Decision-making frameworks and the age of eleven

Three studies reshape how a sport test should treat speed, age and response format. Janssen, Müller and Mann (2023), writing for the Dutch football federation, describe decision-making as a cyclical process in which skilled players often delay to create options. Heisler, Lobinger and Musculus (2023) find that young elite players prioritise decision quality over speed and that a developmental threshold sits near age 11. Travassos et al. (2013) show that the more a test’s response resembles the real action, the more clearly it separates experts from novices. Insporta records response time as one dimension, never as the score, for exactly these reasons.

Janssen, Müller and Mann 2023: the KNVB framework

This position paper comes from the Royal Dutch Football Association (KNVB) and the University of Amsterdam, from researchers who advise European clubs. It introduces several ideas that bear directly on how questions about play should be designed.

Decision-making is cyclical. A player does not choose once. They make an anticipatory judgment, receive new information, update, and judge again. A test that models a single choice captures one turn of the cycle. Item types that present a sequence, or ask what happens next, capture more of it.

The window of opportunity. Skilled decision-makers often postpone the decision to buy time and create new options, rather than taking the first available one. This is the counter-intuitive part: the fastest answer is not necessarily the best one, and a scoring scheme that rewards speed alone can reward the wrong thing.

Decision-making versus anticipation. Decision-making requires a series of anticipatory judgments. Anticipation, predicting what an opponent or teammate will do next, is a distinct cognitive function from recalling a rule or a tactic. A knowledge test that wants to reach toward it needs a distinct item type.

Representativeness through perception-action coupling. The closer a test’s stimulus and required response are to the real game situation, the higher its validity. Text is less representative than video; choosing from a list is less representative than choosing a zone on a pitch.

Heisler, Lobinger and Musculus 2023: quality over speed, and the age of eleven

Researchers at the German Sport University Cologne studied 128 young footballers with a mean age of 10.69 years, measuring decision-making and executive functions together. Two findings matter for any youth assessment.

Quality over speed. The study used a “Take The First” paradigm with four metrics: time to the first option, number of options generated, quality of the first option, and quality of the final decision. Of the four, only the quality of the final decision differed between age groups. Pure speed, on this evidence, is not a marker of expertise in children. A score that combines accuracy with time is defensible; a ranking by speed alone is not.

A threshold near 11 years. Before about 11, decision-making and executive functions develop non-linearly, so a test result from a nine-year-old is a snapshot of a moving target. After 11 they become stable enough to act as predictors. For a test used with young players this implies that age cohorts matter more than a difficulty scale alone: the same question means different things at 10 and at 13.

Both findings come from a single cross-sectional study, and the age threshold in particular should be read as a finding to be replicated rather than a settled fact.

Travassos et al. 2013: the response matters as much as the stimulus

This meta-analysis pooled 111 effect sizes from 882 participants and asked a simple question: does the size of the expertise effect depend on how the participant responds? It does, and in a consistent order.

Response format	Expertise effect
Verbal report	Smallest
Button press	Larger
Micro-movement	Larger still
In-situ action	Largest

The more representative the response, the greater the difference between levels. This complements the KNVB framework: representativeness is a property of the whole task, stimulus and response together.

For a knowledge test the implication is clear and a little uncomfortable. Choosing one of four options is the most generic response format there is. Ranking options by dragging them into order is a step toward specificity. Tapping a zone on a pitch or a player in a video frame is a further step. Each step toward a sport-specific response should raise validity, and each step is more expensive to build and to score. Insporta’s current format, four options and one key, sits at the generic end of this scale, and that is stated plainly rather than hidden.

What Insporta takes from these three studies

• Response time is recorded as one dimension among several, and never used as the score on its own, following Heisler (2023) and the window-of-opportunity argument in Janssen et al. (2023). The methodology keeps stems and options within length corridors so that time reflects thinking, not reading.
• Age matters more than a difficulty number for young players. Segmenting content by age cohort, with about 11 as a boundary, is a design direction the evidence supports.
• Anticipation-style items (“what happens next”) would measure something different from recall and applied knowledge, and are a natural extension of the item bank.
• Response formats more representative than four options, such as ranking, are worth the cost, per Travassos (2013).

How these directions fit together is set out in how Insporta applies the research.