Tactical knowledge as a product of the combination of different teaching methods employed in inversesequences in volleyball

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the differences between traditional and situational teaching methods on the acquisition of procedural and declarative tactical knowledge in volleyball sessions of training, and to verify the influence of the order of employment of these methods on tactical knowledge. The sample was composed by 36 students (male/aged 12-14 years), 22 of them were school volleyball players and the other 14 were not volleyball players (control group). One group has started the teaching-learning-training process by using situational method (GST), while in the other group it was used traditional method (GTS). After 15 training sessions, there was an inversion, with the first group using the situational method and the traditional method being applied in the second group during additional 15 training sessions. Training session's categorization (STEFANELLO, 1999) was conducted in order to confirm the employment of the teaching method. To assess the procedural knowledge was used KORA test (MEMMERT, 2002) on the tactical parameter recognize spaces. For the measurement of declarative tactical knowledge it was utilized the Tactical Knowledge Test of Network Attack Situations (PAULA, 2000). Pre-test scores appointed the three groups to be in similar levels of declarative tactical knowledge, convergent procedural tactical knowledge (tactical intelligence) and divergent procedural tactical knowledge (tactical creativity). On the GST, by applying the situational method (referring to 15 initial sections), there was no significant difference on the tactical declarative knowledge, but there was on the procedure convergent and divergent. On the GTS, by using the traditional method none of the tactical knowledge developed. When making the inversion of learning method on the GST (30 sections on the sequence situational traditional) it was detected a significant improvement of both tactical procedure knowledge. However, this did not occur on the GTS on the traditional-situational sequence. These results suggest that training sequence referring to GST provided significant improvement on the players' tactical intelligence and creativity.