On Being in the Wrong Place: The Role of Children’s Conceptual Understanding and Ballgame Experience when Judging a Football Player’s Offside Position

Abstract

We investigated the role of children’s conceptual understanding and ballgame experience when judging whether a football player is in an offside position, or not. In the offside position, a player takes advantage of being behind the defence line of the opposing team and just waits for the ball to arrive in order to score a goal. We explained the offside rule to 7- and 9-year-old children with a Subbuteo setup. They produced drawings of an offside position until it was correct (drawing to criterion). Thereafter, children judged whether a designated player was in an offside position in a computerized task. Like adults, also children found it easier to judge when a player was in a wrong rather than a right place. Only when including frequency of ballgame practice in the analysis it was revealed that boys were better independently of age as they judged the offside position more systematically.

Sex Differences as a Statistical Variable

“…One conclusion from these studies is that sex differences in small samples are dependent on the interest of the particular participants in the samples. Girls with little interest in football are not as good as boys in identifying an offside position [52]. Boys who are interested in pen and paper are also good in reading [59].…”

“…However, also spatial memory which is supposed to depend on spatial concepts can be learned by repetition without the necessity of spatial strategies [46] as long as objects and places stay the same in repeated viewings. Moreover, the study on the understanding of the offside rule [52] showed that while the LC-operator was allowing boys to excel in the visual identification task of the wrong place, this did not prevent systematic judgement. In drawings, the LC-operator in combination with the F-operator would allow boys to avoid proliferation of detail so that the transition to viewpoint perspective and visual realism would involve just a small adjustment of contour [30,33].…”

“…Children are only gradually developing an understanding of spatial axes [44,50,51]. Hence, we taught 7-9-year-old children to identify an offside position with a Subbuteo set-up [52]. They drew the spatial positions of the players and the goalie as often until they got it right, see Figure 7.…”

“…We adopted the arrow that points towards a player who may or may not be in an offside position. Children should either touch an offside player on the screen (48 trials), or touch the centre circle if there was no offside position (48 trials) [52].…”

“…Children were drawing the offside position with pin men as often as required until they could create a correct depiction of the offside position. Achieving a correct drawing of the offside position was the criterion to be admitted to the offside rule computer task[52].Sex Differences as a Statistical Variablehttp://dx.doi.org/10.5772/66433…”