A scoping review on developmental activities of girls' and women's sports
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We provide a scoping review of research on athlete development in girls' and women's sports. Our emphasis is on pathways to expertise in the context of deliberate practice theory and associated models, such as the Developmental Model of Sport Participation (DMSP). Despite rationale for sex and gender differences in sport development, there are relatively few studies where the developmental pathways of female elite athletes have been evaluated. We sought to map the scope of the literature on this population over the last 30 years, focusing on measures of practice types and amounts. Following an extensive search of the literature, 32 studies were identified that included all female participants or presented sex/gender disaggregated data. Retrospective methods were commonly used to quantify practice, play and specialization. National-level athletes were the most represented, although there was considerable heterogeneity in sport and expertise-level, making general or comparative judgements challenging. We identified some groups that had accumulated high volumes of practice at a young age, particularly in soccer and gymnastics. Across sports and studies, early majority hours of engagement in the primary sport was the norm. Athletes deviated from predictions in the specialization pathway detailed in the DMSP, by continuing to participate in other sports throughout childhood and adolescence. In addition to highlighting the relative paucity of data pertaining to athlete development pathways in female athletes, we show that the data from these groups deviate from predictions detailed in current models of athlete development.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 teacher head, 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".