ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Cognit.
Sec. Learning and Cognitive Development
Assessing the Stability of Tactical Learning in Youth Footballers: The Contribution of a Metacognitive Double-Pass Method
Provisionally accepted
- Universite Polytechnique Hauts-de-France, Valenciennes, France
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The stability of tactical learning in youth football remains insfficiently explored. This study examined players' explicit recognition of taught tactical content and the short-term stability of these judgements using a metacognitive double-pass (DP) method. A total of 225 youth footballers (U-13, U-15, U-18; n=75 per group) completed both a single-pass (SP) and a delayed double-pass DP assessment across 40 standardised animated tactical scenarios. Results revealed a clear decline from SP to DP, suggesting overestimation in immediate (SP) judgements. Although stability improved with age, it did not approach high declarative integration, even in U-18s. These findings support the use of DP method as a conservative indicator of declarative accessibility and underline the importance of instruction that fosters guided verbalisation, reflective practice, and metacognitive monitoring. The double-pass approch thus appears to be a valuable tool for refining formative assessment in sport contexts.
Keywords: declarative recognition, development, Double pass, Football, metacognition, tactical stability
Received: 16 Jul 2025; Accepted: 30 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Acoumambo, ZOUDJI and Belhouchet. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Bachir ZOUDJI
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