Feedback...

1. Feedback... ...on issues related to your critiques

2. How to start? • It wasn’t required here, but if you’re going to critique a study, it’s always best to provide a précis first – this way you establish to the reader what your understanding of the main points of the article are • You also allow the reader to understand straight away if there were any misunderstandings!

3. What would you get if you added a control group? • This would be a group which received no instructions throughout the study • How is the study’s outcome limited by the absence of such a group? • Does it’s absence make the author’s argument weaker?

4. Sampling and validity • What type of validity is affected by the fact that these participants are volunteers? • And how might a change in “motivation to participate” affect these results?

5. “level of feet” – task objective • If several people interpreted the instruction that their performance was measured by “whether they kept their feet level” by the proximity of the heels to the back of the board, how might this alter results? • If these person’s improved their performance, how would the results be expected to be affected? • Does it match the observed results?

6. What if a person performs poorly through bad form... • There are a myriad reasons why people differ in the way they perform on a task (either this one or a golf task or any other task) • What is the assumption being made when comparing all these reasons for differing to the one (s) under investigation in this study? • What happens to all the other reasons for differing?

7. What if you ask a lot of questions? • Try to answer them! • By all means use speculative language (“it may be that”; “it could be”; “it is possible that”) • This means you’re getting closer to the actual critique yourself (conclusions), rather than asking the reader (me) to do it.

8. Did you discuss all the constructs? • Most did not try to critique the independent constructs, other than to observe we don’t really know if people did as they asked • And what would happen if they didn’t? Or if only some of them had? • Only some discussed the dependent construct.

9. Differences in balance experience... • Uncontrolled in the study • What kind of problem (validity) is this? • Is it likely to alter the results of the study? How?

10. What are we trying to generalize? • Is it the effect of focus of attention? • (hint – NO)

11. Were there other reasons besides F. of A. & T. O. for the observed balance differences? • Bear in mind we’re talking about reasons for differences among the four groups – not differences from start to finish of the experiment • How is this controlled for? • What about differences before the experiment started?

12. What would happen if the experiment had gone on longer (more practice)? • How might the results have altered? • What kind of validity is this?

13. Did consistency of task focus and objective really matter? certainly, consistency matters... ...or does it?

14. How do we know if the sample “was representative”? • What are the steps to go through?

15. Failures to attend in the instructed manner... • How could this affect results?

16. One person explicitly split the answer by validity type... • So many didn’t even attempt a full critique • Some barely offered a partial one.