The Effect of Short-term and Long-term Goals on Acquisition and Retention of Basketball Shooting

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of short term and long term goal setting on acquisition and retention of basketball shooting. 60 male student players aged 15 to 19 years in Gonbad with 1 to 2 years club background in basketball style selected by a questionnaire and assigned- accessible sampling technique and homogenous Manner- based on baseline score to one of Three goal setting conditions: (a) short- term goals (b) long- term goals (c) control. After baseline period، subjects were tested once a day on the 50 shoots over the course of the 4- day experimental period، Then 72 hours later performed the task. Statistical analysis was performed descriptive statistics (deviation standard، mean) and using Independent T- Test، Repeated Measure Analysis of Variance by SPSS: 13/5 to test the performance of the groups in acquisition and retention tasks. Results indicated that the long-term and short- term goals had significant effect on the acquisition and retention of basketball shooting (p<0/05) and the long-term group exhibited the greatest increase in performance although short term group displayed significant improvements.