Coaches' verbal feedback and elementary school football players' motivation

Abstract

The main purpose of the present study was to examine the relation between elementary school football (soccer) players' motivation and the children's causal and emotional cognition of their coach's verbal feedback. A special purpose was to clarify the effectiveness of the coach's feedback for improving the skill of the best players. Skilled football players (grades 5-6, N = 267 boys from 14 teams) were given scenarios in which positive or negative verbal feedback was given by a coach after a player's success or failure in passing. In each situation, the participants assessed the cause of the coach's feedback, the emotion, and the player's motivation. ANOVA of these results showed that motivation was increased more by positive feedback than by negative. Moreover, path analyses revealed that attribution of the feedback to the coach's instructional intention enhanced positive emotions, and that the positive emotions were positively associated with the player's motivation. However, motivation that increased following positive feedback after failure was not associated with attribution of the feedback to the coach's instructional intention.