86 Chapter 5 Effective and efficient acquisition of knowledge and skills is highly desirable in competitive, globalized sports, such as competitive swimming. Given the restricted number of daily training hours (work-rest ratio), the limited time available to make it to the top (with advancing age) and the ongoing increase of the international performance standards, it is important for aspiring swimmers to gain maximal benefits from training and competition. Engagement in SRL may enable ambitious swimmers to optimize their developmental process. As such, effective SRL may be an indirect but crucial factor for acquiring sport expertise (Zimmerman, 2006; McCardle et al., 2019). The association between SRL and the attainment of sport expertise is supported by several studies that investigated differences in SRL among skill-based groups. For example, Cleary and Zimmerman (2001) found that expert youth basketball players set more specific goals, selected more technique-oriented strategies, were more strategic, and displayed higher levels of self-efficacy than non-experts and novices. Jonker et al. (2010a, 2010b) and Toering et al. (2009) highlighted the importance of reflection skills in relation to performance levels. Both studies found that advanced youth athletes outscored their lower-level peers in the area of reflection. Moreover scores for reflection were higher for athletes who made the transition from junior national to senior international level (Jonker et al., 2012) and distinguished junior international athletes from junior national athletes (Jonker et al., 2010a; Toering et al., 2012). Bartulovic et al. (2017), who studied senior athletes, showed that elite status was most strongly associated with engagement in overall SRL and self-monitoring. In sum, these studies unanimously suggest that expert athletes engage more frequently and in more sophisticated SRL subprocesses than less proficient or novice athletes. However, it is noteworthy that the SRL concept has been studied and measured in various ways within the SRL literature (see review McCardle et al., 2019). For example, Cleary and Zimmerman (2000) assessed meta-cognitive processes of SRL using a microanalytic approach (an examiner asked a set of questions during practice and participants responded orally). Their questions about SRL, which solely related to free throws in basketball (domain-specific), were focused on one task of short duration (microscopic-level) within a training session and were about specific instances (event) with a temporally defined beginning and end. By contrast, Toering et al. (2009, 2012a) and Jonker et al. (2010a, 2010b,2012) measured six SRL subprocesses (planning, monitoring, evaluation, reflection, self-efficacy and effort) using the Self-Regulation of Learning Self-Report Scale (SRLSRS) questionnaire (Toering et al., 2012b) which also included motivational aspects of SRL. In these studies, questions about SRL were related to the overall learning context (domain-general) and focused on broader, longer-term regulation across multiple learning sessions (macroscopic-level). Moreover, they assessed the frequency of engagement in SRL subprocesses as a relative enduring, aptitude-based characteristic. Inspired by this line of research, Toering et al. (2013) and Bartulovic et al. (2017) developed sport-specific SRL questionnaires, initializing the recent trend in SRL research in which SRL is proposed to be
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