1999 C. H. McCloy Research Lecture: Children's Control, Learning, and Performance of Motor Skills

Children are amazing! Watching them perform and learn motor skills is a fascinating process. We often hear that "children don't stick with a task very long, because they have short attention spans." That statement can be interpreted to mean "children don't stick with tasks adults want them to do very long." I've watched young children persist for long periods of time at practicing a motor task they wanted to learn, for example, learning to control a joystick, buttons, or a mouse for a video game. Children ages 8-10 years will persist for hours practicing baseball, basketball, or tennis skills. Seeking to understand this process has driven my research interest, because I was an elementary physical education teacher back in the early 1960s. As I look back over my career in research, it seems easy to frame my interest in children's skill performance around four questions. Certainly, these were not the questions at the beginning of my work. However, they evolved over time, and I judge them to be worthwhile, because others seem to find them useful. The questions are not independent, and I did not pursue them in linear order.

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