Does Insporta measure intelligence or reaction speed?

No. Insporta measures knowledge of a specific sport. It makes no claim about general intelligence, working memory, attention or reaction speed, and questions about those are treated as defects.

Why are there no questions about training loads or strength programmes?

Because they are facts about the athlete's body, not about the sport, and they read the same for any sport. A question about recommended barbell weights is outside what Insporta measures.

What is the difference between declarative and procedural knowledge?

Declarative knowledge is knowing what: the rules, the terms, the history. Procedural knowledge is knowing how and when: what to do in a situation. Insporta tests both, as recall and applied questions.

Can a sports-science question ever be in scope?

Yes, when the answer is a fact about the sport rather than about the person. How a triathlon is paced is in scope; how much a given athlete should lift is not.

What a question may measure

An Insporta question tests sport-specific knowledge: rules, tactics, craft, history and context. General cognition, reaction speed and training loads are out.

An Insporta question measures sport-specific knowledge and nothing else: the rules of the sport, its tactics, the craft of playing it, the patterns opponents use, and its history and context. It does not measure general intelligence, executive functions, reaction speed or anything about the athlete’s body. A question about any of those is a defect however well it is written, because it changes what the score means.

The construct, in two halves

Knowledge of a sport comes in two kinds, and Insporta tests both.

Declarative knowledge is knowing what: that a goalkeeper may hold the ball for eight seconds, that a futsal team’s sixth accumulated foul is punished with a free kick and no wall, that the first Test match was played in 1877. These are recall questions.

Procedural knowledge is knowing how and when: given this situation, what is the right action, or what does the Law say happens next. These are applied questions. A defender’s careless challenge inside their own penalty area while the ball is in play: what is the restart? A nauseated athlete late in a hot long-course race: what should they do with their water bottle?

The meta-analysis by Kalén and colleagues (2021) found that domain-specific measures like these separate playing levels far better than domain-general ones, and that the sport-specific knowledge layer is where the largest differences between experts and novices lie. That finding is the reason the construct is drawn where it is; the detail is in Three levels of cognition.

What is out of scope, and why

Three classes of material are outside the construct, and a question about them is removed no matter how good it looks.

General cognitive ability: working memory, attention, inhibition, processing speed, reaction time. Insporta does not test these, and does not present its score as a proxy for them. The evidence that such tests predict sporting level is weak, and a knowledge test that claimed to measure them would be claiming something it cannot support. The argument is laid out in Executive functions: what a knowledge test does not measure and Sport-specific knowledge beats generic brain training.

Physical and biomechanical characteristics of the athlete: training loads, strength protocols, recommended weights, the mechanics of the athlete’s body. A question about barbell weights reads identically for football and basketball, so it tells nothing about football knowledge. An early batch of football content generated from a coaching document contained a whole test of coaching drills and physical preparation for exactly this reason, and it was withdrawn.

Reading: a question whose difficulty lies in the length or construction of the stem measures reading speed as much as knowledge. This is the subject of Reading load and length.

The borderline

Sports science, psychology and economics touch every sport, and they are admissible on one condition: the answer must be a fact about the sport, not about the person. Cricket level 5 has a sub-level on the sports-science team around a professional side, and triathlon level 3 has one on physiology. Both stay in scope because they ask what the sport does, what a workload-management programme is for, why heat acclimation matters over a long course, and not what a particular athlete should do with their own body.

A useful check for the borderline: would the question and its answer be the same in a neighbouring sport? A stem that would have the same answer in eleven-a-side football teaches nothing about futsal; a stem that would read the same for any bat-and-ball sport teaches nothing about cricket. Every question must turn on something the sport does differently.

Why the boundary is strict

A test is only as honest as its claim. Furley, Schütz and Wood (2023) warn that cognitive tests in sport routinely measure several things at once, and that tests with a sporting name often contain no sporting stimulus at all. Insporta’s answer is to state the construct narrowly and keep every question inside it, so that a score can be read as one thing: how well this learner knows this sport. A wider claim would be more impressive and less true.

Where that construct sits among the platform’s other principles is described in How Insporta applies the research. The first article in this section, How Insporta writes a test, shows how the other rules follow from it.