A game for archery accuracy: Fierera 2022 study

Ten beginners at a club in Bekasi, on the edge of Jakarta, used a game called AVShoot as an accuracy exercise, in an action research project run by authors from the State University of Jakarta. Accuracy was measured with an 18-arrow test, three ends of six, and scores were split into three bands: poor from 60 to 111 points, fair from 112 to 138, good from 138 to 158. The stated goal was to get 80% of the archers into the good band.

At the first test 5 archers were in the poor band, 4 in the fair band and 1 in the good band, with 140 points. After the first cycle with the game nobody was left in the poor band, 5 were fair and 5 good. After the second cycle 9 of the 10 were in the good band and 1 in the fair band. The authors conclude that the game is suitable for improving the accuracy of beginners at that club.

The study follows the action research cycle: plan, act, observe and reflect, repeating the cycle if the goal is not met. There were two cycles here, the second run because after the first only 50% of the archers were in the good band. The target face had six rings, scoring 5 to 10, and each archer's score was written on a sheet.

The paper does not describe the game: there is no account of how AVShoot worked, how many sessions each cycle lasted, what distance was shot, with what bow, or how old the archers were. Individual scores are not given, apart from the archer on 140 points, and the results are reported only as the number of archers in each band.

Without a control group the effect of the game cannot be separated from that of simple practice: ten beginners who keep shooting will improve anyway, game or no game. The bands overlap (138 falls in both fair and good), and moving from one band to the next can hinge on a few points over 18 arrows. There are no means, no scores and no statistical tests.

The text also shows signs of hasty writing: the introduction dwells on swimming instructors and children learning to swim, and in the results accuracy is several times called flexibility (kelentukan), passages that seem to have been carried over from another piece of work. It is a short article in the first issue of a local journal, more useful as an account of a club's experience than as evidence.

For anyone teaching beginners the study describes an experience: a group of ten pupils, trained for two cycles with a game, went from one archer in the good band to nine. Beginners do improve in their first weeks, though, and the study gives no way of telling how much of that improvement came from the game and how much from the arrows shot.

The idea of making accuracy practice more varied and fun to keep motivation up is the authors', reasonable but not measured: the study collected nothing on the pupils' motivation or enjoyment, and without a description of the game it cannot even be reproduced.