Motor Skill Learning in Children

The purpose of this article is to briefly describe schema theory and indicate its relevance to early childhood development, with specific reference to children's acquisition of motor skills. Schema theory proposes an explanation of how individuals learn and perform a seemingly endless variety of movements. According to Schmidt (1975), goal directed movement leads to storage of initial conditions, response specifications, performance feedback, and result. These four sources of information combine to produce a motor schema that enables repetition of a movement or performance of a new variation of it. A major prediction of schema theory is that increasing variability in practice on a given task will result in increased transfer to a novel task of the same movement class. Numerous studies reporting support for the variability hyothesis have been generated using young children as subjects and gross motor skill as the task. These findings have important practical implications for the structure of practice sessions with children. Schema theory predicts that practicing a variety of movement outcomes within the same general skill class will provide a diverse set of experiences upon which a schema may be enhanced. Generally, schema theory supports the practice during the early years of problem-solving within the same class of movements and rules rather than instruction in specific sport skills. (RH)