Teaching archery by demonstration: Setyawan 2023 study

On a university archery course for future physical education teachers in Yogyakarta, the scores of 30 students on a 36-arrow test at 15 metres rose on average from 49.10 to 70.80 on a 1 to 100 scale after a few lessons built on demonstrating ten steps of basic technique taken from the Korean professor and coach Kim Hyung Tak: stance, grip, hooking the string, set-up, half and full draw, anchor, aiming, expansion, release and follow-through. The mean difference was 21.70 points (95% confidence interval 15.77 to 27.63, t = 7.487). The lowest score went from 16 to 51 and the highest from 69 to 100. That scale, however, is not the target score: the table of individual data in the appendix shows that each total was divided by the best total in the group at the final test (193 points out of a possible 360). In actual target points the mean went from about 95 to about 137 out of 360.

In the other part of the study, students from the course's five classes rated how the lecturer had run the lessons on four aspects: planning (mean 4.40 out of 5), organisation (4.35), delivery (4.37) and assessment (4.30), all in the top band of the authors' scale.

The study has two parts. For the questionnaire, the authors state that all 80 students in classes A to E took part, but the tables report 74 responses. There were 10 items on planning, 4 on organisation, 18 on delivery and 3 on assessment, answered on a 1 to 5 scale, with internal reliability between 0.884 and 0.981.

For the shooting test, 30 students were drawn by cluster sampling, with no control group. Each shot 36 arrows at 15 metres in ends of six, with a three-minute limit per end; scoring followed the colours of the face (yellow 10-9, red 8-7, blue 6-5) and the total was then converted to a scale of 1 to 100, with the best total at the final test taken as 100. According to the paper's schedule, the first test took place in October 2022 and the lessons using the method were three sessions in November, each of two 50-minute periods. Before and after were compared with a paired t-test.

Without a control group there is no way to separate the effect of the method from what happens to any beginner who shoots for a few weeks: someone starting from nothing improves anyway, and a test at 15 metres leaves plenty of room to go up. The type of bow, the draw weight, the size of the face and how many arrows the students shot between the two tests are not reported, and the conversion of the score to a scale of 100 is not explained in the text: it can only be worked out from the appendix data, and it makes the top score at the final test worth 100 by construction. The course syllabus cited in the paper is by the first author, and the questionnaire rates the lecturer without saying who that was.

The questionnaire measures how far students approved of the way the lessons were run, not how much they learned, and it was filled in by students on that same course. There are careless slips too: 80 students stated and 74 responses, one band of the scale printed as '3.41-3.2' instead of 3.41-4.20, and a Polish abstract that refers to the summer semester where the English text says the odd semester. The journal is flagged in the registry for questionable editorial standards.

For anyone teaching beginners, the study describes a course built on a sequence of ten steps demonstrated by the lecturer, and a mean improvement of about 22 points on the authors' scale, roughly 42 target points out of 360, in a few weeks. Without a comparison with another method, or with students who shoot without it, it cannot say whether demonstrating the ten steps works better than any other orderly teaching of basic technique. The useful part is descriptive: at 15 metres, university students starting from nothing went on average from about a quarter to just under two fifths of the maximum possible score over a short course. That the sequence comes from the Korean school adds nothing to this conclusion, because the study does not compare it with anything else.