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Introduction

Describe "Fitt's and Posner's" phases of learning and explain how you would structure practices to enhance performance. The Fitt's and Posner's stages of learning are a series of practices and learning exercises that will help people to learn specific skills by viewing others doing so. 'Learning is a more or less permanent change in performance brought about by experience' - Knapp 1973 Practice is the rehearsal of a performance in order to learn or improve a skill. The two above definitions of learning and practice show that they are both linked. You cant learn without practice, and if you practice, you will learn. If you practice an exercise correctly, your performance should reflect this, but jumping from learning a skill, to being able to perform it expertly every time, is impossible, and this is where Fitt's and Posner's phases learning come in to play. The Fitt's and Posner's phases of learning are split into 3 different stages, the cognitive, associative and autonomous stages. ...read more.

Middle

Once the learner thinks that they have the correct mental picture, they must practice the skill with a partner, or with the coach, who will give feedback as to where the learner is going right or wrong. Once this phase has been mastered, it would be time to move on to the next phase. The associative stage is where the learner must practice a skill with verbal feedback and guidance from the coach. This will help them to improve the way in which they perform the skill. This help from the coach is very important as they must identify exactly what the learner is doing wrong to correct them. Also, the learner should look towards professional matches to see how the skill is performed by professionals, so that their idea of how to use that skill in a game situation grows. The coach will be able to start using more complex language to explain the skill as the learner should have started to build an understanding of what to do. ...read more.

Conclusion

They can devise their own warm ups that should concentrate on the specific parts of the body used for the particular skill that they wish to practice, and should br able to use a skill in various situations, whether it be passing the ball between themselves and a friend in the park, or using that skill in a match situation where there are an unlimited number of option to place the ball to beat the opposition and complete the pass to a team mate. A coach will help them to improve their performance of the skill, and let them know if they are doing anything wrong. In conclusion, Fitt's and Posners phases of learning can be regarded as important for structuring any sporting practice. All learning seems to develop through these phases. However, Fitts and Poseners fail to realise that some learners may already poses the ability to perform the first stage of learning. Therefore, practices should take this into account, and maybe use these developed learners as demonstrators in the cognitive phase. Word Count: 1009 Candidate Number: ...read more.

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