Aikido’s choku tsuki motor skill: validation checklist

Abstract

Assessment is an essential procedure for any professional intervention, including in physical education and sports contexts. It concerns a process of collecting information that allows accessing the state of practitioners in relation to desired teaching-learning or training behaviors. Recently, the focus on assessment instruments has been extended to the martial arts contexts, whose studies have shown that the assessment instruments have been recognized by experts of different martial arts not only in relation to access of specific performances, but also as a means of promoting the practitioner's knowledge and motivation. The present study sought to develop and validate a checklist for an aikido’s motor skill: the choku tsuki. For content validation, the evaluators were 17 aikido experts, with at least 7 years of experience, all black belts (n = 6 (6^th dan); n = 2 (5^th dan); n = 3 (3^rd dan); n = 5 (2^nd dan); n = 2 (1^st dan)). And, for the reliability test, there were four participants (n = 1 (5^th dan); n = 2 (2^nd dan); n = 1 (1^st dan)). Ten adolescents, all inexperienced in the practice of jo, male (n = 7) and female (n = 3), whose ages ranged from 14 to 16 years old also participated as performers. At least 70% of the aikido experts evaluated the items as clear, adequate and technically viable for application in research contexts. The intra and inter-rater correlation indexes reached at least 0.90. It can be concluded that the choku tsuki assessment instrument is reliable, since it reached significant values ​​in the reliability and objectivity indices.