90 Chapter 5 things to reach my practice goal.” Planning: “Before each practice session, I plan my actions relative to the goal I want to attain during the practice session.” Reflection: “During each practice session, I try to identify my strengths and think about ways to improve these even more.” Speaking up: “If the coach changes an exercise and I don’t understand the change, I ask the coach to explain.” The football-specific self-regulated learning questionnaire was developed as a self-report instrument to measure SRL used in daily football practice. Small adjustments were made to use the questionnaire in competitive swimming. Football-related terms (i.e. “football player” and “football skills) were replaced with swimming-related terms (“i.e. “swimmer” and “swimming skills”). Two planning items were removed because they did not apply to competitive swimming (e.g., “After each practice session, I stay to work on specific skills.”) For the same reason, coaching-related items in the football-specific SRL questionnaire were not included in the present study. Items on processes of self-efficacy (10 items) and effort (9 items) were included to measure the motivational aspect of self-regulation. The instrument for measuring motivational SRL processes was derived from the SRL-SRS questionnaire developed by Toering et al. (2012) and responses were scored using a 4-point Likert scale (1 = almost never, 2 = sometimes, 3 = often, 4 = almost always). Examples of items are as follows. Effort: “I put forth my best effort when performing tasks.” Self-efficacy: “I am confident that I can deal efficiently with unexpected events.” Following Toering et al. (2013) we assigned five of the six SRL subprocesses to one of the three sequential phases of daily practice: before practice, during practice, or after practice. Planning aspects pertained to the time before training; aspects relating to speaking up, reflection and effort pertained to the time during training; and evaluation aspects pertained to the time after training. Self-efficacy was not confined to a particular training phase. Appendix A lists all SRL items in our questionnaire. Cronbach’s α coefficients were calculated to determine the internal consistency of the measurements of the six SRL subprocesses. Measurements of all SRL subprocesses met the criterion value of α >0.70 (α between 0.75 – 0.89; Nunnally, 1978). The inter-scale correlations were calculated with Spearman correlations and did not exceed a value of 0.80 (rs between 0.21- 0.75; see Appendix B; Carron et al., 1985). Performance measures We collected longitudinal data on individual swimmers’ performances for multiple swim events, which necessitated the use of a method for comparing swim performances between swim events to define the best swim performance of the 2018/2019 swim season. The method that we used was introduced by Stoter et al. (2019) in the context of speed skating and has also been applied in competitive swimming (Post et al., 2020a, 2020b).
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