Accomplishment of Institutional Goals
New Technology Can Help
Parks and Recreation centers can utilize TheShootingstreak® Personal Trainer (PT) to broaden their appeal to the public. An additional piece of sporting equipment for those parks with basketball courts can be the center of attention and can keep adolescents and youth occupied at constructive play activity.
This would be in keeping with the philosophy of getting the kids off the streets and into the parks and centers where sports activities can satisfy their need for involvement in group activity. Much of the camaraderie, competition, and cooperation youth are seeking can be found as an essential part of recreational sporting activity. TheShootingstreak® PT can assist those in authority who are seeking to deliver practical means, such as with this new piece of self-improvement training equipment, that can help implement in a visible way much talked about youth development programs.
Programs for youth, such as that provided by Hawai'i Education authorities to school resistant teenagers (See: Chapter 7, by Wares and MacDonald, in W. S. MacDonald and G. Tanabe's Focus on Classroom Behavior (1973), have shown that pro-social behavior change can occur for these youth, in the context of a behavior modification reward program, when they are offered an incentive for accuracy as part of an operant learning methodology (Wares, M.A. Thesis, Dept. of Psychology, University of Hawai'i (1970)). Where secondary reinforcement is contingent upon accuracy of performance, such youth (except for extreme cases) will respond positively both with increased accuracy behavior as well as other pro-social behavior change, such as decreased “Acting-Bad” behavior (e.g., not throwing rocks at the windows of junk cars left on quasi-school-park property).
The mediating factor that could have accounted for the mechanism of change was, likely, the factor of self-esteem. It was observed that youth showed increased regard for others (e.g., decreased “Squawks”; that is, negotiations with instructors) and increased self-confidence as reflected by improvement in academic performance. This is consistent with the notion that the latter can respond to changes in non-academic behavior along the lines of cognitive congruency theory, whereby educational improvements occur as a result of the breaking of a perceptual set (e.g., if I can improve at this then maybe, after all, I can improve at that).
Similarly, TheShootingstreak® PT also rewards accuracy and with increased self-regard as the mediating mechanism. This mediating learning mechanism, in conjunction with the operant feedback and reward mechanism of the apparatus, drives the processes of focused attention, concentrated effort, and basic repetition, all key elements in learning.
“Accuracy” is the watchword of the game of basketball. Accuracy passing, dribbling, rebounding, screening, defensive positioning, shot blocking, and of course, what is the focus of TheShootingstreak® PT — offensive shooting. Basketball coaches who like to emphasize the element of accuracy (also sometimes referred to as the game’s element of “finesse”) may appreciate the contribution made to the game as a whole by training equipment that stresses this key concept; rather than stressing the players themselves by virtue of emphasizing the “physicality” of their game.
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