Influence Of Location And Gender On Performance Of Selected Motor Skills Among Secondary School Student
[AWKA SOUTH LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA, ANAMBRA STATE]

sports and physical activity to negative attitudes of athletes. Furthermore, the traditional Nigerian society forbade women from engaging in vigorous physical activities or sports for fear of making women masculine and having a serious effect on their reproductive ability (Anyanwu, 1980).
Learning of motor skills could be affected by ones emotion. Oberteuffer and Ulrich (1970) viewed emotions as representing a wide range of states in the human organisms, such as joy, happiness, anxiety, fear, stress and sorrow. According to them, the athlete may be anxious before the event, he may fear the competition, dread the consequences or react poorly in front of spectators. These emotions may be considered to have a negative effect. In certain situations emotional state may have positive effect for example, the optimal degree of stress and motivation for the individual participant would promote better motor performance. Supporting the above view, Layman (1970) opined that emotions are a part of any activity, whether caused by environment, the activity itself or the mind of performer, may have an organizing or disorganizing effect on motor performance. It is usual for a person to be emotionally involved to some extent in any activity which he performs.
Motor skill performance will not be complete if emphasis is not made on the sense organs. Singer (1975) remarked that in motor skill performance, the senses are often taken for granted. The sense organs have the ability to detect minor changes in stimuli in motor acts, but those senses such as taste and smell are not involved. He further stated that sense activity is important prior to, during and following a motor act. Kinesthetic, visual and verbal cues provide important knowledge to the learner about his performance. In order for information about motor act to be accurately processed, the input devices that is, the sense organs and receptors must be in good functioning order. Poor depth perception or peripheral vision and inferior audition activity will provide error filled information and the result would be poor motor skill performance.
In our everyday life, a wide range of motor, perceptual and cognitive abilities are gradually and implicitly learnt through our continuous interaction with the environment. Converging data indicate that skill learning is a multiple step process that cannot be reduced to the learning episode only. In the initial step, while the subject is practising that task, the performance asymptotically improves with continued practice. This corresponds to a process coined as fast learning by Karni (1994), Karni & Sagi (1993) and Karni, (1995). Consequently, when tested at a later date, up to several days to weeks later, the performance of the task is markedly improved even without any intervening training sessions. This so-called slow component of learning has been observed in humans for both perceptual and motor skill learning (Karni & Sagi 1993, Karni 1995) and to depend critically on sleep rather than simply on time or initial practice (Maquest & Peigneux 2001). In the domain of motor skill learning, the finger tapping task or its variant the finger opposition task, has been a useful model to characterize the fast and slow components of the learning process as well as the respective effects of time, practice and sleep on the later. In this task, the subjects are asked to finger movements with the non- dominant hand as fast and as accurately as possible. The performance measure consists of the number of correctly repeated sequences in a given time (usually 30 seconds) whereas a moderate, albeit significant increase in performance is reported during the training session and between training episode on the same day, a much larger gain in performance is systematically observed overnight (Walker & Fischer 2002). This suggests that sleep is a major factor underling the overnight gain in performance. According to Fischer (2002) it shows that slow learning is significantly enhanced when participants are allowed to sleep between the training and the retest. The large improvement in performance is observed both after night time and day time sleep ruling out a potential circadian influence on slow learning.
Supporting the above view, Walker (2003) added that motor skill performance depend on the relationship between the fast (within session) and slow (between session) overnight components of learning. This implied that fast and slow-learning phases rely on independent cellular mechanisms. Further, they observe a nearly identical overnight improvement, irrespective of the amount of practice prior to sleep. Although subjects who extensively trained, reached a higher level of performance during practice than subjects with a limited amount of practice. The over- night gain was nearly identical. This suggests that sleep- dependent slow learning is independent of the evolution of the fast component during prior practice. Still, this does not diminish the importance of the fast component of learning in order to initiate sleep-dependent slow learning suggested by Hauptmann and Karni (2002) in the case of a primary task. Accordingly at the systems level, it is known that there is shift of activation from the cerebella cortex to the dentate nucleus during early learning of a motor sequence, and from a cerebedlla-cortical to a striatal-cortical network with intended practice on the same day. Doyon and Karni (2002) followed further by emphasizing on the experience dependent reactivation of the cortico-striatal network during rapid eye movement sleep. Maguet & Peigneux 2001) collectively suggest that there is an early reorganization of the cortical network subtending motor-sequence learning across repeated practice during training and then its consolidation and optimization through off-line practice during the subsequent night.
Nevertheless, the cellular mechanisms underlying the fast and slow components in skill learning are still unknown in humans but intrinsic horizontal connections are strong candidate substrate for motor cortex remapping after skill performance. The studies by Sanes and Donoghue (2000), on primary motor cortex in rats demonstrate that motor skill performance is first accompanied by increased efficiency in interacotical horizontal connections. Rioult-Pedotti (1998), added that this increased efficiency is most probably through the activation of   long-term   potentiation   LTP. Rioult-Pedotti (2000) consequently, summarized that these might under pain the fast-learning phase.
The slow-learning phase probably requires gene transcription and protein synthesis (Abel and Lattal, 2001 & Graves, 2002). Evidence for gene transcription during post training sleep is available for hippocampus-dependent memory in rats (Ribeiro 1999). This discussion therefore concludes that learning of motor skills is one of the fundamental aspects of physical education activity but a number of factors should be considered before effective learning of motor skills.
Gender and Motor Skill Performance
Gender refers to those characteristics and roles which society has assigned, ascribed or imposed on the two sexes men and women. These roles and responsibilities have been so segregated and drawn out that women are not expected to function in the domain that has been mapped out for men and vice versa. Under this gender role assignment, traits such