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The Association between Skill Development and Task Specificity among University Students

Author Affiliations

  • 1Department of Psychology and Human Development, Regent University College of Science and Technology, Accra, GHANA

Int. Res. J. Social Sci., Volume 3, Issue (6), Pages 33-36, June,14 (2014)

Abstract

The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between skill development and task specificity. One hundred and eighty three male and female undergraduate students between 18 and 52 years old were randomly selected to participate. Performance on motor skills of participants was tested using four motor tasks from the Movement Assessment Battery for Children test (Movement ABC) and two tasks from the Test of Motor competence (TMC). Pearson’s correlation was used to analyse the data to examine the relationship between the Movement ABC and TMC. Interestingly, relatively low correlations were found between the six selected motor tasks of the Movement ABC and the TMC and relatively higher correlations were found among the unimanual co-ordinations. The findings suggest that learning of particular motor skills is task specific. Furthermore, motor skills that involve the use of two hands tend to be more task specific than those which employ only one hand at a time.

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