Video modelling for young archers: Tursi 2014 study

Twenty young archers aged 9 to 11 were split into two groups of ten after an initial technical assessment. The experimental group watched modelling videos of shots by Italian national team athletes and the other did not; everyone was filmed and rated by coaches on three phases of the shot (set-up, draw and aim, release and follow-through) with a mark from 0 to 10 grouped into four bands: poor, average, good, excellent.

At the end, in the experimental group, the number of children in the lowest band for draw and aim had fallen from 5 to 2 and the number rated "good" had risen from 1 to 5; for the release the "poor" ratings went from 7 to 4. In the control group the upward shifts were smaller: for draw and aim the "poor" ratings went from 5 to 4, for the release from 6 to 3, with 6 children in the average band and nobody above "good". The text sums everything up with percentages (a 9% better result than the controls, a peak of 9.6% halfway through, 3.2% in each phase for the controls) that cannot be rebuilt from the tables.

This is a short conference paper presented in December 2013 and published in the proceedings, in a special issue of the journal. The groups were formed so as to look similar on the initial assessment, and the paper does not mention random allocation. The assessment used a grid built for the study, applied by the coaches to the videos every four months; results are given only as the number of children in each band at the start and at the end, without the intermediate assessment mentioned in the text. The paper does not say how many videos the experimental group watched, how often, for how long, or how long the programme lasted overall; all we know about the control group is that it did not use the videos. There is no statistical test of any kind.

What weighs here is less the limits of a design than what is missing. The title refers to technical movements and the introduction to motor imagery and mirror neurons, but the intervention consists of watching videos of other archers, and the discussion mentions women's artistic gymnastics as if the passage came from another paper. The paper speaks of significant changes without reporting any test, and does not say whether the coaches doing the rating knew which group each child was in. With ten children per group, at an age when technique improves within a few months anyway, and with no test at all, the gap between the groups may reflect chance or the way each group developed rather than the videos. One final table is titled as if it covered the whole sample, but it shows the control group's data only. Scores on the target were not measured.

Showing young archers the shots of strong archers is a common and sensible coaching idea, but this paper adds no evidence in its favour. The ratings of the group that watched the videos moved up a little more than the controls', especially for draw and aim, but with no statistics, no information on how much or how the videos were used, and judgements by eye on ten children per side. In the registry it stands as a record of an attempt, not a result to lean on.