Why do children loath testing and what can we do about?

Consider this:

A child enjoys and is highly motivated in their sport or activity

That activity has a learning or progressive development architecture that can be assessed or measured (tested), at a point in time, to show level of achievement or progress

The child highly dislikes or is intimidated by the assessment

Children seek and desire feedback so why does testing or formal assessment make them feel this way?  The answer, sensibly enough, is the negative impression or connotation they have toward the results.  Feedback may be formative or summative.  Formative feedback is qualitative and individualised: concerned with what’s occurring throughout the learning process, while summative feedback is quantitative and compares the individual to an external standard.  School exams is an example of summative testing.  Coaching feedback is formative. 

There is probably not a whole lot that can be done to change the way we generally feel about external standards.  They’re inherently threatening though they do contain useful stage-of-development information.  If there is one thing to consider, it’s how we ‘sell’ it.  Testing should belong to the individual.  It can be a way to learn, to assess the strength of what’s understood and in place, and not merely a way to identify what’s missing.  We don’t have to talk about how test results compare externally.  We can also point out that every effort is a test of sorts.  If we take time to individualise the dialogue: past, present, and future, then there is a chance we might lessen the fear just enough for the individual to discover testing hasn’t diminished them.

Feel free to add your own thoughts and experiences of testing on our Facebook page:

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Are target times a good idea?

The inspiration for this question were the responses from the kids after the NZ Winter Swim Championships, held last weekend.  Most had a great weekend but we got talking about why some feel they didn't have a great meet, even after swimming personal bests.  The uniform response, including from those who did enjoy the meet, involved the idea that target times are set and if you don't hit them the meet is a failure even where the result was a personal best.  That seems crazy to me and I thought it needed a little analysis.
We're using the question and feedback format on our Facebook page:Sport Performance Facebook page.  Our blog will present what I think are some important considerations but feel free to contribute your own ideas on our Facebook page.

The first thought I wanted to share about the use of target times, is that it's a risky strategy for measuring success.  It permits no nuance or flexibility in relation to the conditions of the race.  It essentially says that, while other sporting events may contain natural variability, a swimming pool is always and only a 25m or 50m stretch of water.  Is this reasonable?
The first fact to question concerns the pool.  Unless you train at the competition venue, the pool is not the same.  Differences in water depth, which are common from one pool to the next, impart big contrasts in the movement of the water, as any swimmer knows.  There are also the facts of competition to consider.  Try as we might, humans are not static creatures or even close to it, and children are practically a storm of day to day variations.  Competition throws many balls into the air, and the notion that 'it's just the same stretch of water' is at best naive.  The allowance that most sports permit for variation is important because it recognises that every race and every competition is unique in many ways.
Is a target time a valid proposition: are they supported by sport and coaching science?  Peaking certainly is and we see evidence of this in the achievement of personal bests: prepare and execute correctly and you will advance.  Target times derive from the same thinking but they take the basic idea into the realm of fortune teller.  We simply cannot extrapolate progress with such precision.  My suspicion about target times is that they're not supposed to be thought of as 'real' expectations but as a kind of inducement: 'believe it strongly enough and you will achieve it'.  That kind of psychological strategy doesn't concern me.  What should concern us, is the effect they have on athletes after the fact.  At Sport Performance, we have young athletes in every major sport played in NZ, and many minor ones as well, and swimmers hold the most negative impressions of their performances of all sports.
Target times are not the sole reason for this but they're part of the landscape of poorly conceived coaching propositions.  Sport, by it's nature, will challenge self-belief and an individual's sense of capability.  The most important job of the coach is to add balance to this thinking; to show the athlete all the good that is done.  A stop watch, like a personal best and a placing, says little of what happened.  It says nothing specific about preparation and execution.  It provides no information about mood and attitude.  It gives no clues for the future.
The problems, as I see it, with target times is 1) they're basically unreasonable, and 2) they're not counterpointed sufficiently well with coach feedback to permit individuals a balanced and wider sense of what was done.  Most young swimmers I observe do a very good job conducting themselves and too many don't realise it. 

team sport values and full value contracts

The title is a bit of a mouthful but bear with me here.  I get to interact with a lot of sports teams and there are common practices in all of them.  One common practice concerns team building or, rather, how teams are not built.  They're not constructed from a foundation of an agreed and shared culture: how will be behave toward one another and what do we want from our experience?  The first point to make about building a team culture is that it serves two outcomes: team performance and team experience.  My experiences have shown me that by developing the right team experience, we place ourselves in the strongest position to control team performance.  The shared experience should always come first because in serving team performance, it also drives individual goals and outcomes.

I'm not going to tell others which team culture is best; it's highly flexible, and it's in the nature of culture that the individuals involved must define it.  I am going to say, though, that you can't go wrong by including enjoyment as a primary goal.  With the goal of enjoying the experience, we can frame effective training prescriptions and structures.  We also plan for positive thoughts and moods, and I probably don't need to say how useful these are.  Enjoyment also guides the behaviour of individual team members, and it can be used to define acceptable and unacceptable behaviour without entering the murky waters of relationships.  It's a proactive ingredient in building team culture.

The final point I am going to make about building team culture is the role and importance of a 'full value' contract, which implies that individual team members must participate fully in the agreed culture.  Values hold little power if they're not shared, and sharing occurs when individuals participate.  A small step that I believe helps at this point, is to present the team values and the idea of the contract to parents.  Parents play a critical role in team culture via reinforcement of behaviours.  Where parents understand what's expected (of individuals) it is simply more likely that ideas and messages communicated to their children are consistent with the agreed team values.

Rather than hoping for a cohesive and successful team performance, we can help children understand what it means to be a good team member.  We can give them the agency to determine what matters in their sporting experience.     

   

Why children stay involved in the gym program - lessons for parents/ coaches

One of the great benefits of having a run a gym program for children over many years are the observations and lessons learned about them and none is perhaps greater than what I have learned about motivation: why children get and remained involved.

Lesson#1

A majority of children don't choose gym; parents and coaches do.  Children can be very enthusiastic once the idea has been seeded but it's not something that sits in their minds waiting for an opportunity.

What's important to take from this is that, as parents and coaches, we should not reply on a child's comprehension or internal motivation to get them there and keep them going.  Other connections are needed.

Lesson#2

A small number of children connect strongly to gym - their minds or bodies feel good about it - but the majority of children need a social connection.  This is the greatest lesson about extra-curricular exercise: exercise that isn't the main sport, and it applies to many sporting experiences as well.  Social connections are external motivators and they're the single strongest driver in the lives of children.  Social connections are currency that is spent to develop experiences and grow personal meaning and internal connection.  

Deeper, personalised, meaning is the ultimate goal but it takes a lot of time to achieve the connections needed.  It's not a reasonable expectation for many children and, where we can't see the signs of a strong, personal connection to exercise, we have to seed motivation in other ways and that's the role of social connection.

Social connection is the great benefit of joining a gym program through a sports club or team.  The connections are very likely already in place and they are transported with the children.  Another strategy for parents to consider is 'bring a friend'.  At Sport Performance, we're big fans of our kids bringing their mates to class because we know that all it takes is one friend and the likelihood of the child remaining involved is significantly raised.