Assessment of secondary school students' decision-making and game-play ability in soccer

TLDR

The study assessed secondary school students’ decision‑making and game‑play ability and examined the relationship between standardized video‑based game understanding and actual skill execution. Twelve 14‑15‑year‑old students completed a video‑based game‑understanding test and played three 3‑vs‑3 modified soccer games for ten minutes, with all matches video‑recorded and coded for decision‑making and skill execution. Students displayed a basic grasp of offensive and defensive situations, and their game‑understanding scores correlated with their game‑play ability.

Abstract

The purposes of this study were to assess secondary school students' decision-making and game-play ability and to investigate how game understanding, assessed by a standardized video-based test, corresponds to students' decision-making and skill execution ability in actual game play. Students (12, aged 14–15 years) participated in a video-based game understanding test and played three different types of three vs three modified soccer games for ten minutes. All matches were video recorded and analysed using a coding instrument developed for examining the components of game play decision-making and skill execution. The results revealed that the students already had a basic conception of both offensive and defensive game situations. Furthermore, the students' game understanding and game-play ability were found to be related.