An assessment of random practice and blocked practice approaches in skills acquisition, retention and transfer in teaching basketball skills to beginners in senior high schools

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to assess the involvement of blocked and random practices in acquisition, retention and transfer in teaching basketball skills in Senior High Schools. A quasi-experimental design was used for this study. 60 participants were selected from Presbyterian Senior High School, Accra using simple random and purposive sampling techniques. Participants were assigned (n = 30) to Blocked Practice Group (BPG) and Random Practice Group (RPG) respectively. The study involved teaching and learning of 3 basketball skills in 9 training sessions. The reliability coefficient yielded α = .78 using KR21. Four research questions were answered while 2 hypotheses were tested. Descriptive analysis of means and standard deviations was used to answer the research questions while inferential statistics of ANOVA and T-test was used to test the two hypotheses at 0.05 significant level. Results for acquisition indicated the BPG scored higher means than the RPG in all three skills. Results for retention showed much improved performance by the RPG than the BPG in all 3 skills. For transfer, similar results were obtained. ANOVA test for retention produced the following F-values at p<.05: chest pass 86.01; sidearm pass 44.82; and overhead pass 63.58. For transfer, the F-values at p<.05 were 232.54, 102.84 & 102.01 for chest, sidearm and overhead passes respectively, revealing significant mean differences among the three skills but with the RPG recording more superior values within and between group analyses than the BPG. Independent samples t-test revealed the existence of significant difference between random and blocked practices (t(58) = 17.61, p<.05, 2-tailed) in terms of overall learned skills. It was recommended, that physical educators should adopt BPG when the learning objective is isolated skill learning. RPG should be used when the main objective is based on retention and transfer of knowledge to the competitive milieu or to other related activities