User:Treyj96/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Sport psychology

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because it relates to the field of psychology in general, but also overlaps with one of my interests: sports. Additionally, this is a topic that I have not had a chance to explore in school, and wished to learn about it more thoroughly via the article.

My first impression of the article was that it seemed to be relatively short overall, but also had a lot of variance in the length of all the individual sections, so there may be some topics that need to be expanded on or deleted altogether.

Evaluate the article
Lead Section

The lead section for the article does a good job of summarizing many different aspects of Sport Psychology including other sciences the discipline was derived from, how it is practiced, and its overall importance. This section is also concise while not lacking information, however, it is questionable that biomechanics is relevant to the discipline, as it is not brought up again in the article, and the article does not make it clear how this topic is related to sport psychology despite it being mentioned in the lead section.

Content

The article does have some glaring issues with the content. Specifically, the section about the Present status of sport psychology needs to be updated. This section, and therefore the entire article (as this is the only place it is addressed), is unclear on the scope of practice and the training required to consider oneself a "sport psychologist", but this could be due to the lack of standardization within sport psychology itself. The article may still benefit from clearing up the current state of the practice and whether sport psychology is a discipline of its own, or a specialization that a practitioner of another discipline, such as clinical and/or counseling psychology, can concentrate on.

Moving on, the section regarding common areas of study does a good job of summarizing psychological principles and theories that may apply to sports, but often does not explicitly state how these principles relate to sports or sport psychology in general, and these connections may not be obvious to a reader who does not have an extensive background in psychology. Moreover, the subsection entitled Team processes, could be heavily expanded upon as teams are a large part of many sports and much psychological research exploring team dynamics has been conducted; surely, there is some overlap.

Conversely, the Commonly used techniques section does a good job of showing how psychological principles are put into action in sport psychology. Nevertheless, some of these topics could be further explored.

Wrapping up the review of the content, the sections on Sport-specific differences and Exercise psychology seem to be somewhat out of place and be better off being intertwined with the existing material.

Tone

In terms of tone, this article does an excellent job of portraying information in an unbiased way, especially in the section that mentions the conflict between sport psychologists within the Association for Applied Sport Psychology (AASP). With that said, the overall writing and grammar within the article could be improved upon but is passable.

Sourcing

Regarding sources, there could be some issues with sources used in the article, particularly in the Early history part of the History of sport psychology section. Two of these sources are self-published and the veracity of their claims would benefit from being backed-up by a stronger source. Additionally, the entire section about the present status of the practice lacks citations entirely. Conversely, other sections of the article are well cited, such as the Personality subsection.

Overall Impressions

Overall, the article does a good job of explaining Sport psychology but not a great one. In terms of strength, the sections on the uses of psychological theory and applications have strong citations from journals and interesting information. However, there are some important issues with content and citations that need to be addressed to strengthen the credibility and scope of the article, and some minor finishing touches that could help it. One such touch would be imagery, as the page includes no imagery at all and could benefit from some images or other media to help reinforce some of the information. For example, many studies are referenced, and an image of what those studies may have looked like could add some context to what the researchers were really doing assuming those images exist. Sadly, the reason for some of the issues with the article become apparent when looking at the talk page; it looks like there were some people dedicated to improving the article, but progress has not been made in quite a while. Ultimately, the Sport psychology page has a strong base, but needs to be updated and expanded upon.