Abstract
One of the distinguishing characteristics of a highly skilled person is the ability to perform a skill in a number of different ways according to variations in environmental demands. This flexibility in motor behavior has been considered as resulting from the acquisition of a motor program operating under the constraints of "fixed rules" and governed by "flexible strategies" (Koestler, 1969). Taking into consideration the above mentioned statements, the following hypothesis was constructed. In serial skill learning, as the teaching program becomes stricter and each component part of a serial task becomes overprogrammed, the learner's degree of freedom in response choice becomes more restricted. As a consequence, it is thought that the invariant properties (fixed rule) of the skill become overemphasized and hence serial motor patterns are acquired only as a fixed motor program. Forty female undergraduate students participated in this experiment to test the above hypothesis. The experiment was conducted in a real-life classroom situation and the subjects were divided into two groups (G.A and G.B), each with twenty subjects. Two learning conditions based on the degree of freedom of response choice where set up and the two groups were respectively assigned to each learning condition. The task was a serial learning of basketball skills. The results were analyzed in terms of execution time of trials, successful trials, anticipation, errors, and stability in performance. It was found that the group which performed under the higher degree of freedom showed a high performance level in relation to all the above mentioned measures. These results showed support for the hypothesis and were interpreted as evidence in favor of the assumption that as the teaching program becomes stricter, the degree of freedom of the learner's action is reduced. And consequently, it becomes more and more difficult to acquire flexible motor programs.
