Evaluating the effectiveness of a mental skills training program on the sport performance of Special Olympics athletes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The development of sport expertise is a complex and multidimensional process. Although it is well established that physical practice will impact the development of expertise in an athlete, it is also known that it is not the only determining factor. Researchers have argued that combining physical practice with mental skills training will better prepare athletes for competition compared to physical practice alone. However, most research has focused on generic athletes, implying that the role of mental training in athletes with intellectual disabilities is currently under researched. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate coach perceptions of the effectiveness of a mental skills training program offered to Special Olympics athletes prior to attending the 2013 World Games. A total of 9 coaches (Mage = 48 years; Myears coaching = 18 years) participated in structured telephone interviews aimed at understanding the role of mental training in the development and performance of athletes. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using NVivo. Overall, results suggest that providing athletes with a mental training workshop prior to the World Games had a positive effect on athlete experience and performance. However, participants identified various components of the program that require adaptation and suggested recommendations for improving the quality of training provided to athletes. Conclusions and recommendations will be discussed to determine how to best deliver the program to maximize athlete training.Acknowledgments: We would like to acknowledge Special Olympics Canada for supporting this research
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".