The main objective that coaches of teams in the youth development stages should have is to optimize to its maximum exponent the teaching – learning process of the player. For this, coaches should take into account the teaching perspective of cognitivism in order to achieve their goals.
How is cognitivism applied to the teaching – learning process?
In a sport such as football focuses its main action on explaining how young players receive information from the environment and how they interpret it according to the game situations in which they are immersed in. In other words, cognitivism prioritizes the different cognitive processes through which the individual goes through in order to learn.
Players use a sequence of processes that involve the acquisition, transformation, organization, retention, retrieval and use of information to interpret reality. This representation of reality will be different for each player, as it will depend on their own cognitive schemas.
But, how can the coach stimulate the cognitive processes of the player?
In order to optimally develop the processes, the main role of the coach will be to guide the player in their learning, without conditioning them by giving them the solution to the problems that are presented to them during the game. This is achieved by making the individual think through questions that make them process the information within the game in relation to a specific skill.
The purpose of this process is to promote the player’s reflection of their own actions while playing, in addition to stimulating the mechanisms of perception and decision making, since from its stimulation, we can increase the player’s knowledge regarding the environment and the game.
For e.g. if we are training the content of the specific motor skill of driving with the ball, and the concept of driving into free spaces, a question that the coach could ask if the player is having difficulties could be where is the opponent? Do you have space to drive into? By asking these questions, the coach will be able to stimulate the different mechanisms of the player.
However, there are certain circumstances where the coach should use another learning perspective such as behaviorism, which understands human learning from stimuli and their corresponding responses, i.e. without paying attention to the intermediate cognitive processes of information processing.
However, this type of learning-teaching processes will only be promoted on certain occasions and as a complement to cognitivism. Since most of the use of behaviorism will only be used during the training of the Basic Motor Skills, or in other words, coordinative skills.
In conclusion, the use of cognitivism within the teaching-learning process will favor the improvement of the level of play in players by enhancing the mental processes during the game, developing a significant and permanent learning for the individual.
