the effects of instructional and motivational self-talk on learning a dart throwing skill in children with mild mental retardation

Background: the aim of this study was to investigate the effects of instructional and motivational self-talk on learning a dart throwing skill in children with mild mental retardation. method: the subjects included 45 children with mild mental retardation who were equally divided into three groups of instructional self-talk, motivational self-talk, and control. the motor task included darts throwing skill in which children’s darts throwing scores as well as self-efficacy were measured as dependent variables. the participants performed pre-test (including 15 throws), acquisition phase (including five 5-minute practice blocks), and retention test (including 15 throws). the participants in the instructional self-talk group were asked to repeat the “center-target” phase before each attempt during the training phase and then throw the dart. those in the motivational self-talk group were asked to use a motivational phrase “i can before the throw. the children in the control group followed a similar protocol but were not given any self-talk instructions. results: the results showed that mentally retarded children who practiced instructional self-talk had better performance than those who used motivational self-talk and the control group in throwing darts in the retention test (p=0.000). moreover, the motivational self-talk group performed better than the control group in dart throwing in the retention test (p=0.000). finally, the results showed that children in the instructional and motivational self-talk groups reported higher self-efficacy scores than those in the control group in the retention test (p=0.000), while no significant difference was observed between the instructional and motivational self-talk groups. (p=0.527) conclusion: the results of this study show that children with mild mental retardation are able to learn motor skills through self-talk.