The purpose of the present review was to provide a theoretical understanding of the learning advantages underlying a self-controlled practice context through the tenets of the self-determination theory (SDT). Three micro-theories within the macro-theory of SDT (Basic psychological needs theory, Cognitive Evaluation Theory, and Organismic Integration Theory) are used as a framework for examining the current self-controlled motor learning literature. A review of 26 peer-reviewed, empirical studies from the motor learning and medical training literature revealed an important limitation of the self-controlled research in motor learning: that the effects of motivation have been assumed rather than quantified. The SDT offers a basis from which to include measurements of motivation into explanations of changes in behavior. This review suggests that a self-controlled practice context can facilitate such factors as feelings of autonomy and competence of the learner, thereby supporting the psychological needs of the learner, leading to long term changes to behavior. Possible tools for the measurement of motivation and regulation in future studies are discussed. The SDT not only allows for a theoretical reinterpretation of the extant motor learning research supporting self-control as a learning variable, but also can help to better understand and measure the changes occurring between the practice environment and the observed behavioral outcomes.

The present experiment examined the learning effects of participants self-controlling their receipt of knowledge of results (KR) on all or half of their acquisition trials (50%). For participants who were provided 50% self-control, the first half of their acquisition period consisted of receiving KR on all trials, or according to a faded-KR schedule. Participants practiced a sequential timing task. The results showed that independent of practice condition, participants who self-controlled their KR during the acquisition period demonstrated superior performance compared to the respective yoked conditions in the retention and transfer portion of the experiment. These results extend previous research by suggesting that decreasing the proportion of self-control trials does not compromise learning in a self-controlled context.

Easy-to-difficult and difficult-to-easy progressions of task difficulty during skill acquisition were examined in 2 experiments that assessed retention, dual-task, and transfer tests of learning. Findings of the first experiment suggest that an easy-to difficult progression did not consistently induce implicit learning processes and was not consistently beneficial to performance under a secondary-task load. The findings of experiment two did not support the predictions made based on schema theory and only partially supported predictions based on reinvestment theory. The authors interpret these findings to suggest that the timing of error in relation to the difficulty of the task (functional task difficulty) plays a role in the transfer of learning to novel versions of a task.

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