Self-regulated learning and expertise development in sport: current status, challenges, and future opportunities

ABSTRACT

In sport, athletes engage in large amounts of practice to reach higher levels of performance. Self-regulated learning (SRL) could be critical for optimizing training conditions and maximizing training amounts. Our purpose was to review literature concerning SRL in sport training contexts. We focused on articles taking a practice-enhancement orientation from a social-cognitive perspective. Thirty-four articles met search criteria. Most articles used a conceptual model guided by Zimmerman's work. We identified six emergent lines of inquiry: (a) descriptions of SRL; (b) SRL as characteristic of athletes; (c) skill group differences in SRL; (d) interventions with SRL as a focus or an outcome; (e) relations among SRL processes, beliefs, and other variables; and (f) measurement of SRL. Based on reviewed research in sport and drawing on research on SRL from education, we highlight four issues that provide opportunities for quality empirical research and conceptual development related to SRL and sport practice. In addition, we emphasize the potential role that SRL plays in sport expertise development.

KEYWORDS:

• Athletes
• self-regulation
• metacognition
• sport expertise
• practice

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Rafael Tedesqui and Diane Ste-Marie for their guidance on sections of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Lindsay McCardle http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2499-3751

Joseph Baker http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5686-1737

Notes

1. Two articles (Dorris, Power, & Kenefick, 2012; Wagstaff, 2014) were returned in our search that used the terms self-regulation and self-control interchangeably. These articles focused on self-control within an ego depletion paradigm (Baumeister et al., 2007). Because this paradigm emphasizes self-control as a personal capacity or limited resource rather than as a social cognitive process and learned competency, these articles were excluded.

2. Two articles (Janelle, Barba, Frehlich, Tennant, & Cauraugh, 1997; Janelle, Kim, & Singer, 1995) based in the motor learning tradition were returned in our search in which learners selected their own feedback schedules (what Wulf, 2007, terms self-controlled training conditions). Though these articles made theoretical connections between self-controlled training conditions and SRL, investigators inferred self-regulatory strategies without assessing SRL, and thus these articles were excluded. In other cases where similar motor learning designs have been used, and there was complementary data collection on SRL (e.g., Ste-Marie et al., 2011), articles were retained in our review.

3. This collection of work (9 articles included in this review) was conducted mostly out of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands by colleagues including Elferink-Gemser, Jonker, Jordet, Toering, Visscher, and others (Elferink-Gemser et al., 2015; Jonker, Elferink-Gemser, Toering, et al., 2010; Jonker, Elferink-Gemser, & Visscher, 2010, 2012; Toering et al., 2011; Toering, Elferink-Gemser, Jonker, et al., 2012; Toering, Elferink-Gemser, Jordet, et al., 2012; Toering et al., 2013; Toering et al., 2009). We refer to this work as Jonker and Toering's as they have been lead authors on most of these papers.

4. Reflection subscale might be one exception to this, with items that refer to broad reflection on strengths and weaknesses and integrating reflections on progress to future learning experiences (Jonker et al., 2012).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under an Insight Development Grant [grant number 430-2015-00904] (Bradley W. Young, PI).