effect of transitional practice schedule on contextual interference in badminton skills learning (long service, forehand toss and backhand toss)

contextual interference is defined as interference in performance and learning that arise from practicing one task in the context of other tasks. transitional practice is a kind of practice sequence that starts out with trials of large blocks; then moves to smaller random blocks, and eventually finishes with complete randomization. the aim of this study was to investigate the effect of ‘transitional practice schedule’ on contextual interference in learning three badminton skills. the research was quasi-experimental with three experimental groups. the subjects were 30 female students of physical education (age: 19±1.3) from urmia university who voluntarily participated in the study. they practiced three badminton skills (long service, forehand toss and backhand toss strokes) for ten sessions. in each session, each subject practiced 15 trials for each skill and totally 45 trials. the blocked group practiced in a blocked format. the random group practiced all three skills randomly in a way that no two similar skills would be repeated one after the other in each sequence. the transitional practice group practiced the first three sessions in a blocked format, the next three sessions with five random trials, the next three sessions with three random trials and the last session in an entirely random format. the groups' performances were recorded in each session. after the ten sessions, the immediate retention test and after 48 hours with no practice, the delayed retention test was conducted. the data were analyzed by one-way analysis of variance with repeated measures (anova). the results showed that in the acquisition stage, group differences were not significant (p=0.48), but the mutual reaction (practice sessions x groups) was significant (p=0.001). in immediate retention test, only the difference between the block and random groups was significant (p=0.005) and the blocked group performed better than the random group. in delayed retention test, both random and transitional groups performed significantly better than the block group (p=0.001). transitional group performed better than the random group and this difference was significant (p=0.043).