Circuit drills for child archers: Arisman 2018

A researcher at PGRI University in Palembang, Indonesia, tried a circuit of technical drills with 24 boys in the fifth and sixth years of primary school who attended an after-school archery club. After the programme the mean score on a basic technique test rose from 22.31 to 26.04, with a t of 4.49, which the author compares against a critical value of 1.714.

The spread of scores changed as well: before, 12 children were above average, 2 average and 10 below; afterwards the figures were 8, 10 and 6. There was no control group, so the only comparison is before against after within the same group.

The programme ran for two months, with three 90-minute sessions a week and a stated total of 16 sessions. The circuit was organised in stations, with six different exercises, at an intensity given as 80% of maximum ability, 30 seconds of rest between stations and 5 minutes between sets. The paper does not describe what was done at each station, nor the equipment, distance or type of bow.

The sample was chosen at the author's discretion from the 35 children in the club and consists of all the boys (14 in the fifth year and 10 in the sixth). The outcome is a basic technique test scored in points; the items assessed, the scale, who did the scoring and the standard deviations are not given. Normality was checked with the Lilliefors test and the comparison made with a t-test.

As evidence that the method works, the study is very weak. Without a control group the effect of the circuit cannot be separated from two more months of practice, the children growing up and familiarity with the test. The test itself is not described, and it is not known whether the person scoring it knew the aim of the study. Standard deviations and an effect size are missing.

The arithmetic has some cracks too. Three sessions a week for two months comes to more than 16 sessions; the English abstract refers to an independent-samples t-test, although the data are repeated measures on the same children; the degrees of freedom are given as 24 (n-1), which with 24 participants would be 23, and the critical value of 1.714 matches a one-tailed test with 23 degrees of freedom. There are no data at all on shooting itself, neither score nor grouping.

For anyone teaching children, the study shows only that over two months of a club run as a circuit of technical drills, the score on an in-house basic technique test went up. It does not show that the circuit works better than another way of running the session, since there is no comparison, nor that it leads to arrows closer to the centre. The station format, with short rests and many repetitions of the movement, is a common way of managing a large group; this paper adds no evidence that it is the most effective one.