By George Fell
On coach education courses we are commonly taught that “demonstrations should be silent”. I completed a systematic review of existing research and discovered that it is not a very well researched field. What research I could find (10 papers of which 6 relate to body movement, none of which are paddling related) suggests that demonstrations accompanied by additional information (e.g. narration, or uses of noises to mark particular points in the demonstration) often produce better performances than silent demonstrations. Results are combined quantitatively to give an overall effect size (d=-0.54) for silent demonstrations and discussed qualitatively to come up with some tentative guidelines for when demonstrations should (and shouldn’t) be silent.