Effect of a Tactical Critical Thinking Intervention on Technical-tactical Decision-making in University Volleyball: A Quasi-experimental Study

This interventional study evaluates the effect of a Tactical Critical Thinking Program (PTPC, by its Spanish acronym) on technical-tactical decision-making in university volleyball. The study uses a quasi-experimental, non-randomized, parallel-group design with intentional allocation. One group receives regular volleyball training enriched with the PTPC, and a comparison group continues with usual practice routines without structured reflective spaces.

The setting is a university men's volleyball programme in Cartagena, Colombia. Eligible participants are adult male players who belong to the university team, have regular training experience, are medically cleared for full participation and can attend the planned training and assessment sessions. Exclusion criteria include any current injury or medical restriction for sport participation and an inability to comply with the intervention schedule.

The PTPC integrates critical thinking and collaborative reflection into representative volleyball practice. Across approximately 12 sessions, embedded within normal team training, each session follows a stable pedagogical sequence. An initial brief activation phase clarifies the tactical focus of the day (for example, organisation of reception, serve-receive-attack connections or spike decision-making) and invites players to identify recurrent problems and shared objectives. The central phase consists of game-based drills and small-sided games that manipulate numerical relations, court spaces and rules to expose players to tactically demanding situations involving serve, reception, spike and defensive actions. Within this central phase, the coach introduces short, preplanned pauses in which players analyse recent sequences and discuss what is working, what is limiting performance, which technical resources they use or lack, and which tactical or positional adjustments they propose. A final phase of more open play under full rules emphasises the application and refinement of the agreed tactical adjustments and promotes metacognitive reflection on why certain options are chosen and how they relate to collective strategy.

The comparison group follows the usual training programme designed by the coaching staff. This programme includes warm-up, physical preparation, technical drills and team game play, but it does not include the protocolised reflective pauses or the guided questioning structure that characterises the PTPC. Training volume, frequency and general intensity remain as comparable as possible between groups so that the main planned difference is the presence or absence of the structured critical-thinking component.

Outcomes focus on technical-tactical performance in serve, reception and spike. Technical execution is assessed through a standardised battery of volleyball skill tests that quantify accuracy and consistency for each action using target zones and scoring criteria based on established methodological references. Tactical decision-making is assessed during standardised small-sided games (for example, 4 vs 4) on a regulation court under official rules. Games are video recorded, and trained observers code each serve, reception and spike as tactically appropriate or inappropriate according to predefined criteria (such as serving to vulnerable zones, directing reception to an optimal setting area, or attacking into uncovered spaces). For each player and each skill, a decision-making index represents the proportion of appropriate actions out of the total number of observed actions.