Research Blog #1

The scholarship I chose was, "Perspectives on Learning Styles in Motor and Sport Skills", by Ian Fuelscher, Kevin Ball, and Clare MacMahon. This research discusses learning strategies displayed by coaches to their athletes and the potential connection that can occur in the classroom. For example, motor abilities are one of the main predictors for a person's success in sports. When tying this up with my focal area, Social Studies, a connection can also be made. Students have greater success with this subject if they can organizing papers, homework, in-class assignments, and can follow along during readings. Although these may seem as if they are basic, common skills, many students fail to perform one or more of these skills, and with motor skills training, a student may become more successful in class. Even handwriting can play a huge role with comprehending material through note-taking, a vital process in Social Studies. The test was given by Pashler between athletes in two separate groups. One group learned how to do a certain skill by visualization, while the other group learned through explanation and the other visualization. In large part, the testing was very tricky because of outside influences such as prior knowledge, sleep, learning types, learning speeds so the outcome of the groups who learned the best was not mentioned. However, just as in sports, visualization plays a key role in learning social studies, especially the history aspect of it. Student must learn to think and picture certain events. Instructors should also be cautious in showing just one scene about an event, which could misconstrue the history or simply be inaccurate.