Motor Competence and Difficulty of Self-Set Goals on Motor Learning

Motor competence is associated with the perceived difficulty of a task. This study hypothesized that children with higher motor competence perceive certain tasks as less challenging than their peers with lower motor competence. As a result, children with higher motor competence were expected to set more ambitious goals for themselves while learning a new task compared to children with lower motor competence. To investigate the relationship between motor competence and the difficulty of self-set goals during motor learning, we included 48 children aged between eight and ten years, stratified into terciles; our analysis focused on 32 children from the highest and lowest terciles. The experimental task required participants to throw a 100 g bean bag toward a target located 3 meters away. Children were instructed to set goals before each block of 10 trials during the learning phase. Pretest, retention, and transfer tests were administered without imposed goals. Motor competence was assessed using the Motor Competence Assessment, which integrates scores from the task used to evaluate motor learning and the percentage increase in each block to assess the difficulty of the self-set goals. The findings revealed no significant correlation between motor competence and the difficulty of self-set goals. Nevertheless, higher motor competence was linked to enhanced performance during the acquisition phase, retention and transfer tests. These results suggest that although motor competence is associated with improved motor learning, it does not influence the level of challenge of the goals that children set for themselves.