Comparing the Effects of Acoustical Feedback and Praise within the TAGteach® Framework to Teach Off-Ice Figure Skating Skills to Children

Abstract

Figure skating demands increasingly complex technical skills, which has contributed to rising injury rates among these skaters (Porter, 2013; Kowalczyky et al., 2019). To enhance performance and reduce injury risk, skaters often engage in off-ice training. Research has shown that off-ice training can reduce training time (Anca & Carmen, 2014) and lower injury risk (Liptez & Kurse, 2000; Reilly et al., 1990, p. 292). Only one known study has assessed whether off-ice training improves on-ice performance, and they reported overall positive effects on on-ice performance (Anca & Carmen, 2014). TAGteach is a multicomponent package that uses an auditory stimulus to provide immediate feedback following correct skill performance (Quinn et al., 2017), but its effects have not been evaluated in figure skating. Both auditory feedback and verbal praise have been used to increase performance in sport-specific skills, but only auditory feedback has been used within TAGteach, based on the proposed rationale that it provides more immediate (Fogel et al., 2010), precise (LaMaraca et al., 2018), and consistent (Arnall et al., 2021) feedback than verbal praise. However, to date, no known studies have compared these feedback forms within TAGteach. This study used an adapted alternating treatments design to compare the effects of auditory feedback and verbal praise within TAGteach on the performance of off-ice figure skating jumps. All three participants mastered all jumps, and improvements maintained at 2- and 4-week follow up. We observed increased on-ice performance for the two participants for whom we assessed generalization to on-ice performance.