Pocket guide for novice archers: Susanto 2024

The authors produced a pocket booklet for people starting out in archery and had it rated by experts and by students. The cover was designed in Canva and the text written in Word; the contents listed in the conclusions are equipment, the facilities of a shooting range, and basic technique, described starting from body alignment, the position of the hand on the grip and the purpose of the movement.

Two archery coaches rated the content: suitability of the material 4.79 out of 5, that is, 95.8%; learning support 4.5, that is, 90%; language 4.56, that is, 91.2%; overall mean 4.56, that is, 91.2%. One media expert rated the presentation 4.27, that is, 85.4%. The booklet then went to 24 students on the extracurricular archery course at a secondary school in Trawas, in East Java province, enrolled across the three year groups, who filled in a rating sheet after reading it: materials 4.31, that is, 86.2%, appearance 4.29, that is, 85.8%, learning 4.40, that is, 88%, with a mean of 4.33, that is, 86.6%.

The authors conclude that the booklet is suitable for use as training material. Flexibility, which gives the paper its title, was never measured, either before or after; nor was shooting performance. The study assesses how much a booklet appeals to its readers, not what effect it has on the people who use it.

The work presents itself as research and development in ten steps, from identifying the problem to mass production; the authors then specify that six were used, namely potential and problems, data collection, product design, design validation, revision and product testing.

Validation was entrusted to two archery coaches as subject-matter experts and to a lecturer from State University of Malang as media expert. The experts filled in rating sheets across three sets of indicators: presentation of the material, appearance and learning, on a five-point scale. The field test consisted of handing the booklet to the 24 students and collecting their judgement on eleven items after they had read it. The starting data come from interviews with the school's archery coaches, who reported a shortage of material: the technique taught there rested on the teacher's personal experience, and books on archery were not in circulation.

The methods section lists many further instruments: questionnaires on knowledge and motivation, satisfaction questionnaires, observation sheets on posture and consistency during training, physical flexibility tests before and after the programme (toe-touch tests, back flexibility tests), structured or semi-structured interviews with students and coaches, and a daily training diary. None of these instruments appears in the results.

That same section is written as guidance rather than as a record: it says that participants' ages may vary but that it is best to focus on one band, that the sample size should include 20 to 30 beginners and that 3 to 5 coaches should be involved, that the coach should have at least two years of experience. What was actually done has to be reconstructed from the figures in the tables.

The title announces a flexibility training model, and the study does not measure flexibility. The tests for doing so are listed in the methods and never reach the results, and the booklet described in the conclusions contains equipment, facilities and basic technique: where the flexibility training sits inside the product is not clear. The introduction, too, spends three paragraphs on rhythmic gymnastics, and the reasoning about why flexibility matters is built on that discipline rather than on archery.

What was measured are opinions. Twenty-four students and three experts said a booklet seemed well made to them, on a five-point scale, after reading it: that is not a measure of learning, of flexibility or of performance. The people who produced the booklet are also the people who collected the ratings, there is no comparison group, there is no before and after on anything, and the students were not followed over time.

The figures are not entirely consistent. In the text the appearance aspect is worth 85.2% where the table says 85.8%, and the conclusion reports a score of 4.53 equal to 90.6%, which matches none of the means in the tables (4.56 from the subject-matter experts, 4.27 from the media expert, 4.33 from the students). The text also shows signs of light editing: at one point hockey coaches are named among the recipients of the booklet.

This is a thin source, and it counts as one: it documents the production of a teaching aid for beginners at an Indonesian secondary school and the satisfaction of the people who read it.

For someone who shoots, nothing changes: there is no exercise to try, no measurement, no effect. In the registry the source counts as a document on the production of teaching material for beginners, not as evidence on flexibility or on technique.

One thing, though, comes through plainly in the authors' account, and every club knows it well: at that school the technique taught depended on what the teacher had picked up on their own, and there was no reference text. A booklet setting out equipment, the range and the steps of the shot solves that problem, and the students found it clear. Whether that booklet then makes anyone more flexible, or more accurate, is a question this study did not attempt to answer.