Starting distance for archery beginners: Singer 1966

In 1965 a physical education teacher used his own three university archery classes to answer a simple teaching question: is it better to start beginners close to the target or far from it? One class learnt at 10 yards, one at 25 and one at 40, five lessons each, after which all three were moved to the other distances and, at the end of the term, to the Columbia Junior Round.

The starting distance changed nothing. On the common test at 25 yards the three classes scored 99.5, 107.0 and 106.6 points out of 216, with no statistically appreciable differences, and on the Columbia Junior Round 315.3, 292.4 and 315.6 points: those who had started at the hardest distance, with the immediate satisfaction of hitting the target almost never, came out neither better nor worse off. What did weigh heavily was the distance of the moment: moving from 10 to 20 yards the classes lost 58 points on average, and about 20 points at every step after that, even when the step was only 5 yards. The author notes a tendency, not significant, by which the number of lessons already taken matters more than the kind of progression: at the same distance, classes reaching it later in the term shot slightly better.

The three classes were archery service courses at Ohio State University, taught by the same instructor, who is also the author of the study. Seventy-five students enrolled; of the 58 who attended regularly to the end, 20 were in the class that started at 10 yards, 18 in the one at 25 and 20 in the one at 40. Each class met twice a week for ten weeks, forty minutes outdoors, and the three lessons were scheduled on the same two days and in the same slot, between noon and three, so that the weather would not fall on one class alone.

The first five lessons introduced the equipment, the technique and the problems of that class's own distance. In the sixth each class was measured at that distance, and then all of them were moved: the 10 yard class went to 20 and then 25, finally to 30 and 40; the 40 yard class took the reverse route; the control class, starting at 25, visited every distance. Each test was the sum of four ends, 24 arrows, preceded by a practice end, and the maximum at any distance was 216 points. In the ninth week, after thirteen shooting lessons for everyone, came the Columbia Junior Round, four ends each at 20, 30 and 40 yards. Comparisons were made with analysis of variance and t tests between pairs of classes.

The classes were not formed at random: students signed up for a timetable, so differences between groups may come from who was in them. The man teaching was also the man measuring and the man who wrote the article, and while a score on a target face leaves little room for interpretation, teaching does not. About the people themselves we know only that they were university students on an elective course: no sex, no age, no previous experience. Seventeen of the 75 who enrolled dropped out along the way, and the article does not say who they were.

Then there is a step that would not pass today: to run the computing programme, which required groups of equal size, the author was two people short in the class of 18, and he replaced them with two copies of the group average. Two invented data points out of sixty do not move the means, but they shrink the variance and make the comparison easier to clear, and they do so in the group that comes out lowest on the Columbia Round.

Finally, the design confounds two things the study would like to separate: the classes reach the same distance after a different number of lessons, and the author notices this, so much so that he builds his remark about the weight of practice on it. With three classes and no baseline measure, neither of the two ideas can be properly tested.

This is a study sixty years old, on university students and with methods that would be handled differently today, but the question is still the one every beginners' course faces: what distance to start from. Here three different ways of starting led, nine weeks later, to the same place, and the class that began at 40 yards, missing the target almost every time for five lessons, did not fall behind. The immediate satisfaction the author expected to be decisive did not show up in the final scores.

The other figure worth knowing is what distance costs a beginner: between 10 and 20 yards the classes lost 58 points out of 216 on average, and about 20 points at every step after that, even steps of only 5 yards. It is the figure that explains why a beginner's score says little unless you are told the distance it was shot at.

What cannot be drawn from this is advice on progression for archers who are not absolute beginners, nor any firm conclusion about teaching: the largest group counted twenty people, the biggest gap on the Columbia Round was 23 points out of more than 300, and the study did not judge it distinguishable from chance.