Phases of learning

Phases of Learning

Fitts and Posners (1977) three stage model:

this is the process of learning a skill, this theory covers three stages where you start at the cognitive stage where you are new to the skill, once you get more practice and knowledge you would work your way up to associative and then if you develop the skill to be second nature you go into the autonomous stage.

Cognitive stage:

At this stage you will do the most learning as you will take in all of the information provided to you as you have no base knowledge and every peice of information is seen as important to perform that skill, in this stage you generally have some base knowledge but lack the physical ability such as the movements and the coordination to perform the skill well, once you have performed the skill and created the movement and it is done incorrectly then it is hard to change. an example of this would be trying to do kick ups, if you get taught one way to perform a kick up, after time you will develop and get better, but if you tried to change the technique then the amount of kick ups you would do would decrease before it got better.

Associative stage:

At this stage the skill you have learn is being perfected at a very slow rate in terms of the cognitive stage, at this stage you have learnt a technique or movement and you are trying to change all of the errors that you might have in that technique, for example when a striker shoots and the ball is going over the net a lot, he would look at changing his body position when shooting, this could be that they are leaning to far back as doing this will generate an upwards movement and if it was corrected the issue of hitting it over a lot may be resolved

Autonomous stage:

at this stage you have got to the stage where you can perform the skill automatically, it had become a second nature response, and you don't need to think about it, this is the part where you will either have to change your technique fully as the fault in your technique is having an overall effect, but usually when you reach this stage you are only making really small change so that you can perfect your technique, and example of this is when an athlete swaps from football where he was a freekick taker to rugby where he will be used as the conversion kicker, the athlete would either have to completely change the technique to suit the new ball or and goal of the kick, or he could only change one aspect of it such as to generate the elevation to get it over the goals.

Learning curve and plateau's:
the learning curve shows that with the amount of practice you do the better you will become at performing the task, as you can see on the image below, at the start of the graph you have only had very little attempt and therefore your performance is very low, but at the attempts increase so does performance.

http://www.intropsych.com/ch07_cognition/learning_curve.html

on the graph you have a slow beginning, a steep acceleration and a plateau, and if i relate this graph to the three stage model:

Slow beginning:

at the beginning you are at the cognitive stage as your attempts are going to be at its maximum, and you will also make the most mistakes and that is why the attempts increases at a higher rate, this is due to a lack of experiences in doing that action. this is where we are learning a new skill such as how to do a correct serve in tennis if you hadn't played and close related sports before learning it.

Steep acceleration:

when you get to the steep acceleration part you are coming to the associative stage as you have gathered all of the information and it is just about developing the skill by removing all of the information you need from what you dont need, this will reduce the amount of mistakes that you do and this is why it has a steeper increase in performance than attempts as each attempt you are getting better and better, this would be when you have learnt how to do the serve and you are now practise getting it into the right zones on the court.

Plateau's

at the final stage you will be at the autonomous stage as you have hit a plateau in performance and this is where the graph grows until it levels off as you have either reached the top of your performance, or hit a wall in performance due to something, and once you hit this, it is very hard to change and improve as the details between right and wrong become smaller and smaller therefore the attempts that you take are greater and the improvements you get are very little. this would be where you have got the hang of picking where you want hit the serve, how much power and the technique, and you can do this at a high success rate.

Plateaus don't always level off so that your performance will stay the same it also means that your performance can drop off, this could be an internal such as psychological problems or a decrease in morale or external factors such as being put under pressure to succeed, on the graph you would see a decrease in performance and the amount that it decreases would depend on how long it takes you to resolve it