morning, to the sound of the Michigan State University college radio station, Impact 89 FM. I love the awkward first-time DJs, and the station seems to have an early 1990s nostalgia — lots of grunge.

Ever since I got an iPhone, I now read most of my e-mail in the morning while I am lying in bed. There are about 20 minutes where I don’t want to be physically awake and out of bed, but I need to do something to wake my mind up. I get e-mail alerts from ScienceDaily website, which keeps me up to date on a range of topics from Social Psychology to Sensory Perception. Occasionally, I will tweet the findings of the study — I use twitter to catalog and bookmark things that are of interest to me.

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Research2 Comments

Mental Toughness – now part of Wikipedia

Andy Driska

Mental toughness has been my primary research interest over the last two years. It is a term that gets used frequently without having a strict definition or framework that explains what it is and what it ain’t. In the internet age, a Wikipedia entry can provide consistency and clarity for a term. It’s typically the first hit of a Google search. With that in mind, I’ve created a mental toughness page for Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is an open venture. Its strength lies in crowd-sourcing. I highly encourage people to update and edit this post, as it serves as a beginning framework.

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Mental toughness – a term commonly used by coaches, sport psychologists, sport commentators, and business leaders – generally describes a collection of attributes that allow a person to persevere through difficult circumstances (such as difficult training or difficult competitive situations in games) and emerge without losing confidence.
Mental toughness is a contested term, in that many people use the term liberally to refer to any set of positive attributes that helps a person to cope with difficult situations. Coaches and sport commentators freely use the term mental toughness to describe the mental state of athletes who persevere through difficult sport circumstances to succeed. Only within the past ten years has scientific research attempted a formal definition of mental toughness as a psychological construct.

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A Brief History of Sport Psychology

Andy Driska

This history of sport psychology was my contribution to the Sport Psychology Wikipedia entry, and a much abbreviated version appears on Wikipedia. In this history, I tried to focus on the modern applied sport psychology movement and the events that have led to the crossroads the field now stands at.

I was urged to write a portion of the new Wikipedia entry by my Michigan State cohort Sam Forlenza, who is battling the stunning lack of clarity in sport psychology knowledge and information on the web. Sam has also revived the sport psychology movie database, a comprehensive list of movies related to sport psychology.

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Early History: Isolated Studies of Motor Behavior and Psychology of Sport and Physical Activity
Look back at the history of sport psychology, and until the mid-1960s, it is hard to find a consistent line of research and applied practice typical of a scientific discipline. From the late 1800s until the middle of the 20th Century, psychologists, physical educators, coaches, and even ornithologists, carried out the “work” of sport psychology.

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