Effects of Teaching Methods on Swimming Skill Acquisition in Children With Developmental Coordination Disorder

This study compared the delivery of “verbal and visual” with “verbal, visual, and tactile” swimming instruction to small groups of DCD pupils for front crawl and backstroke performance across 10 lessons × 30 min/week. The interaction and main effects for group and time on front crawl performances were not significant, indicating no differences were found between the two teaching methods. In addition, the front crawl performances of the DCD swimmers did not change over the intervention period. The interaction and main effect for group on backstroke performances over the 10 weekly lessons were not significant. However, a significant main effect of time was found with backstroke changes found between Weeks 1 and 10 and Weeks 6 and 10. Subcomponent analyses for horizontal body position, head position and breathing, and use of the lower limbs revealed significant time effect improvements, but only between Weeks 1 and 10. Hence, both DCD groups improved their backstroke performances at the same rate across the 10 week intervention, despite being exposed to different instructional methods.