Teaching surgeons to operate--principles of psychomotor skills training.

Although the ultimate success of surgery depends on the use of adequate psychomotor skills, the evaluation of the abilities of a trainee and the teaching of these skills has not been systematized. The choice of a trainee in surgery should be based at least partially on his innate abilities, and his training should be begun at an appropriate level. The procedures he may do should be analyzed to determine the skills required for their performance. Then these skills should be taught specifically, initially in non-threatening situations such as laboratory settings, and their acquisition assessed so that he can be progressed to more advanced work at the appropriate time. Ultimately a decision must be made whether to train a candidate to a skill level or whether to train him for a set period and then counsel him regarding which procedures he has the skills to perform. There are well developed concepts in educational psychology that may be used in developing improved methods to assess and train prospective surgeons.

The effect of practice and temporal location of knowledge of results on the motor performance of older adults.

An investigation was conducted to compare the effect of practice on the motor performance of older adults with that of college-aged adults. The temporal location of knowledge of results was varied during the practice in an attempt to ascertain the relationship between information storage/processing capacity and practice effect. Analysis of variance revealed motor performance proficiency differences favoring the younger adults but no difference between age groups in the pattern of performance change associated with practice. The proficiency differences could partially be explained in terms of older adults' information processing limitations.

Motor schema formation and retention in young children.

The variability-of-practice hypothesis, a major prediction of Schmidt's (1975) motor schema theory, was tested in an attempt to investigate motor-schema formation. In addition, schema retention was observed after a 2-week retention interval. The task involved preschool children in tossing a bean bag for appropriate distance. Four treatment groups received 100 practice trials equally divided over five days. Variation was provided by varying the weights of the bean bags. The testing situations involved tossing a criterion weighted bean bag as well as a novel weighted bean bag which none of the groups had experienced previously. In addition, all groups were tested on a new but similar task. The results supported the variability-of-practice hypothesis in terms of schema formation and transfer to novel tasks in the same movement class. After a two-week retention interval, loss in performance was significantly less for the group with variability of practice than all other groups.