Archery course and attention: Türker 2022 study

Forty-six sports science students with no shooting experience: twenty-six took an eight-week basic course in Olympic recurve, twenty carried on with their university lectures only. Before and after, all of them sat the d2 attention test, a pen and paper task in which the letters d accompanied by two dashes have to be crossed out, row by row, with twenty seconds per row.

In the course group every measure moves. Letters processed go from 461 to 517, errors of omission from 84 to 38, errors of commission from 48 to 15, the error percentage from 28.1 to 9.4 per cent. The total performance score rises from 329 to 464 and the concentration score from 37 to 144; the swing in working rate between the best and worst row falls from 25 to 19. All the differences have p below 0.001, except the last (p 0.007).

In the control group nothing moves significantly: letters processed from 483 to 483, omissions from 93 to 80, errors from 45 to 41, error percentage from 28.3 to 25.3, total performance from 346 to 361, concentration from 37 to 57, swing from 26 to 30. Before the intervention the two groups were indistinguishable on all seven measures.

Sorting total performance into bands, at the first test 76.9 per cent of the course group sat in the lowest band and 23.1 per cent in the mediocre one; at the second test 19.2 per cent were in the best band, 42.3 per cent in the normal one, 30.8 per cent in the mediocre one and only two students, 7.7 per cent, in the lowest. In the control group the distribution stays as it started.

Among the demographic variables the author finds no difference by sex or by age. He does find that the students with a left dominant eye, five men and two women in the course group, improve more than the others on total performance and concentration but end up with more errors of commission and a higher error percentage; he explains this by cross-dominance, since the university had only right-handed bows and the sight window therefore sat on the opposite side from the one they needed.

A two-group design with a test before and after, without randomisation in the strict sense: the 46 volunteer students from a sports science faculty were picked at random from those enrolled, but the course group was made up only of students whose drawing arm was the right one, because the university's inventory held nothing but right-handed bows. The sample is 22 women (47.8 per cent) and 24 men (52.2); the men average 22.08 years and the women 21.55. The course group has 14 men and 12 women, the control group 10 and 10.

The d2 test is a timed selective attention task, adapted into Turkish, made up of 14 rows of 47 figures, 658 letters d and p in all with one, two, three or four dashes above or below, in sixteen possible combinations. Only the d letters with two dashes are to be crossed out, ignoring the rest, and each row lasts twenty seconds, for a total of about eight minutes. The measures are the number of letters processed, omissions, incorrect marks, the error percentage, total performance (letters processed minus errors), concentration performance (correctly marked letters minus incorrect marks) and the swing in working rate between the best and worst row.

The course was taught by the author, a second-level archery coach, in the faculty's shooting hall. After a preparatory phase covering the history of the sport, the equipment and a demonstration of the twelve steps of the shot, eight weeks followed of three two-hour lessons, 48 hours in all. The early weeks cover the basic stance, wall work for the bow arm, drawing with an elastic band and drawing with a bare bow; in the fourth week dominant hand and eye are measured and each student's bow length and draw weight are worked out; from the fifth week they shoot, first nine arrows at 5 metres with no target face, then 27 arrows at 5 metres, 36 and 45 at 10 metres, and in the last two weeks 18 and 27 arrows at 15 and 18 metres, with knockout and team contests on faces carrying three scoring zones.

The equipment was of teaching standard: indoor shooting only for reasons of climate, four lanes of at most 18 metres, 25-inch wooden risers, no clicker and no pressure button because the participants were not archers, composite carbon and aluminium arrows between 71 and 78 cm chosen without reference to each student's draw length, and limbs stated at between 26 and 34 pounds according to sex, age and body weight. The analysis uses independent samples t-tests, one-way analysis of variance and paired samples t-tests, with a threshold of 0.05 and normality checked on skewness and kurtosis.

The most quoted part of this paper is also the part that does not hold. The abstract concludes that archery develops attention by 40.8 per cent and concentration by 289.2 per cent, and by more than golf, orienteering, darts and table tennis. Those percentages are this study's own changes set beside percentages read off other papers, with different samples, ages and designs: secondary school students for golf and darts, children of nine to thirteen for table tennis. No direct comparison was made, and with designs as different as these none can be. The comparison between disciplines, in this paper, is numbers placed side by side.

Then there is a problem in the denominator. The 289.2 per cent comes from a concentration score that starts at 37 and reaches 144: on a test where an adult usually sits between 150 and 180, a starting value of 37 is practically the floor of the scale, and a percentage increase computed on a value that low says very little. The bands bear this out: at the first test 76.9 per cent of the course group and 75 per cent of the controls sat in the worst band, and the initial error rate was 28 per cent in both groups. Sports science undergraduates who mark one item in four incorrectly at their first attempt suggest a problem in how the test was administered or understood rather than a deficit of attention. Part of the gain at the second test is therefore simply having done the task before. It remains the case, though, that the controls did the test twice without improving, and that makes the reading less straightforward in both directions.

Allocation to the groups is not random: only students whose drawing arm was the right one ended up in the course group, so allocation depends on a characteristic of the person. The author is at once the coach who taught the course and the person who administered the test before and after: there is no blinding, and the assessor knew whom he was assessing. The control group did nothing, so the comparison is not between archery and another activity.

There are inconsistencies in the numbers. In the final comparison between groups, letters processed has a t of 1.778 with a stated p of 0.015: with 44 degrees of freedom that t does not reach the threshold. The abstract dates the d2 test to 1998, the methods to 1962. Limbs stated at between 26 and 34 pounds are a heavy draw weight for people who have never shot, and on teaching-grade wooden risers; the paper does not explain whether this is the figure marked on the limb or the force actually reached at each student's draw.

Finally the outcome. The d2 test is a pen and paper task: it measures nothing about shooting. There are no scores, no accuracy, no groups, and the participants are not archers. The dominant eye subgroup is seven people out of twenty-six, and the explanation by cross-dominance is the author's own reasoning, and he states that he found nothing in the literature to compare it with.

For anyone who shoots, this study is not about the shooting line: nobody counted a point, and the participants were undergraduates picking up a bow for the first time. It is about the question of whether a beginners' course changes the result of a pen and paper attention task.

On the substance, the data show that after eight weeks the course group did much better on the test and the group that did nothing stayed where it was. How much of that improvement is attention and how much is familiarity with a task already seen cannot be separated, because the starting point was abnormally low in both groups: three quarters of the students in the worst band and one item in four marked incorrectly at the first sitting.

The percentages that circulate on the strength of this paper, the 40.8 and the 289.2 per cent, and the idea that archery beats golf, darts and table tennis, should not be used. They do not come from a comparison: they are this study's changes placed beside figures read off others, on different people of different ages, and the second is computed from a starting value close to the floor of the scale.

What remains useful is the description of the course, unusually detailed for a paper of this kind: eight weeks, three two-hour lessons, from the basic stance to drawing with an elastic band and with a bare bow, then nine arrows at five metres with no target face and a gradual increase out to 18 metres, with internal contests in the final weeks. Anyone putting on a course for beginners has a written programme here that they can read and judge, whatever the attention test measured.