Discuss the Differences Between Skill, Ability And Technique and Explain How You Would Structure Practices to Enhance These Components

Authors Avatar

 Dominick McAleenan        Page  of                                   5/10/2007

Discuss the Differences Between Skill, Ability And Technique and Explain How You Would Structure Practices to Enhance These Components.

Skill can be defined as:

        

“The learned ability to bring about pre-determined results with maximum certainty, often with minimum outlay of time, energy or both”

                                                        (Guthrie) 1

Guthrie’s definition strictly means that when a skill is performed, it is as short as possible, and one continuous, fluid motion, making it as efficient and ergonomic as possible.

Psychologists have come up with different types of skills in order to differentiate between skills, for example motor skills and verbal skills.  Three different skills are cognitive skills, perceptual skills, and motor skills.

Cognitive skills or Intellectual skills, these involve thought processes, using ones mental powers, e.g. problem solving, measuring the length of a long jump or calculating batting averages.

Perceptual skills, these involve interpreting and making use of stimuli incoming via the senses, you could see the same information as somebody else, but your brain may interpret it differently, an example could be a football player surveying the field, they would have to take into account, other players, position of the ball, the crowd, and many variable factors as well.  

Motor skills involve the muscular system and concern muscular movement and control.  For example, walking and jogging are motor skills because they involve both movement and muscular control.

Performance in sport is a complex process.  It does not just one type of the above skills, but a combination of skills.  Most skills are referred to as perceptual motor skills, as they involve though, interpretation and movement: cognitive skills, perceptual skills, and motor skills.

Join now!

I am going to use a football player as an example of all of these skills working together.  The cognitive skill would be working out whether to dribble or pass then how to dribble.  The perceptive skill would be the player then working out the position of team mates and opposing players, context of the game – winning or losing, how much time you have and what is the final objective, i.e. scoring.  The motor skill would be the physical action of dribbling, the speed, and route in which the player wishes to go.

An example of a ...

This is a preview of the whole essay