Lesson 19 · How are movement skills acquired, developed and improved?
Everyone has an opinion about how to coach. Very few of them are evidence.
Sport is unusually full of confident claims, and the confidence is not correlated with the evidence. A coach who has done something for twenty years and a study of four hundred athletes can disagree, and the coach will usually sound more certain. This lesson is about doing the research properly for a skill in a sport you actually care about: finding what is known, judging whether a source deserves to be believed, working out what it means for a Tuesday evening training session, and — the part the syllabus asks for explicitly and nobody enjoys — saying what is still not known.
Here are four statements about how skills improve. All four are widely repeated. Only one of them is a research finding as stated.
"It takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert."
"Practising skills in a varied, unpredictable order produces worse practice performance and better retention than practising them one at a time."
"Children should specialise in one sport early if they want to reach the elite level."
"Visualising a skill is as effective as physically practising it."
Choose the one you believe is a genuine finding, and for each of the other three, write what is wrong with the statement rather than with the idea behind it — because in each case there is a real piece of research underneath a claim that has been stretched.
- Frame a researchable question about one skill in one sport, narrow enough to be answered.
- Find sources, and rank them by the weight they deserve rather than by how confident they sound.
- Recognise the four ways a genuine finding gets stretched in popular retelling.
- Summarise what the research says about acquiring, developing and improving your chosen skill.
- Translate findings into how it is applied in practice — a concrete change to a real session.
- Propose further research questions that follow from what is genuinely unknown.
- Report honestly where the evidence is thin, contested or absent, rather than writing round the gap.
- Peer review — the process by which other researchers in the field assess a study before publication.
- Primary source — a report of the research written by the people who did it.
- Secondary source — someone else's account of that research.
- Systematic review — a study that gathers and synthesises all the research on a question using a declared method.
- Sample — who was studied, and therefore who the finding may apply to.
- Generalisability — how far a finding extends beyond the sample it came from.
- Correlation — two things varying together, which is not on its own evidence that one caused the other.
- Deliberate practice — effortful practice specifically directed at improving a weakness, with feedback, as distinct from playing or repeating.
- Publication bias — the tendency for studies finding an effect to be published more readily than those finding none.
Lesson 15 established that a research question decides everything downstream, and that holds when the research is reading rather than measuring. A question that is too broad returns a million results and no answer.
| Version | Question | What happens when you search it |
|---|---|---|
| Too broad | How do you get better at football? | Returns everything ever written about football. No source answers it because it is not a question |
| Narrower, still unusable | How is passing skill developed in football? | Names a skill but not a population, an age or a specific aspect of development. Findings will contradict each other because they concern different learners |
| Researchable | What does the research say about how practice should be arranged to develop decision-making in passing, for adolescent football players? | Names the skill, the component, the population and the aspect. Searches return a manageable literature, and contradictions become informative rather than confusing |
Choose a skill you can actually observe. The research is much easier to interpret, and much easier to apply, when you can go and watch the thing in a session this week. A question about elite sprint mechanics is harder to make real than a question about the same sport's skill you personally perform.
Quick check: The main problem with the research question "How do you get better at football?" is that:
The sources you will actually find range from a systematic review to a video by someone with a large following, and they do not deserve equal weight. Rank them, and say in your write-up which rank each source sat at — that single habit is most of what HM-11-10 is assessing.
| Source | Why it ranks there | Still useful for |
|---|---|---|
| Systematic review or meta-analysis | Gathers all the studies on a question by a declared method, so it is not one team's result | Establishing what is actually known, and where the field disagrees |
| Peer-reviewed primary study | Assessed by other researchers before publication; method and limitations stated | Detail, and checking what a secondary source has left out |
| Textbook or sporting-body resource | Usually accurate and simplified; may be some years behind the research | Definitions, established models, and a starting point |
| Coaching publication or reputable journalism | Secondary, and written to be interesting, so the finding is often stated more strongly than the study did | Finding out which studies exist — then go to the study |
| Social media, blogs, coach opinion | No review process; may be experience, may be marketing | Generating a question, and learning what practitioners believe — which is itself worth knowing |
Low rank does not mean worthless, and this is worth saying plainly. A coach's opinion is weak evidence about what works and strong evidence about what coaches do, and the gap between those two is often the most interesting finding a student produces. What is not acceptable is presenting a low-ranked source as though it were a high-ranked one.
Four questions to ask of any source, whatever its rank: Who was studied? (a finding from elite adult males may not transfer to adolescent beginners). How many? (twelve participants supports a much smaller claim than four hundred). Who paid for it? (the credibility question from Lesson 15). Is this the study, or someone's account of the study?
True or false: A coach's opinion is worthless as a source and should be excluded from a research task entirely.
This card answers Card 01. Each of those four statements sits on top of genuine research, and three of them have been stretched in a recognisable way. Learning the four failure modes lets you spot the stretch without having read the original study.
An average becomes a requirement. Statement A. The underlying research found that expert violinists had accumulated an average of roughly ten thousand hours of deliberate practice by age twenty. An average across a group became a threshold every individual must cross, the enormous variation around it disappeared, and "deliberate practice" — effortful work on a weakness, with feedback — quietly became "hours". The real finding is that a great deal of deliberate practice is necessary; the stretch is that a specific number is sufficient.
A correlation becomes a cause. Statement C. Elite athletes are indeed often found to have specialised. But the athletes who specialised early and did not make it are not in the sample — they stopped playing, so nobody counted them. Studies that do follow whole cohorts generally find that early diversification is associated with equal or better long-term outcomes and lower dropout and injury. Looking only at the people who succeeded is the most common error in sport research, and it produces confident advice that is backwards.
A qualified result loses its qualifier. Statement D. Mental rehearsal does produce measurable improvement, particularly for skills with a large cognitive component, in performers who already have the movement pattern. The qualifier — that it supplements physical practice rather than replacing it, and works best for someone who has something to rehearse — is what gets dropped, and dropping it converts a useful technique into a false promise.
A finding is generalised past its sample. A result from twelve elite adult male athletes is reported as a fact about athletes. This is why "who was studied?" is the first question in Card 05, and it is the stretch that is easiest to check and most often skipped.
Match each stretched claim to the way the underlying finding was distorted.
- "It takes 10,000 hours to become an expert"
- "Specialise early if you want to make it"
- "Visualising is as good as practising"
- "Athletes recover best with this protocol"
- A group average was turned into a threshold every individual must cross
- Only the people who succeeded were counted, so a correlation was read as a cause
- A qualified result lost the qualifier that made it true
- A result from a narrow sample was generalised to everyone
The syllabus asks specifically how is this applied in practice, and that sub-point is where most research tasks become vague. "Coaches should use random practice" is not an application; it is the finding with the word should added. An application says what a named person does differently on a named occasion.
| Finding | Weak application | Real application |
|---|---|---|
| Random practice improves retention | "Coaches should vary their practice" | "In our Tuesday session the three shooting drills are shuffled by a called number instead of run in blocks of ten, with the same total repetitions" |
| Frequent augmented feedback creates dependency | "Coaches should not give too much feedback" | "The coach asks the player what they noticed before commenting, and gives feedback after every third attempt rather than every attempt" |
| Open skills require unpredictable practice | "Practice should be game-realistic" | "The cone is replaced by a live defender, and the player must choose between shooting and passing based on what the defender does" |
And an application needs a limitation attached, because context changes what transfers. A finding from a full-time elite program may not survive two sessions a week with twenty players and one coach. Saying so is not weakness; it is the difference between applying research and quoting it. The most common real constraint is time, and a proposal that requires more of it than the club has is not an application either.
Two truths and a lie. Which statement is false?
The third sub-point asks what further questions could be proposed, and it is the one students treat as a formality. It is actually the strongest evidence that the reading was done, because you cannot name a real gap in a literature you have not read. Four reliable sources of a good question:
From the sample. Almost every study you find will have been conducted on a population unlike the one you care about. "Does the contextual interference effect hold for 14 year old beginners as it does for the adult participants studied?" is a real question generated simply by reading who was in the study.
From a contradiction. Where two sources disagree, the question is what explains the difference — usually the population, the skill or the measure. "Why does varied practice help in the open skill studies and not in the closed skill study?" is better than either source alone.
From the measure. Ask what was actually measured and what was assumed. If retention was tested after 24 hours, the question of whether the effect survives a season is untouched and worth asking.
From the practice gap. Where the research says one thing and coaches do another, the question of why is genuinely open and genuinely useful. It is often not ignorance: random practice is harder to organise, looks worse to a watching parent, and is less enjoyable for the coach to run.
The fourth source is the most underrated, and it is where this dot point meets the rest of the subject. A finding that is well established and widely ignored is not a knowledge problem; it is an implementation problem, and asking what would have to change for practice to follow the evidence is a more useful question than restating the evidence more loudly.
Fill the gaps. Type one word in each box.
A study assessed by other researchers in the field before publication is described as -reviewed. A report written by the researchers who did the work is a source. Two things varying together, which is not on its own evidence that one caused the other, is a .
Text description
- Two parts, one above the other.
- Above, a five-level pyramid of source quality from systematic reviews and meta-analyses at the top, through peer-reviewed primary studies, textbooks and sporting body resources, coaching publications and journalism, down to social media and coach opinion at the base, with four questions listed beneath it to ask of any source: who was studied, how many, who paid for it, and is this the study or an account of it, plus a note that a low-ranked source is weak evidence about what works and strong evidence about what coaches believe.
- Below, the four ways a genuine finding becomes a false claim: an average turned into a requirement, a correlation read as a cause because only successful athletes were counted, a qualified result that lost its qualifier, and a narrow sample generalised to everyone.
Activities · put the method to work
This is the dot point. Choose one skill in one sport — ideally one you play — and produce a research report with all five parts below.
The question, narrowed to name the sport, the skill, the component and the population. Check all four before searching anything.
At least four sources, ranked. State each source's rank from Card 05, and answer the four questions for the two you rely on most. At least one source must be from the top half of the hierarchy.
What the research tells us about acquiring, developing and improving this skill — organised by the three headings, not by source. A report organised source by source has summarised its reading rather than answered its question.
How it is applied in practice. Describe a specific change to a specific session, in the language of Card 07's third column, and name the constraint most likely to prevent it.
Three further research questions, from three different sources in Card 08, each with one sentence saying what it would take to answer it.
Two requirements that decide the quality of the report. Name at least one thing your sources disagree about, or explain why you found no disagreement — a literature in which everyone agrees is usually a literature you have only read one side of. And state one thing that is genuinely not known, rather than writing round the gap.
Odd one out. Three of these are genuine applications of a research finding. Which one is just the finding restated?
Take one claim about skill development in your sport. Find four sources that address it, one from each of at least three levels of the Card 05 hierarchy. For each: give the rank, answer the four questions, and state what the source actually claims as opposed to what its headline says.
Compare the strength of the claim at each level. The usual pattern is that the claim gets stronger and less qualified as the source gets weaker. Say whether you found that pattern.
Trace one claim back. Take a confident statement from a low-ranked source and follow it to the study it rests on, if one exists. Record what changed on the way, using the four failure modes from Card 06.
Find the dead end. Some confident claims cannot be traced to anything at all. If you find one, that is a result worth reporting, not a failed search — say where the trail stopped.
Write the honest one-line summary of what is actually known about your claim, at the strength the best evidence supports and no stronger.
Step 3 is the one worth taking seriously. An untraceable claim is a finding about your topic, and reporting it is exactly what HM-11-10 is asking for — making a conclusion from a range of sources includes concluding that a widely repeated claim has no source.
Investigate how a movement skill in a sport of your choice is acquired, developed and improved. Outline what the research indicates, how it is applied in practice, and what further questions could be proposed.
Investigate means plan, inquire into and draw a conclusion. The question then names the three sub-points explicitly, so the structure is given to you — and the marks are distributed across all three, which means the "further questions" section cannot be a single throwaway sentence.
Plan: name the sport, the skill and the specific question; what the research indicates, organised by acquiring, developing and improving; the application as a concrete session change with its constraint; then two or three further questions with their sources.
Taking the jump shot in basketball for an adolescent club player: on acquisition, the research supports blocked practice under simplified, predictable conditions while the movement pattern is being formed, because a learner in the cognitive stage has no pattern for varied practice to consolidate. On development, the contextual interference effect indicates that once a basic pattern exists, random and varied practice depresses performance within a session and substantially improves retention and transfer. On improvement, work on an open skill must include the perceptual component — reading a defender and selecting a response — because practice under unopposed conditions develops only the execution.
Applied to a real session: the three shooting drills that were previously run in blocks of ten are shuffled in a called order, with the same total repetitions; a live defender replaces the cone so that the player must choose between shooting and passing; and the coach asks what the player noticed before commenting, giving feedback after every third attempt rather than every attempt. The constraint most likely to prevent this is that the session will visibly look worse, and a coach judged on how a session appears will revert within a fortnight.
The skill investigated is the jump shot in basketball, and the question was narrowed to how practice should be arranged to develop it in adolescent club players, since a question about basketball in general could not be answered by any source. The research indicates different things at each phase. On acquiring the skill, evidence supports simplified, predictable, blocked practice while the movement pattern is being formed, because a learner in the cognitive stage has no established pattern for varied practice to consolidate and randomising too early prevents one forming at all. On developing it, the contextual interference effect is well supported: practising several skills in an unpredictable order produces poorer performance during the practice session itself and markedly better retention and transfer when tested after a delay, because the intervening attempts displace the movement plan and force the learner to reconstruct it on each repetition. On improving it further, the evidence on open skills indicates that practice must include the perceptual component — reading the defender and selecting between shooting and passing — since unopposed repetition develops only the execution half of the task, which is not the half that a match principally tests. Sources were ranked rather than treated equally: the contextual interference finding rests on peer-reviewed experimental work and is reported in textbooks, whereas the strongest claims encountered came from coaching blogs and were stated far more confidently and with fewer qualifications than the studies they rested on. It is also worth recording that most of the primary studies were conducted on adult participants, often university students rather than athletes, so their generalisability to adolescent club players is an assumption rather than a finding. Applied in practice, this produces three specific changes to a Tuesday session: the three shooting drills previously run in blocks of ten are shuffled in a called order with the same total repetitions; a live defender replaces the cone, so the player must choose between shooting and passing on the basis of what the defender does; and the coach asks the player what they noticed before offering an assessment, and comments after every third attempt rather than every attempt, to develop error detection rather than replace it. The constraint most likely to prevent all three is not equipment or time but appearance: the session will visibly look worse than the blocked version, and a coach judged by watching parents or by their own impression of a session will revert to blocked practice within a fortnight unless the expected decline is agreed in advance. Three further questions follow from the reading. First, from the samples: does the contextual interference effect hold as strongly for 14 year old beginners as for the adult participants who were studied, given that beginners may lack the movement plan the effect depends on? Second, from a contradiction between sources: varied practice appeared beneficial in the open-skill studies and less so in one closed-skill study, so what property of the skill determines the size of the effect? Third, from the gap between research and practice: given that this finding is decades old and well established, what would have to change about how coaching is observed and judged for practice to follow it? The third is the one I could investigate myself, by surveying local coaches on what they do and why, which would require only the method used in this course rather than a laboratory.
A coach claims that "research proves it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill, so young athletes must specialise early." Evaluate this claim as a use of research evidence.
Evaluate means make a judgement based on criteria, with strengths and weaknesses. The sentence contains two claims and an inference between them, and all three can be assessed separately — which is the structure that earns the marks.
Plan: separate the three parts; assess claim one as an average turned into a requirement; assess the inference, which does not follow even if claim one were true; assess claim two on its own evidence, including who is missing from the sample; then the judgement, conceding what is sound.
The underlying research examined violinists and found that those judged best had accumulated an average of approximately ten thousand hours of deliberate practice by their early twenties. Three things happened on the way to the coach's version: an average across a group became a threshold each individual must cross; the considerable variation around that average was discarded; and "deliberate practice" — effortful work directed at a specific weakness, with feedback — became simply "hours", which is not the same quantity and is the one the finding was actually about.
Even if the first claim were true, the conclusion does not follow: a large quantity of practice could be accumulated across a longer period, or from a later start, without early specialisation. The second claim therefore needs its own support, and the evidence does not favour it. Studies of elite athletes often find early specialisation, but those samples contain only athletes who reached the elite level; those who specialised early and dropped out or were injured are absent by construction. Research following whole cohorts generally finds early diversification associated with equal or better long-term outcomes and lower dropout and injury.
This is a compound claim, and it contains three separable assertions: that research proves a ten thousand hour requirement, that early specialisation follows from it, and implicitly that the word "proves" is appropriate. Each fails, though not equally, and one part of the underlying idea is sound and should be conceded. The first assertion misrepresents its source in three distinct ways. The research it derives from examined expert performers, notably violinists, and found that those judged best had accumulated an average of roughly ten thousand hours of deliberate practice by their early twenties. First, an average across a group has been converted into a threshold that each individual must cross, which is a different kind of statement; second, the substantial variation around that average has been discarded, so that individuals who reached expert performance in considerably fewer or more hours disappear from the claim; and third, "deliberate practice" has become "hours". Deliberate practice is effortful work directed specifically at a weakness, with feedback, and is not interchangeable with time spent playing or repeating, so the coach's version measures a quantity the research did not study. The word "proves" is also inappropriate: research supports, indicates or fails to support, and a single correlational finding about one domain does not prove anything about another. The second problem is the inference. Even if a large accumulation of deliberate practice were necessary, early specialisation would not follow, because the same accumulation could be achieved from a later start or over a longer period, and because practice in related sports may transfer. A conclusion that does not follow from its premise fails regardless of whether the premise is true, and this is a separate fault from the first. The third assertion therefore requires evidence of its own, and the available evidence does not support it. Studies of elite athletes do frequently report early specialisation, but such samples contain only athletes who reached the elite level; those who specialised early and then dropped out, burned out or were injured are absent from the sample by construction, so the correlation observed cannot support a causal recommendation. Research that follows whole cohorts rather than only the survivors generally finds early diversification associated with equal or better long-term performance outcomes, together with lower dropout and lower injury rates, particularly in adolescents. What should be conceded is that the idea underneath the first claim is real and important: high-level skill does require a very large volume of practice, and the quality of that practice — whether it is deliberate and directed at weaknesses with feedback — matters more than its duration. A coach who took that from the research would be well served by it. The failure is not in valuing practice volume but in converting a descriptive average into a prescriptive rule, attaching an inference that does not follow, and supporting the conclusion with a sample that excludes exactly the people whose experience would test it. Judged as a use of research evidence, the claim is unsound, and the specific fault is instructive: it is the shape most misused sport research takes, in which a genuine and qualified finding is stated more strongly and more usefully than its evidence allows.
Multiple choice · 5 questions
MC 1. A study assessed by other researchers in the field before publication is described as:
- A. peer-reviewed
- B. self-reported
- C. anecdotal
- D. correlational
MC 2. The first question to ask when judging whether a research finding applies to your own team is:
- A. how many people have shared it online
- B. whether the conclusion agrees with what the coach already believes
- C. who was studied, and how similar they are to your team
- D. how recently the article was written
MC 3. Studies that examine only athletes who reached the elite level risk a misleading conclusion because:
- A. elite athletes are unwilling to participate in research
- B. those who followed the same path and did not succeed are absent from the sample
- C. elite athletes train too much for their results to be measured
- D. such studies are never peer-reviewed
MC 4. Which of the following is a genuine application of a research finding rather than a restatement of it?
- A. "Coaches should vary their practice appropriately"
- B. "Random practice is better than blocked practice"
- C. "Feedback should not be excessive"
- D. "The three shooting drills are shuffled in a called order instead of run in blocks of ten"
MC 5. A widely repeated coaching claim cannot be traced to any study at all. The best response in a research report is to:
- A. omit the claim, since it cannot be supported
- B. report that the claim could not be traced, and say where the trail stopped
- C. cite the most popular source that repeats it
- D. assume a study exists but is not publicly available
Short answer · exam style
SA 1. Remember Band 3 Outline three criteria you would use to judge whether a source about skill development is reliable. (3 marks)
SA 2. Apply Band 5 For one movement skill in a sport of your choice, explain what the research indicates about how it is acquired and improved, and describe how this would change a real training session. (5 marks)
SA 3. Evaluate Band 6 "Research proves it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill, so young athletes must specialise early." Evaluate this claim as a use of research evidence. (6 marks)
📖 Comprehensive answers (click to reveal)
Multiple choice: 1 → A. 2 → C. 3 → B. 4 → D. 5 → B.
Activity 1 guidance: Step 1 is where reports are won or lost, and the failure is always the same: a question naming the sport but not the skill, the component or the population. Enforce all four before any searching happens, because a broad question produces a report that summarises reading instead of answering anything. Step 3's instruction to organise by the three headings rather than by source is the structural requirement that most improves the writing; a report with a paragraph per source has not synthesised, and it will usually also fail to notice where its sources disagree. The disagreement requirement in the closing paragraph is deliberately hard to satisfy and should not be waived: if a student genuinely finds none, the likely explanation is that all four sources are secondary accounts of the same primary study, which is itself a finding worth reporting. On step 4, expect first drafts to produce the weak column of Card 07; the test is whether the application could be photographed. On step 5, questions drawn from the sample and from the practice gap are usually the strongest, and the practice-gap question is the one students find most interesting because it is genuinely open — the reasons coaches do not adopt well-established findings are rarely ignorance and often that the better method is harder to run and looks worse while it is running.
Activity 2 guidance: The pattern in step 1 is reliably present and is startling the first time a student sees it laid out: the systematic review says the effect is moderate and depends on the skill and the learner's stage, the primary study says it was observed under specified conditions, the coaching article says it works, and the social media post says it is the secret nobody is telling you. Step 2 usually terminates in one of two places — a real study that is more modest than its retelling, which is the four failure modes made visible, or a chain of sources all citing each other with no primary study at the end. Step 3 exists because that second outcome is common and students assume it means they searched badly. It does not: a claim that circulates without a traceable origin is a finding about the claim, and reporting where the trail stopped is a legitimate and valuable conclusion. Step 4 should be genuinely uncomfortable to write, because the honest summary is almost always weaker and more hedged than any single source the student read, and learning to write at the strength the evidence supports is the whole habit HM-11-10 is trying to build.
SA 1 (3 marks): One mark each for three distinct criteria, each with a reason. Acceptable criteria include: whether the source is peer-reviewed, since the method has been assessed by others in the field; who was studied and how many, since a finding may not generalise beyond its sample; whether it is a primary source or an account of one, since claims typically strengthen and lose their qualifiers in retelling; who funded it, since an interested funder is a credibility concern; and how recent it is, where the field has moved. A criterion stated without a reason earns half and is not creditable alone; three versions of "is it trustworthy" count as one criterion.
SA 2 (5 marks): Names a specific sport and skill and narrows the question [1]. States what research indicates about acquiring the skill, with a reason — for example simplified blocked practice while the pattern forms, because a cognitive-stage learner has no plan for varied practice to consolidate [1]. States what research indicates about developing and improving it — for example the contextual interference effect, and for an open skill the need to train the perceptual component [1]. Describes a specific, concrete change to a real session, of the kind that could be observed happening, rather than restating the finding with "should" attached [1]. Identifies a constraint or limitation — the generalisability of the sample to this population, or a practical obstacle such as the session visibly looking worse [1]. An answer that is correct about the research but whose application is a principle rather than a change caps at 3.
SA 3 (6 marks): Separates the compound claim into its parts — the hours claim, the specialisation claim, and the inference joining them [1]. States what the original research actually found: an average of approximately ten thousand hours of deliberate practice among expert performers, not a requirement [1]. Identifies at least two distortions — an average converted into a threshold, the variation discarded, "deliberate practice" reduced to "hours", or the inappropriate use of "proves" [1]. Shows that the inference fails independently: even a large practice requirement does not entail early specialisation, since the volume could be accumulated later or over a longer period [1]. Identifies the sampling problem in the specialisation evidence — studies of elite athletes exclude those who specialised early and dropped out or were injured, so the correlation cannot support a causal recommendation — and notes that whole-cohort research generally favours early diversification [1]. Reaches a judgement that concedes what is sound: a large volume of quality, deliberate practice is genuinely necessary, and the fault lies in converting a descriptive average into a prescription and in the unsupported inference [1]. An answer that simply rejects the whole claim without conceding the real finding underneath it caps at 4, because evaluation requires both sides.
Narrow the question first. Name the sport, the skill, the component and the population. "How do you get better at football?" cannot be answered by any source, because it is not a question. And choose a skill you can go and watch this week — the research is far easier to interpret and to apply when you can see the thing.
Rank your sources, and say which rank each one sat at. Systematic review, peer-reviewed study, textbook, coaching press, social media. Then four questions of any of them: who was studied, how many, who paid, and is this the study or an account of it? And keep hold of the nuance: a coach's opinion is weak evidence about what works and strong evidence about what coaches believe — and the gap between those two is often the most interesting thing you will find.
Four ways a real finding becomes a false claim. An average becomes a requirement (10,000 hours). A correlation becomes a cause because only the successful were counted (specialise early). A qualified result loses its qualifier (visualising is as good as practising). A narrow sample is generalised to everyone. The tell is that a genuine finding is usually specific, awkward, and states its own downside — like the one in Card 01 that was real: random practice makes the session worse and the learning better.
An application says what a named person does differently on a named occasion. "Coaches should vary practice" is the finding with should added. "The three drills are shuffled by a called number instead of run in blocks of ten" is an application — you could photograph it. Attach the constraint that would realistically stop it, and remember the most common one is not equipment but appearance.
And propose the further questions properly, because that section proves you read. They come from the sample, from a contradiction between sources, from what was actually measured, and from the gap between what research says and what coaches do. If your reading found little on your skill, say so — a claim must never exceed its evidence, and that applies to a literature review exactly as it applied to your experiment in Lesson 15.
That closes the third inquiry question. Lesson 20 begins the last one, on the relationship between psychology, movement and performance — starting with personal identity and motivation.
Mark lesson as complete
Tick when you've finished the practice and review.