ABSTRACT
The aim of this study is to examine the technique problems and performance difficulties that the athletes of Fin swimming experience in their daily training. The basic theoretical framework is based on work in cognitive science (Chi, Feltovich & Glaser, 1981, Carey, 1994) and cognitive developmental psychology (Vosniadou, & Brewer, 1992), which shows that there is considerable conceptual reorganization of prior knowledge required in the process of development or the acquisition of expertise in a domain. The central assumption of this study is that the prior knowledge of the athletes in the swimming style of “butterfly” makes the empirical performance of the new fin swimming style difficult, because of the similarity of two movements. The Fin swimming style starts with the up and down propulsion instead of the down-up movement of butterfly (Pictures 1–2). Twenty-one athletes of Fin swimming participated in the present study. Twelve of these were between 16 and 27 years of age and nine were between 10–15 years of age. The study had two phases: At the first part the athletes of the National Team had to perform some exercises (25m immersion, 50m surface, 100m hands down and legs dolphin style, 1 starting and 1 turn) during their training. At the second part all the athletes of fin swimming had to complete a questionnaire with 30 questions. After the questionnaire five athletes of the National Fin swimming team gave an individual interview. A qualitative analysis of the errors in fin swimming shows that the prior knowledge of butterfly swimming inhibits the acquisition of the correct movement in “fin” swimming. The analysis of the questionnaires showed that the athletes seems to organize the new information about the fin swimming style on the bases of the underlying structure of butterfly knowledge.
