Two ways to reach full draw in archery: Grebner 1969

At a high school in Illinois, 216 first-year girls with no previous archery lessons learned two different ways of reaching full draw. Four classes used the "push" method: the string hand goes to the anchor point on the face first, then the bow arm extends by pushing forwards. Three classes used the usual "pull" method, in which the bow arm is already extended and the string hand draws back to the face. After 19 daily lessons the score of the last round showed no significant difference between the two groups.

The paper gives no means, standard deviations or test value, only the conclusion. It does report the reliability of the score: between the rounds shot on the last two days the correlation was 0.80 in the pull group and 0.78 in the push group, which the Spearman-Brown formula, assuming two further rounds, raises to 0.92 and 0.91. In the push group the correlation between final score and general motor ability was 0.32.

The girls attended Glenbard East High School in Lombard, and the study comes from a 1965 master's thesis at Northern Illinois University. Girls were excluded if they scored under 90 on the Lorge-Thorndike intelligence test, were under 14 or over 15 and a half, had many absences, physical impairments, insufficient English or previous archery lessons; to keep class sizes up, 19 with no intelligence score and 14 who had shot a few times without a course were kept in.

Each class met daily for 55 minutes, 40 of them for instruction and shooting, on an indoor range at 10, 20 and 25 yards (about 9, 18 and 23 metres). The bows were solid fibreglass, between 20 and 30 lb checked at a 26-inch draw, and the practice arrows Port Orford cedar and lemonwood, 24, 26 or 28 inches long, assigned by the instructor from a chart. The three instructors rotated so that each taught both methods, and classes were asked not to discuss them with each other. Before the comparison the groups were checked with a t-test on intelligence and on the Scott and French motor ability battery (a basketball throw, a 4-second dash, a repeated wall pass and a standing long jump), with no significant differences. The final comparison is a t-test on the means of the last round.

The groups are whole classes rather than girls allocated one by one, and the push classes met in the first, third, fifth and last periods of the day, the pull classes in the others: the author herself notes that time of day may have mattered. The final round is not described (number of arrows, distance, target face) and none of the figures of the comparison are given, so it is impossible to tell how close the groups were or whether the study could have detected a small difference. The abstract says the groups were also equated for initial archery ability, but no such measure appears in the methods.

The study grew out of the problem of unstable anchors in beginners, and anchor stability is exactly what was not measured: there is only the score. Finally, it concerns girls of 14 and 15 with light school bows, followed for 19 lessons.

For anyone teaching beginners, the result says that reaching the anchor first and then extending the bow arm, or drawing the string to the face with the arm already extended, made no difference to the score after a course of lessons: the choice between the two can be made on other grounds, such as the pupils' strength or how easily they find their anchor. It says nothing about modern recurve technique, with a clicker and a back-driven draw, nor about experienced archers. It is also a piece of history: as early as the 1960s people were arguing over whether the bow arm should push or stay still, and this comparison ended without a winner.