Ericsson and Pool
Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
(2016)
[12] We start off with a general idea of what we want to do, get some instruction from a teacher or a coach or a book or a website, practice until we reach an acceptable level and then let it become automatic. ...
[but] once you have reached this satisfactory skill level and automated your performance...you have stopped improving. People often misunderstand this because they assume that the continued driving or tennis playing or pie bak-
[13]
ing is a form of practice and that if they keep doing it they are bound to get better at it, slowly perhaps, but better nonetheless. They assume that someone who has been driving for twenty years must be a better driver than someone who has been driving for five, that a doctor who has been practicing medicine for twenty years must be a better doctor than one who has been practicing for five...
But no. Research has shown that, generally speaking, once a person reaches that level of "acceptable" performance and automaticity, the additional years of "practice" don't lead to improvement. If anything, the doctor or the teacher or the driver who's been at it for twenty years is likely to be a bit worse than the one who's been doing it for only five, and the reason is that these automated abilities gradually deteriorate in the absence of deliberate attempts to improve.
[40] This is how the body's desire for homeostasis can be harnessed to drive changes: push it hard enough and for long enough, and it will respond by changing in ways that make that push easier to do. ... [And then,] It is comfortable again. The changes stop. So to keep the changes happening, you have to keep upping the ante...
This explains the importance of staying just outside your comfort zone: you need to continually push to keep the body's compensatory changes coming, but if you push too far outside your comfort zone, you risk injuring yourself and actually setting yourself back.
This, at least, is the way the body responds to physical activity. Scientists know much less about how the brain changes in response to mental challenges.
...
[41] Recent studies have shown that learning a new skill is much more effective at triggering structural changes in the brain than simply continuing to practice a skill that one has already learned. On the other hand, pushing too hard for too long can lead to burnout and ineffective learning. The brain, like the body, changes most quickly in that sweet spot where it is pushed outside—but not too far outside—its comfort zone.
...
[45] developing certain parts of the brain through prolonged training can come at a cost: in many cases
[46]
people who have developed one skill or ability to an extraordinary degree seem to have regressed in another area. Maguire's study of the London taxi drivers provides perhaps the best example. At the end of the four years, when the trainees had either finished the course and become licensed drivers or had stopped trying, she tested her subjects' memory in two ways. One involved knowing the locations of various London landmarks, and at this the subjects who had become licensed drivers did far better than the rest of the subjects. The second was a standard test of spatial memory...and on this the licensed drivers did much worse than the group who had never been trained to become taxi drivers. By contrast, the trainees who had dropped out scored about the same as the subjects who had never trained. Because all three groups scored equally well on this memory test at the start of the four-year period, the only explanation was that the licensed cabbies, by developing their memories of London streets, had done something to cause a decline in this other sort of memory. Although we don't know for sure what caused that, it seems likely that the intense training causes the trainees' brains to devote an increasingly large segment to this sort of memory, leaving less gray matter to devote to other sorts of memory."
[60] A key fact about such mental representations is that they are very "domain specific," that is, they apply only to the skill for which they were developed. We saw this with Steve Faloon: the mental representations he had devised to remember strings of digits did nothing to improve his memory for strings of letters. Similarly, a chess player's mental representations will give him or her no advantage over others in tests involving general visuospatial abilities, and a diver's mental representations will be useless for basketball.
This explains a crucial fact about expert performance in general: there is no such thing as developing a general skill. You don't train your memory; you train your memory for strings of digits or for collections of words or for people's faces. You don't train to become an athlete; you train to become a gymnast or a sprinter or a marathoner or a swimmer or a basketball player.
The impossibility of "general skills" would seem to torpedo my former youthful ideal of "style-neutral pedagogy." It is likewise a challenge to washed-up jocks who rail against today's regime of early specialization and insist that playing many sports growing up was important in making them successful at the one sport they ended up playing professionally.
Taleb administers the truth serum:
The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events.
And again:
The graveyard of failed persons will be full of people who shared the following traits: courage, risk taking, optimism, etc. Just like the population of millionaires.
(Black Swan, p. 105)
Perhaps the sports "graveyard" is also full of multi-sport athletes. And, per Ericsson, perhaps these jock-commentators are underselling their later intensive training in a specialty. This all may be closer to the truth. Unfortunately, none of it really makes the current social and cultural regime of hyperspecialization any easier to justify. I'll come clean and invite the jocks to cosign: perhaps the recourse to a "general skills" hypothesis is merely a rationalization rather than a critique. It is a reaction against so much that is obviously wrong, but it itself is also wrong. If so, then we can safely dispense with it.
Having issued that mea culpa, I confess that I usually am unconvinced by these high-level, popularized accounts. It seems they always leave room for more granular skepticism. Start here: ear-training, e.g., is a general skill in music and a specialized skill in the grand scheme. The way ear-training was taught even in so specialized and airless an undergrad program as the one I attended was, as few of us failed to notice, a far cry from any of the settings to which we were expected to ultimately apply it. At a certain point, you must take your (specialized) place and see how it goes.
Incidentally, this is why the assertion that
If anything, the doctor or the teacher or the driver who's been at it for twenty years is likely to be a bit worse than the one who's been doing it for only five
also rings a bit hollow. There is no training that that is "specialized" enough to merge theory with practice; and at that point, the acclimation to practice is, functionally if not spiritually, a type of skills improvement.
Where I have worked for the past several years, this is indeed the outlook, and it seems to me something more than a mere rationalization. One of our finest players claims to have developed on-the-job rather than in the practice room, and unlike the jocks, in his case let's just say that life history, verbal statements, and observable behavior alike make this is a very believable story. What could account for this?
I remember where and when I was told for the first and only time by a representative of the college I had enrolled in that ensemble rehearsal time was not to be counted as "practice" time. Oddly enough, this rang truer for me in the school environment than it has in the "professional" one. I didn't get much of any benefit from rehearsing difficult music a few times and then giving one performance of it; but playing the same simple music thousands of times with the same players in the same setting has been the only thing that has pushed me past my post-college stagnation phase. The reasons for this actually comport perfectly with Ericsson's account. The missing factors are also the same ones missing from much of this book: quality is often subjective; no skill is ever perfected; motivation comes and goes.
Even for my bandmate, whose entire personal investment is elsewhere, the "want" to sound good is not the same kind of "want" as wanting a large family or a hamburger. He often seems not to care how he sounds, whereas I am more immediately buoyed by sounding good and crushed by sounding bad. Nonetheless, we both notice acutely; often we notice different things, but with the same (unusual) acuity. I am by far the more anxious to improve, but he has been at it four times as long as I have and he notices everything. Thus he has gotten really, really good, so good that even in his utterly apathetic pre-tired state his "expert performance" is "noticed" by all.
Given such a contradiction between consciously-stated attitudes and observable behavior, it makes sense to consider the environment. For one thing, playing the same simple songs in the same venue for years makes you hyperaware of your own (and others'!) shortcomings. Because the baseline task is simple enough and because it is repeated thousands of times, perhaps you begin to make small fixes without thinking too hard about it. In our case, we also have the privilege of hearing each other play, day after day, for years (in his case for decades). You would have to be exceptionally jaded not to crib a few things here and there; and again, with simple material you aren't precluded from doing so by your own shortcomings. In Ericsson's terms, we have never actually "automated our performance," even though this "automated" quality is axiomatic of the job we do. (As one of our seasonal compadres says, we "make music by the pound.")
Musical performance can be monotonous when unvaried. There's no doubt about that. But musicians aren't the "automating" type. Even musicians who seemingly fell into the profession rather than chasing after it, whose entire personal investment is elsewhere, even these musicians, I am left to conclude, are not the "automating" type. Of course I hear the same stories you do about tenured symphony players and academics who can barely play by the time they retire; and I hear stories about twenty year-olds winning significant auditions; but with my own eyes and ears mostly I find that older players have physically declined only slightly while they have learned and consolodated tremendously.
In these respects, the central place of music in so many popularized accounts of expert performance is actually quite inapt and unfortunate. Music seems to me an exceptionally poor (because confounded) lens through which to seek laboratory results. That could be because music itself is an "art" rather than a "science," but I fear it's actually because I know so much more about music than I do about, say, athletics or medicine.
(I also know that E&P's account of Scrabble player Nigel Richards is not quite right. Nigel's word knowledge is what first strikes a newb, but what fellow players really marvel at is his analytic ability, an ability which is so deep and unique that other grandmasters occasionally have trouble explaining or even discerning his thought-process in a given position. I know a lot of words and I'm just a potzer-expert. It's not hard to explain where the words come from. Nigel's purported photographic memory certainly is remarkable in its own right, but by itself it wouldn't get him very far. The reasons why are very hard to explain to a living-room Scrabble player, just like my sixty-something bandmate is hard to explain to a laboratory researcher. Anyway, to reiterate, it's suspicious how much more correct the book seems when it is discussing something I don't know anything about.)
In my particular college situation, we were assumed to be specialists without necessarily having had the chance to figure out what we really wanted. Time taken to find oneself is necessary for long-term adjustment, health, and for intrinsic fulfillment, but it works against professional success and social status, which are hypersensitive to anti-meritocratic warps like accumulative advantage and Kahnemanian distortions of judgment. Patience sets us back professionally once we are being compared with specialists who have already banked thousands of specialist-hours. Patience is a virtue only in the retrospective abstract, or maybe in Extremistan; functionally it is downright maladaptive for today's young people. It has been said (I know not with what justification) that even pro sports, the last preserve of innate ability and advantage, have begun to favor those with the most early specialist training. The era of the streetballer is over. You used to get better training playing streetball; as a mere child you played against grown-ups as soon as you had the courage to get out there with them; you either got assaulted or did the assaulting. But now the cultivated training programs have caught up with and surpassed the streetball method. The sudden inability of athletically superior American basketball players to consistently beat more highly-trained European players is attributable to this. So my sources tell me.
This individual dilemma is mirrored at mass scale. If there are no general skills, then decisions about what to teach to whom promise to defy conclusive democratic resolution. Best of luck to everybody!
Ericsson insists that no one is born a peak performer. Is it more plausible that as a matter of affinity there are born specialists and generalists? (By "born" let's include early influences/happenstances which are out of baby's control.) What he says later about "deliberate practice" not being fun for the practicer is hard for me to accept at face value. Ditto the dreaded invocation of "sacrifice" (255). For me the period of conservatory regimen was indeed not much fun, much as the subjects in his study reported, but it was not pure torture either. I wonder if "delayed gratification," that old warhorse, does not sum it up better, by which I mean that there is plenty of expectation of a later payoff. No, this is not "fun," but it is a mindset that keeps people going. I would caucus with the behavioral economists on this one and argue that something has to be keeping people going. Rank and Becker had a somewhat different "existential" gloss on this, but with the same bottom line. In the highly reductive, popularized account offered in Peak, meanwhile, there does not seem to be much of anything of this kind. Perhaps it is too obvious a point for him to have begun with to say that people must actually like the thing they are practicing if they are to improve at it. I think that by omitting it he has, rather, shown that it cannot be omitted. You can be having all the "fun" in the world yet without some such larger purpose be nonetheless on the edge of despair. Current events have driven that point home for good.
Perhaps the rare born specialists among us are bound to win the meritocracy, and perhaps at a population scale of billions the law of large numbers ensures there will enough of them to pretty much rule the world. And perhaps that's why the highest status performers in sports and music are only rarely the most entertaining.
And of course, consider Sennett (The Culture of the New Capitalism):
Practically, in the modern economy, the shelf-life of many skills is short; in technology and the sciences, as in advanced forms of manufacturing, workers now need to retrain on average every eight to twelve years. Talent is also a matter of culture. The emerging social order militates against the ideal of craftsmanship, that is, learning to do just one thing really well; such commitment can often prove economically destructive. In place of craftsmanship, modern culture advances an idea of meritocracy which celebrates potential ability rather than past achievement. ...
[Another] challenge follows from this. It concerns surrender; that is, how to let go of the past. The head of a dynamic company recently asserted that no one owns their place in her organization, that past service in particular earns no employee a guaranteed place. How
[5]
could one respond to that assertion positively? A peculiar trait of personality is needed to do so, one which discounts the experiences a human being has already had. This trait of personality resembles more the consumer ever avid for new things, discarding old if perfectly servicable goods, rather than the owner who jealously guards what he or she already possesses. ...
"Skills extinction" has sped up not only in technical work, but in medicine, law, and various crafts. One estimate for computer repairmen is that they have to relearn their skills three times in the course of their working lifetimes; the figure is about the same for doctors. That is, when you acquire a skill, you don't have a durable possession."
(pp. 4-5)
In those firms which do abandon the structures of social capitalism, the personal consequence of focusing on young talent is that as experience increases it has less value. I found in my interviewing that this slighting of experience was notably strong among consultants, who have a professional interest in thinking so.
(p. 97)
Skills extinction is a durable feature of technological advance.
(p. 98)
[112] The final problem with the ten-thousand-hour rule is that, although Gladwell himself didn't say this, many people have interpreted it as a promise that almost anyone can become an expert in a given field by putting in ten thousand hours of practice."
No, Gladwell did not "say" this explicitly, but you'd have to be a real bonehead not to pick up on this subtext. This was rather irresponsible of him, I think, (but good for the bottom line!) given the clear caveats which apply. Frankly, much of Peak is wrapped in similar subtextual optimism, all while being very careful not to "say" anything whose literal meaning is unsupportable.
To show a result like this, I would have needed to put a collection of randomly chosen people through ten thousand hours of deliberate practice on the violin and then see how they turned out. All that our study had shown was that among the students who had become good enough to be admitted to the Berlin music academy, the best students had put in, on average, significantly more hours of solitary practice than the better students, and the better and best music students had put in more solitary practice than the music-education students.
Indeed, take a quick mental inventory of all the obstacles (the practical ones, and also the logical/rhetorical ones) to conducting a study which "put[s] a collection of randomly chosen people through ten thousand hours of deliberate practice on the violin." Ericsson's subjects had already self-selected. That self-selection is a much more interesting and urgent topic for research, and probably it is not nearly as susceptible to any kind of study as is "expertise."
On the next page [113], Ericsson's measured optimism reappears:
When we say that it takes ten thousand—or however many—hours to become really good at something, we put the focus on the daunting nature of the task. ...
But I see the core message as something else altogether: In pretty much any area of human endeavor, people have a tremendous capacity to improve their performance, as long as they train in the right way. If you practice something for a few hundred hours, you will almost certainly see great improvement...but you have only scratched the surface. You can keep going and going and going, getting better and better and better. How much you improve is up to you.
This puts the ten-thousand hour rule in a completely different light: The reason that you must put in ten thousand or more hours of practice to become one of the world's best violinists or chess players or golfers is that the people you are being compared to or competing with have themselves put in ten thousand or more hours of practice. There is no point at which performance maxes out and additional practice does not lead to further improvement. So, yes, if you wish to become one of the best in the world in one of these highly competitive fields, you will need to put in thousands and thousands of hours of hard, focused work just to have a chance of equaling all of those others who have chosen to put in the same sort of work.
So, the rule of deliberate practice comes with no fixed prescription of quantity, but only one of quality. In competitive pursuits, the bar is set by one's competition; otherwise, it is up to us ourselves where we want to set the bar based on our own wants and needs.
Of course when we tie our goals to the external moving target of competition with others, we forfeit a certain amount of self-determination. Here again is an affinity that is not for everyone. I am not so sure that it leads ineluctably to social dysfunction, but certainly it is unsightly, it can be unpleasant to be around, etc. In this connection the "mediocore" perspective at least makes a little bit of sense to me. The problem is that even the quite modest, humane achievement of "a few hundred hours" of deliberate practice is plenty sufficient to form the basis of invidious comparison. It is certainly enough to alienate peers and to bring plenty of third-hand quotes from Marx streaming into your comments section.
[131] When you look at how people are trained in the professional and business worlds, you find a tendency to focus on knowledge at the expense of skills. The main reasons are tradition and convenience: it is much easier to present knowledge to a large group of people than it is to set up conditions under which individuals can develop skills through practice.
Indeed, and as band teachers and studio teachers know (or they should), simply conveying to the student the "knowledge" of how to set up such conditions for themselves, somewhere outside of school and outside the school day, and then sending them off to go make it happen, doesn't work at all, not when pretty much the entire social and material world outside of school is pushing in the opposite direction.
[154] Any activity at the limits of your ability will require full concentration and effort. ...
Maintaining this sort of focus is hard work, however, even for experts who have been doing it for years. ...the violin students I studied at the Berlin academy found their training so tiring that they would often take a midday nap between their morning and afternoon practice sessions. People who are just learning to focus on their practice won't be able to maintain it for several hours. Instead, they'll need to start out with much shorter sessions and gradually work up.
...Focus and concentration are crucial...so shorter training sessions with clearer goals are the best way to develop new skills faster. It is better to train at 100 percent effort for less time than at 70 percent effort for a longer period. Once you find you can no longer focus effectively, end the session. And make sure you get enough sleep so that you can train with maximum concentration.
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[159] To effectively practice a skill without a teacher, it helps to keep in mind three Fs: Focus. Feedback. Fix it. Break the skill down into components that you can do repeatedly and analyze effectively, determine your weaknesses, and figure out ways to address them.
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[164] Tests on the best typists have shown that their speeds are closely related to how far ahead they look at upcoming letters while they type.
...
[166] Some people had suggested that the students [spelling bee contestants] who had spent the most time practicing did so because they actually liked this sort of studying and got some sort of pleasure out of it. But the answers students gave to our questionaire told a very different story: they didn't like studying at all. None of them did, including the very best spellers. The hours they had spent studying thousands of words alone were not fun; they would have been quite happy to do something else. Instead, what distinguished the most successful spellers was their superior ability to remain committed to studying despite the boredom and the pull of other, more appealing activites."
Well, okay. Can we ask some adults sometime?
...
[167] there is little scientific evidence for the existence of a general "willpower" that can be applied in any situation. ...
[168] ...if anything, the available evidence indicates that willpower is a very situation-specific attribute.
For sure. But kids haven't chosen their situation. If you've broken loose of school and have your wits about you, then you can chase "situations" where you've already noticed you tend to have "willpower." Or you can "choose" to pound pills and watch porn; that's why the adults tried to lock you up for as long as it was legal to do so. It's a double-edged sword.
Once we establish that "willpower is a very situation-specific attribute," we then want to know the reasons for people's different choices of "situation." Now we are chasing a new set of psychological correlates, and then another, and another, until eventually we either run out of new places to look or end up back where we started.
That's funny. My vibe is quite the opposite: practice was so much fun at first that it was all I wanted to do, then it gradually became boring, and now it's torture. Maybe I'm more normal than I thought....
[171] Runners and other athletes find that they become inured to the pain associated with their exercise. Interestingly, studies have found that while athletes get acclimated to the particular type of pain associated with their sport, they do not get acclimated to pain in general. They still feel other types of pain just as acutely as anyone else does. Similarly, over time musicians and anyone else who practices intensely get to the point where those hours of practice no longer seem as mentally painful as they once were. The practice never becomes outright fun, but eventually it gets closer to neutral, so it's not as hard to keep going.
[172] Studies of expert performers tell us that once you have practiced for a while and can see the results, the skill itself can become part of your motivation. You take pride in what you do, you get pleasure from your friends' compliments, and your sense of identity changes. You begin to see yourself as a public speaker or a piccolo player or a maker of origami figures. As long as you recognize this new identity as flowing from the many hours of practice that you devoted to developing your skill, further practice comes to feel more like an investment than an expense.
Another key motivational factor in deliberate practice is a belief that you can succeed. In order to push yourself when you really don't feel like it, you must believe that you can improve and—particularly for people shooting to become expert performers—that you can rank among the best. The power of such belief is so strong that it can even trump reality. [gives example of Swedish runner whose father lied to him about his time (on the low side) as a young teen, and who thereby gathered motivation]
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[173] One of the strongest forms of extrinsic motivation is social motivation.
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[174] One of the best ways to create and sustain social motivation is to surround yourself with people who will encourage and support and challenge you in your endeavors. Not only did the Berlin violin students spend most of their time with other music students, but they also tended to date music students or at least others who would appreciate their passion for music and understand their need to prioritze their practice.
Since when did other music students offer this kind of "understanding" to each other?! Let me know where I can find these people if they exist.
Perhaps the most important factor here...is the social environment itself. Deliberate practice can be a lonely pursuit, but if you have a group of friends who are in the same positions...you have a built-in support system.
...
[188] Bloom found a slightly different pattern in the early days of the children who would grow up to be mathematicians and neurologists than in the athletes, musicians, and artists. In this case the parents didn't introduce the children to the particular subject matter but rather to the appeal of intellectual pursuits in general.
[232] Of course, the abilities measured by IQ tests do seem to play a role
[233]
early on, and it seems that children with higher IQs will play chess more capably in the beginning. But what Bilalić and his colleagues found was that among the children who played in chess tournaments—that is, the chess players who were devoted enough to the game to take it a level beyond playing in their school chess club—there was a tendency for the ones with lower IQs to have engaged in more practice. We don't know why, but we can speculate: All of these elite players were committed to chess, and in the beginning the ones with higher IQs had a somewhat easier time developing their ability. The others, in an effort to keep up, practiced more, and having developed the habit of practicing more, they actually went on to become better players than the ones with higher IQs, who initially didn't feel the same pressure to keep up.
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[236] If there are indeed genetic dif-
[237]
ferences that play a role in influencing how well someone performs (beyond the initial stages when someone is just learning a skill), they aren't likely to be something that affects the relevant skills directly—a "music gene" or a "chess gene" or a "math gene." No, I suspect that such genetic differences—if they exist—are most likely to manifest themselves through the necessary practice and efforts that go into developing a skill.
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[255] Most people, even adults, have never attained a level of performance in any field that is sufficient to show them the true power of mental representations to plan, execute, and evaluate their performance in the way that expert performers do. And thus they never really understand what it takes to reach this level—not just the time it takes, but the high-quality practice. Once they do understand what is necessary to get there in one area, they understand, at least in principle, what it takes in other areas. That is why experts in one field can often appreciate those in other fields. A research physicist may better understand what it takes to become a skilled violinist, if only in general terms, and a ballerina may better understand the sacrifice it takes to become a skilled painter.
Our schools should give all students such an experience in some domain. Only then will they understand what is possible and also what it takes to make it happen.
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[257] we could produce a new world, one in which most people understand deliberate practice and use it to enrich their lives and their children's.
What kind of world would that be? To begin with, it would contain far more experts in far more fields than we have today. The societal implications of this would be enormous. Imagine a world in which doctors, teachers, engineers, pilots, computer programmers, and many other professionals honed their skills in the same way that violinists, chess players, and ballerinas do now. Imagine a world in which 50 percent of the people in these professions learn to perform at the level that only the top 5 percent manage today. What would that mean for our health care, our educational system, our technology?
The personal benefits could be tremendous as well. I have spoken very little of this here, but expert performers get great satisfaction and pleasure from exercising their abilities, and they feel a tremendous sense of personal accomplishment from pushing themselves to develop new skills, particularly skills that are on the very edges of their fields. It is as if they are on a constantly stimulating journey where boredom is never a problem because there are always new challenges and opportunities."
Sure. But good luck creating the social support network for all of these people to become experts. You can spread the gospel of deliberate practice all you want, but "social motivation" is a zero-sum game.
p. 258--Homo exercens="practicing man"
pp. 258-259—he finally draws the connection to the fast-changing employment landscape and the seeming need for adult workers to retrain. Deliberate practice saves the world! But his outlook seems too rosy, because one-sided. Previously he has identified the importance of social motivation, but now the reader wonders just how that part of the equation could ever be applied at mass scale, how it could be normalized/institutionalized, as he seems here to think is possible, desirable, and necessary.
Most of this was written a while ago. It has been touched up in places, sometimes substantially. As so often, it languished in the backlog for so long that things have moved on. Let us see just how far they have moved on...
Brooke N. Macnamara and Megha Maitra
"The role of deliberate practice in expert performance: revisiting Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer (1993)"
(2019)
[2]The impact of this article—which shifted the narrative about the origins of expertise away from any important role for genes or stable abilities and towards the importance of practice and training—is difficult to overstate. Cited over 9000 times (source: Google Scholar as of 12 November 2018), it is one of the most referenced articles in the psychological literature. ...
...
1.2.1. Magnitude of effects
...at least in retrospect, Ericsson et al.’s finding that accumulated amount of deliberate practice differentiated even experts is surprising. ...finding differences in amounts of practice between novices and experts would be expected, but finding significant differences among three groups of experts of varying accomplishment is less expected. ...Macnamara et al. found that accumulated amount of deliberate practice significantly accounted for performance variance among sub-elite athletes...and athletes with a range of skill levels, but did not reliably differentiate among elite athletes...
I've often had the (naive) thought that if innate differences were to emerge anywhere, it would be most clearly among experts who have all maxed out their deliberate practice ; this can redeem certain rat-races of "skill acquisition" which otherwise seem pointless and anti-meritocratic.
As we'll see later, it has been questioned whether Scrabble, e.g., actually entails "deliberate practice" by any of the competing definitions. No one can question that performance benefits from "preparation" here as elsewhere, but indeed, Scrabble can often seem more like the agglomeration of a few distinct rote exercises rather than a body of "expertise." This can be deflating. The surface "beauty" of the game masks a quite uninteresting, unremarkable, unaesthetic underlying structure.
The redeeming quality, though, is in being a game of "imperfect information," and also a "variance game" as a chess-playing co-worker once remarked to me in a slightly contemptuous tone of voice. But this is where the depth and beauty of Scrabble start, not where they end. I suspect that they end here, rather, if you have not done all of the rote learning needed to equip yourself for the task. (To be sure, I have not.) In that case, it's merely "your word against mine" as the old pun goes; it's just roulette. But reading your opponent's plays as signals is equal parts art and science, as are "stylistic" choices between candidate plays of near-equivalent equity. Rote learning is unsightly and, for most people, boring, but it is the key which unlocks all of this "next-level" game theory.
The magnitude of the effect of deliberate practice reported by Ericsson et al. is also surprising. ...
1.2.2. Potential bias
Ericsson et al.’s method for collecting retrospective estimates of practice—a structured interview—is potentially prone to experimenter bias and response bias . ...experimenters aware of the
[3]
hypothesis...can unconsciously influence participants’ estimates in an interview procedure. ... Experimenters in Ericsson et al. also provided participants with a ‘[d]escription of the institute and the purpose of the study’ just before the interview began . Depending on what was said, this could have influenced participants’ estimates. To reduce potential experimenter-expectancy bias and response bias, the present study employed a double-blind procedure—...
1.2.3. Multiple definitions
Ericsson et al. appear to theoretically define deliberate practice as practice activities designed by a teacher. ... However, according to both the study’s Methods section and the interview protocol...[they also] appear to operationally define deliberate practice as ‘practice alone’ with no indication that participants were asked to restrict their estimates of practice to only those designed by a teacher. ...
[4]
In the present study, we first asked participants to estimate amounts of deliberate practice defined as practice alone with no restrictions that the activities be teacher designed,... We next asked participants to estimate amounts of deliberate practice defined as teacher-designed practice, restricting estimates to time spent on practice activities that had been designed by a teacher.
If someone asked me this, I don't know that I could answer second part. My teachers didn't
design
my practice; I did. So my answer is: none. Although I was certainly applying my teachers' observations and remarks at all times. So, on second thought, my answer is: all.
[5]...2.1.4. Sample Size
... Conducting expertise research, by definition, means studying a small subset of the population, thus there are relatively few participants from which to sample, making large-sample replications nearly impossible. However, if replications of expertise studies never enter the scientific record because of small samples, then we probably will never provide additional evidence to support or refute the original studies. ...
... when the original study (with a small sample) has already entered the scientific record, replications with similar sample sizes (since that is all that is feasible) should also be allowed to enter the scientific record...
Further, the original publication made clear and bold claims,... ...while a similar finding from a small replication study would add minimal support, evidence contradicting an ‘impossibility’ needs only a single example to falsify it. In this way, replications of any size have the potential to contribute to our understanding...
[6]
2.2 Materials and Procedure
...
[7]
...
...enjoyableness of the activity without considering the outcome of the activity. We provided the same example as Ericsson et al. to describe this: ‘… it is possible to enjoy the result of having cleaned one’s house without enjoying the activity of cleaning.’
[15]
4. Discussion
...
[16]
...
We did not replicate Ericsson et al.’s major result of ‘complete correspondence between the skill level of the groups and their average accumulation of practice time alone with the violin.’ While the less accomplished violinists had accumulated less practice alone than the more accomplished groups, we found no statistically significant differences in accumulated practice alone to age 18 between the best and good violinists. In fact, the majority of the best violinists had accumulated less practice alone than the average amount of the good violinists. The results were similar when restricting practice estimates to only activities that were designed by a teacher.
Further, the size of the effect did not replicate. ... explaining 26% of performance variance is not an inconsequential amount. However, this amount does not support the claim that performance levels can ‘largely be accounted for by differential amounts of past and current levels of practice’...
...
One possibility for the different findings could be differing levels of expertise. While...our violinists appeared to have the same relative difference in skill from each other, they may have an overall higher level of expertise than Ericsson et al.’s violinists (e.g. the current violinists had entered many more competitions than those in 1993). If this is the case, it could be that the importance of deliberate practice diminishes at high levels of expertise in music, as has been demonstrated in sports.
i.e. Practice smarter, not harder?
Expertise
above clearly means something different than it does in the subtitle to Peak. They seem to mean something like "savvy." As a brass player, I might say "guile."
[17]
...
4.1. Multiple definitions of deliberate practice
To the best of our knowledge, the present study was the first to test and compare both definitions of deliberate practice—practice alone and teacher-designed practice. ...
...Ericsson has sometimes argued that practice activities need to be designed by a teacher to qualify as deliberate practice. In the context of arguing against the results of a meta-analysis that found deliberate practice was less important that Ericsson et al. claimed, Ericsson...argued that many of the included studies should have been excluded because they do not meet the criteria for deliberate practice. Specifically, he stated, ‘The absence of a teacher for all or most of the accumulated practice time violates the definition [of deliberate practice].’ He rejected a number of studies included in the meta-analysis, including several of his own studies, because the ‘[a]rticles do not record a teacher or coach supervising and guiding all or most of the practice.’
In contrast with the definition of deliberate practice where activities need to be designed by a teacher, Ericsson has sometimes argued that practice activities do not need be designed by a teacher to qualify as deliberate practice. In line with this definition, Ericsson et al. asked participants to estimate hours of ‘practice alone’ with no apparent restriction to teacher-designed practice. ...
If deliberate practice is assumed to be the most important activity for improving performance, then our results do not support the notion that practice activities need to be designed by a teacher to qualify as deliberate practice. ...
[18]
...
...our findings suggest one of two definitions of deliberate practice should be adopted. The first possibility is that deliberate practice (at least in classical music) should clearly and consistently be defined as ‘practice alone’. ...
The other possibility is that deliberate practice should follow Ericsson’s definition that practice activities do not need to be designed by a teacher to qualify as deliberate practice. ...
We believe that theoretical definitions should be empirically tested and not changed depending on the argument. As an example of such a change based on argument, take Tuffiash et al.’s study of expert Scrabble players. Tuffiash et al. described the experts’ practice as ‘activities that best met the theoretical description of deliberate practice’ . And, citing that study, Ericsson et al. later described those same activities as ‘meeting the criteria of deliberate practice’. However, when arguing against the meta-analytic results, Ericsson rejected this same study because the activities ‘violate our original definition of deliberate practice’. Definitions of key theoretical terms must be consistent in order to accumulate evidence for or against a theory.
Hmm.
The Tuffiash paper is paywalled, but the abstact suggests that findings were strongly in favor of nurture as against nature. This comports with my firsthand experience in Scrabble. It does not comport with my firsthand experience in music. Which is to say: I don't think that we should expect to find, eventually, some theory of "expertise" which is ultimately generalizable across disciplines.
DAVID Z. HAMBRICK, FERNANDA FERREIRA, AND JOHN M. HENDERSON
Practice Does Not Make Perfect
SEPT 28, 2014 7:45 PM
the cognitive psychologists Fernand Gobet and Guillermo Campitelli found that chess players differed greatly in the amount of deliberate practice they needed to reach a given skill level in chess. For example, the number of hours of deliberate practice to first reach “master” status (a very high level of skill) ranged from 728 hours to 16,120 hours. This means that one player needed 22 times more deliberate practice than another player to become a master.
... We searched through more than 9,000 potentially relevant publications and ultimately identified 88 studies that collected measures of activities interpretable as deliberate practice and reported their relationships to corresponding measures of skill. ... With very few exceptions, deliberate practice correlated positively with skill. ... But the correlations were far from perfect: Deliberate practice left more of the variation in skill unexplained than it explained. ...
What are these other factors? ... One may be the age at which a person starts an activity. ...Gobet and Campitelli found that chess players who started playing early reached higher levels of skill as adults than players who started later, even after taking into account the fact that the early starters had accumulated more deliberate practice than the later starters. ...
Wouldn’t it be better to just act as if we are equal, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding? That way, no people will be discouraged from chasing their dreams—competing in the Olympics or performing at Carnegie Hall or winning a Nobel Prize. The answer is no, for two reasons. The first is that failure is costly, both to society and to individuals. ...
The second reason we should not pretend we are endowed with the same abilities is that doing so perpetuates the myth that is at the root of much inaction in society—the myth that people can help themselves to the same degree if they just try hard enough. ...
This is trite intellectual territory, but the reminder is always welcome: neither of the facile poles of the "merit" discourse are coherent in and of themselves.
Our abilities might not be identical, and our needs surely differ, but our basic human rights are universal.
But I'm not sure this is coherent either. "Basic human rights" ought to reflect "needs" and not wants. But "if our needs surely differ," then this purported "universal"-ity is in some kind of trouble.
Goodman and Goodman: "If freedom is the aim, everything beyond the minimum must be rigorously excluded, even if it should be extremely cheap to provide; for it is more important to limit political intervention than to raise the standard of living."
And earlier, the authors warn against the type of argument which
conflates scientific evidence with how that evidence might be used—which is to say that information about genetic diversity can just as easily be used for good as for ill.
Yep, and that's why Philosophy, like Jazz and The Author, won't die even after it has been killed. Science without Philosophy is just educated nihilism.
Fernand Gobet and Morgan H. Ereku
Checkmate to Deliberate Practice: The Case of Magnus Carlsen
(2014)
[1]...
As top performers have spent similar number of hours to improve and maintain their skills, the fact that individuals...have so outrageously dominated their sport throws considerable doubt on the deliberate practice framework.
Previously I thought I might be losing my mind since no academics ever seem to mention this more naturalistic data , which could more concisely be called "paying attention."
Brooke N. Macnamara, David Z. Hambrick, and Frederick L. Oswald
Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions: A Meta-Analysis
(2014)
[2]...
... We made no prediction about how the strength of the relationship between deliberate practice and performance would vary across domains. However, we did predict that this relationship would generally be more positive for high-predictability activities than for low-predictability activities, on the basis of findings that effects of training on performance are stronger when the task environment is more predictable.
...
[5]
...
Theoretical moderators. Domain was a statistically significant moderator... Percentage of variance in performance explained by deliberate practice was 26% for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports..., 4% for education..., and less than 1% for professions...
Predictability of the task environment was also a statistically significant moderator,... As hypothesized, the percentage of variance in performance explained by deliberate practice was largest (24%) for activities high in predictability..., intermediate (12%) for activities moderate in predictability..., and smallest (4%) for activities low in predictability...
Methodological moderators. The method used to assess deliberate practice was a statistically significant moderator,... The percentage of variance in performance explained by deliberate practice was 20% for studies that used a retrospective interview..., 12% for studies that used a retrospective questionnaire..., and 5% for studies that used a log method...
The method used to assess performance was also a statistically significant moderator,... The percentage of variance in performance explained by deliberate practice was 26% for studies that used group membership..., 14% for studies that used laboratory tasks, 9% for studies that used expert ratings..., and 8% for studies that used standardized objective scoring measures...
[8]
The second ["additional"] model included only the 59 effect sizes for solitary deliberate practice (games: 6; music: 9; sports: 14; education: 30; professions: 0). We tested this model to address the question of whether deliberate practice must be performed in isolation to be maximally effective. The overall percentage of variance explained by deliberate practice was 11% in this model (games: 23%; music: 23%; sports: 22%; and education: 3%;..., which indicates that solitary deliberate practice is not a stronger predictor of performance than deliberate practice with other people.
...
General Discussion
...
... Why were the effect sizes for education and professions so much smaller? One possibility is that deliberate practice is less well defined in these domains. It could also be that in some of the studies, participants differed in amount of prestudy expertise (e.g., amount of domain knowledge before taking an academic course or accepting a job) and thus in the amount of deliberate practice they needed to achieve a given level of performance.
...
[9]
...
... Ericsson et al. (1993) argued that any performance advantage associated with starting age simply reflects the fact that a person who starts at a young age has more time to accumulate deliberate practice than a person who starts at a later age. However, Gobet and Campitelli (2007) and Howard (2012) found that starting age negatively predicted chess rating even after statistically controlling for deliberate practice. This evidence suggests that there may be an optimal developmental period for acquiring complex skills, as there seems to be for acquiring language.
Brooke N. Macnamara and David J. Frank
How do Task Characteristics Affect Learning and Performance? The Roles of Variably Mapped and Dynamic Tasks
(2018)
[1]...psychologist who label themselves “expertise researchers,” tend focus on differences in the amount of accumulated practice to explain variation in performance... By contrast, those who label themselves “individual differences researchers,” “intelligence researchers,” or “working memory researchers” tend to focus on individual differences in cognitive resources as explanations for individual variation... Yet both practice-performance relationships...and abilities-performance relationships...for real-world tasks tend to be relatively small. That is, both the expertise and individual differences literatures leave the majority of interindividual variance in real-world performance unexplained.
Even more importantly, there is considerable heterogeneity in the predictive power of both practice and cognitive ability across studies... We propose that the general lack of predictive power in both expertise and individual differences research, as well as the gross heterogeneity of findings, stem in part from a common problem: the failure to account for moderating task characteristics.
...
Task Characteristics ...
[2]
...
... In a meta-analysis, Macnamara, Hambrick, and Oswald (2014) found performance domain to be a significant moderator of the relationship between practice and performance:... Similarly, meta-analyses examining the relationship between general mental ability and job performance... find that the relationship between general fluid intelligence and job performance differs based on job domain. Despite this, few studies have sought to determine the underlying features that dictate the extent to which a task relies on basic cognitive resources in addition to task-specific practice.
Although task characteristics have largely been ignored in experimental studies of individual differences in task performance, there is one notable exception. Ackerman’s (1986) performance-ability relations theory suggests that task characteristics can be thought of in terms of having consistent (consistently mapped) components or inconsistent (variably mapped) components—which determine how practice and cognitive resources influence performance. Ackerman (1986) proposed that tasks with consistent components allow automatic processes to develop with practice... Once automatic processes are in place, individual differences in available cognitive resources are less associated with differences in task performance. In contrast, tasks with inconsistent (variably mapped) components continuously require controlled processing to perform the task despite training, thus recruiting cognitive resources even after accumulating task-specific practice.
...
Dimensions of Difficulty Until recently, a set of additional task characteristics thought to impact learning and performance had not been formally proposed. In a recent book titled Accelerated Expertise: Training for High Proficiency in a Complex World, Hoffman et al. (2014) put forth eight dimensions of difficulty hypothesized to increase task difficulty across domains via their reliance on limited cognitive resources.
- Static versus dynamic: Important aspects of static tasks can be captured in “snapshots,” whereas dynamic tasks are continuously changing. ...
[3]
...
- Discrete versus continuous: Attributes of discrete tasks are characterized by a small number of categories, whereas attributes of continuous tasks are characterized by a continua of features or a large number of categorical distinctions. ...
- Separable versus interactive: Processes in separable tasks occur independently or with weak interactions, whereas processes in interactive tasks are strongly interdependent. ...
- Sequential versus simultaneous: Processes in sequential tasks occur one at a time, whereas processes in simultaneous tasks occur at the same time. ...
- Linear versus nonlinear: Relationships among features in linear tasks are proportional and can be conveyed with a single line of explanation, whereas relationships among features in nonlinear tasks are nonproportional and require multiple lines of explanation. ...
- Single versus multiple representations: Elements in single-representation tasks have one or very few interpretations or uses, whereas elements in multiple-representation tasks have multiple interpretations, and uses, based on context. ...
- Mechanistic versus organic: Attributes in mechanistic tasks can be understood in terms of their parts. Effects in mechanistic tasks have direct causal agents, whereas organic tasks must be understood as a whole and effects in these tasks are due to system-wide functions. ...
- Homogenous versus heterogeneous: Components and conceptual representations in homogenous tasks are uniform across a system (e.g., there is a single explanation), whereas components and conceptual representations in heterogeneous tasks are diverse. ...
The dimensions of task difficulty are intuitively appealing. However, they have not yet been empirically tested.
The Present Studies ...
[4]
...
Experiment 1 ...
[10]
...
Experiment 2 ...
[11]
...
General Discussion ...
[12]
...
Our results suggest that task characteristics are an important component of any model or theory of skill acquisition or expertise. Specifically, task characteristics affected the impact of cognitive load and practice amounts on learning and performance. This finding suggests that the predictive power of cognitive resources on expertise and the predictive power of practice on expertise are not set amounts that can be applied to any task or any performance domain. Rather, the influence of these factors is systematically heightened or reduced depending on the characteristics of the task.
...
[13]
...
... Currently, industrial/organizational psychologists are aware that general cognitive resources best predict occupational level and performance (even better than job experience), as well as rate of learning when receiving job
[14]
training . Additionally, the predictive power of general cognitive ability increases as complexity—information processing requirements— of the job increases . However, better understanding of how task characteristics impact information processing requirements can refine job classifications and enhance systems for personnel recruitment, work placement, and training.
I look forward to seeing that angle applied back to music, where much of this chatter got started, because I've known some great musicians whose, uh,... general cognitive ability was not terribly impressive in any other domain, and I've seen some very smart students struggle mightily with elementary "general music." (Oliver Sacks has of course documented some extreme examples arising from congenital conditions or later injury.)
Certainly there is a just aversion to bringing things like job classifications into the artistic/creative side of this discussion. But honestly, the more I've been privileged to actually "work at playing," i.e. the more I've had to put up with mis- placement and subpar occupational performance , the more willing I have gotten to broach things in those terms. Of course when I was underemployed it was easier to parrot the notion that there are too many musicians and not enough work. Now I'm working and, hate to say it, but there seems to be about as much work as there are really good musicians to do it.
Also, don't forget that musicians can join or leave the expert cohort at any point in life, not just at the beginning and end!
Alexander P. Burgoyne, David Z. Hambrick, & Brooke N. Macnamara
How Firm Are the Foundations of Mindset Theory? The Claims Appear Stronger than the Evidence
(2020)
(From a word doc, hence pagination probably differs from published version.)
[3]
There is currently a great deal of scientific interest in mindset (i.e., implicit theories). Mindset refers to people’s beliefs about the nature of personal attributes, such as intelligence. People who hold growth mindsets (i.e., incremental theorists) believe attributes are malleable, whereas those who hold fixed mindsets (i.e., entity theorists) believe attributes are unchangeable (Dweck, 2006). According to Dweck (2006), “the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life” (p. 6). The rationale is that mindsets form the “core” of people’s meaning systems, bringing together goals, beliefs, and behaviors to shape people’s thoughts and actions (Dweck & Yeager, 2019).
Honestly, the only place I've ever seen the phrase "growth mindset" is on dating sites, where I have seen it on most (seemingly all) profiles of people in banking, finance, real estate, accounting, etc., and on very few others. Like many such sayings which people fall back on, the misprision eventually becomes part of the new meaning. Hence to me, now, it seems to refer simultaneously to personal, financial, reputational and familial "growth." But here is its actual source, apparently.
The presumed importance of mindset rests on several theoretical premises. ...
Premise 1: People with Growth Mindsets Hold Learning Goals
...according to Dweck and Yeager (2019), mindset theory was developed to explain why some people care more about improving their ability (i.e., learning goals) whereas others care more about proving their ability (i.e., performance goals). ...
[4]
...
Premise 2: People with Fixed Mindsets Hold Performance Goals
Dweck (2000) stated,
Believing that your qualities are carved in stone—the fixed mindset—creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over….I’ve seen so many people with this one consuming goal of proving themselves—... (p. 6, emphasis added).
...people with fixed mindsets “have to look good at all times” and “the cardinal rule is: Look talented at all costs” (p. 4). ...
Premise 3: People with Fixed Mindsets Hold Performance-Avoidance Goals
Burnette, O'Boyle, VanEpps, Pollack, and Finkel (2013) stated, “although entity theorists prioritize performance goals more than incremental theorists do, we suggest that this difference is especially strong for performance-avoidance goals.” (p. 660). Dweck (2002) has also described how people with fixed mindsets supposedly avoid performing tasks if they might fail:...
[5]
...
Premise 4: People with Fixed Mindsets Believe That Talent Alone–Without Effort–Creates Success
...“Those with a fixed mindset believe that if you have natural talent, you shouldn’t need much effort”... ...people with fixed mindsets “believe that talent alone creates success–without effort”...
Premise 5: People with Growth Mindsets Persist to Overcome Challenge
Rattan et al. (2015) explained, “students with growth mindsets…pursue challenges…and are resilient to setbacks; in contrast, students with fixed mindsets avoid challenges…and give up more easily when facing setbacks” (p. 722). Indeed, mindset has been described as “a theory of challenge-seeking and resilience” (Dweck & Yeager, 2019, p. 482). ... ...the for-profit mindset-intervention company Mindset Works (co-founded by Dweck) explains on their website: “Children with a growth mindset persist in the face of challenges”...
[6]
Premise 6: People with Growth Mindsets Are More Resilient Following Failure
According to Yeager and Dweck (2012), mindsets “appear to create different psychological worlds for students: one that promotes resilience and one that does not” (p. 304). ... By contrast, individuals with fixed mindsets are “devastated by setbacks” (Dweck, 2008). ...
Prior Evidence for Premises
...despite the claim that people with growth mindsets care first and foremost about learning (Premise 1), a recent meta-analysis found the correlation between mindset and learning goal orientation was only !̅= .19 (Burnette et al., 2013). For comparison, other personality constructs correlate much more strongly with learning goal orientation: self-efficacy (!̅= .56); need for achievement (!̅= .38); openness to experience (!̅= .34) (Payne, Youngcourt, & Beaubien, 2007). Burnette et al.’s meta-analysis also revealed weak evidence for Premises 2 and 3:...
[7]
We could find no evidence that people with fixed mindsets believe that talent without effort creates success (Premise 4). ...most studies do not test mindset’s relationship with persistence towards a real-world challenging goal that is important to the individual.
Few studies have examined the relationship between one’s naturally-held mindset and resilience to failure (Premise 6). Rather, studies that examined resilience to failure by “helpless” and “mastery-oriented” children.. ..or after manipulating praise (Mueller & Dweck, 1998) have been interpreted as evidence of mindset’s relationship with resilience... However, Li & Bates (2019) directly tested this relationship. In one sample, they found no association between mindset and performance following failure. In another sample, they found that students with fixed mindsets performed better than students with growth mindsets following failure.
Present Study
...
[8]
...
Method ...
[12]
...
Results ...
[20]
Discussion ...
Although we did not find robust support for mindset theory’s premises in terms of statistical significance, some might argue that small associations have practical significance. However, without robust evidence that associations are nonzero, as is the case with half the premises tested, there is no evidence of practical significance. ... We found that mindset accounted for 1% of learning goal orientation variance. By comparison, a meta-analysis found that self-esteem, need for achievement, and general self-efficacy explained 10%, 14%, and 31% of learning goal orientation variance, respectively (Payne et al., 2007).
[21]
...
David Z. Hambrick, Brooke N. Macnamara, and Frederick L. Oswald
Is the Deliberate Practice View Defensible? A Review of Evidence and Discussion of Issues
(2020)
[2]
...here we will discuss what we believe are serious concerns with whether the deliberate practice view is viable as a scientific theory—that is, whether it is empirically testable and falsifiable. ... Before doing so, however, we note two uncontroversial claims about expertise, by which we simply mean a person’s measurable (i.e., quantifiable) level of performance in a domain. First, as Ericsson and colleagues have emphasized... , expertise is acquired gradually. In other words, people are not literally born as experts,...
The second uncontroversial claim is that training can lead to large, even massive, improvements in people’s level of expertise (i.e., domain-relevant performance). ...
...
WHAT IS DELIBERATE PRACTICE
...
[4]
...
Challenges to the Deliberate Practice View
...
New Types of Practice
...
[7]
...
...Ericsson and colleagues went from arguing that activities exist that meet the criteria for deliberate practice in the boardgame SCRABBLE, to arguing that it is not possible to engage in deliberate practice in SCRABBLE. Specifically, referring to Tuffiash et al.’s (2007) SCRABBLE study, Ericsson et al. (2009) stated that “[s]everal researchers have reported a consistent association between the amount and quality of solitary activities meeting the criteria of deliberate practice and
[8]
performance in different domains of expertise, such as. . .Scrabble (Tuffiash et al., 2007)” (p. 9). However, Moxley et al. (2019) wrote that because SCRABBLE lacks professional coaches “SCRABBLE players cannot engage in deliberate practice, but only purposeful practice and other types of practice” (p. 1150). Under this new framework, activities that once qualified as deliberate practice are now classified as less effective purposeful practice. Of course, it is appropriate for a theorist to reinterpret past evidence as a theory is refined and revised over time. But it is a serious problem, as in this case, when the reinterpretations of evidence are not explicitly acknowledged, explained, and justified. ...
An awful lot of this seems to hinge on the presence or absence of a coach/teacher. Too much, I would say.
(In any case, there are some Scrabble (i.e. SCRABBLE) coaches out there, mostly outside of the U.S.)
... [10]
...
HOW IMPORTANT IS DELIBERATE PRACTICE?
...
[11]
...
IS THE DELIBERATE PRACTICE VIEW DEFENSIBLE?
...
[12]
...
TOWARD A MULTIFACTORIAL MODEL OF EXPERTISE
...
Developmental Factors
... The early specialization view argues that the earlier the training can begin, the better. ... Because it is both physically and psychologically taxing, a person can engage in only a few hours of deliberate practice a day... without burnout and/or injury. Therefore, the individual who begins training at a relatively late age (e.g., age 12) can never catch up to the individual who begins training earlier (e.g., age 6). However, in a meta-analysis of sports studies with samples representing a wide range of skill, we found no evidence for an earlier average starting age for high-skill athletes relative to lower-skill athletes. Furthermore, research suggests that the highest (elite) levels of sports performance are associated with a later starting age, combined with participation in a diverse range of sports in adolescence. ...
Experiential Factors
...
[13]
..in Güllich’s (2017) study... he not only found that the medalists had accumulated significantly less main-sport practice than their less-accomplished counterparts during childhood/adolescence, but also that the medalists had accumulated significantly more experience with other sports during this period...
Ability Factors
Research has firmly established that cognitive ability explains a statistically and practically significant amount of the variability in people’s acquisition of complex skills... That is, people higher in cognitive ability learn complex skills more readily and rapidly than people lower in cognitive ability. ... Ericsson (2014d) has theorized that general cognitive ability is important initially in acquiring complex skills, but its predictive power diminishes as domain-specific skills and knowledge are acquired, stating:
For individuals who have acquired cognitive structures that support a high level of performance the expert performance framework predicts that these acquired cognitive structures will directly mediate superior performance and thus diminishing correlations between general cognitive ability and domain-specific performance (p. 84).
For complex tasks of interest to expertise researchers, evidence for this claim, which we termed the circumvention-of-limits hypothesis (Hambrick and Meinz, 2011), is weak and inconsistent. In a recent review (Hambrick et al., 2019), we searched through approximately 1,300 articles and identified 15 studies... relevant to this hypothesis. Of the 15 studies, only three yielded any evidence supportive of the circumvention-of-limits hypothesis. Moreover, methodological limitations... precluded any strong conclusions from those few studies. Providing what might be considered the strongest evidence for the hypothesis, one of these three studies that seem to support the circumvention-of-limits hypothesis was a meta-analysis of chess studies... As determined by a moderator test, fluid intelligence correlated significantly more strongly with chess rating in lower-skill chess players (avg. r = 0.32) than in higher-skill chess players (avg. r = 0.14). However, it is important to note that skill level was highly confounded with age (i.e., lower-ability samples were youth, whereas higher-ability samples were adults), limiting the strength of the evidence in support of the circumvention-oflimits hypothesis.
We also note that results that have sometimes been used to argue that the influence of general cognitive ability on expertise diminishes with increasing skill do not warrant this conclusion. ... Ruthsatz et al. (2008) found that a measure of general cognitive ability... correlated positively and significantly with musical accomplishment in high school band members (r = 0.25, p < 0.05), but not in university music majors (r = 0.24) or conservatory students (r = 0.12).
Cute.
However, the critical question is not whether the lower-skill group correlation is statistically significant while the higher-skill group correlations are not. Rather, it is whether the former correlation and the latter correlations are significantly different from each other, as determined by the appropriate statistical test. As it happens, in the Ruthsatz et al. (2008) study, the correlations are not significantly different from each other (all z tests for differences in correlations are statistically non-significant). Thus, the results of Ruthsatz et al.’s (2008) study fail to support the hypothesis that ability-performance correlations diminish with increasing skill.
We also reviewed evidence relevant to the circumvention-of-limits hypothesis from the job performance literature, and here the evidence is more consistent and interpretable. General cognitive ability is regarded as the single best predictor of job training performance, and of subsequent job performance... ...
Genetic and Environmental Influences
Research in the field of behavioral genetics has demonstrated that both genetic and environmental variance across individuals
[14]
contribute to the total variance in a wide range of behavioral outcomes (Turkheimer, 2000), including ability factors that have been found to correlate with measures of expertise. ... Because some of these factors correlate with expertise, it stands to reason that both genetic and environmental variance may also contribute to the total variance in expertise. Furthermore, basic abilities and characteristics that may predict individual differences in expertise have also been observed to be substantially heritable, including drawing ability (Arden et al., 2014), music aptitude (Ullén et al., 2014; see Mosing et al., 2018, for a review), and maximal oxygen consumption in athletic performance...
At the same time, no psychological trait is 100% heritable (Turkheimer, 2000), and even the most heritable psychological trait will have a sizeable environmental component. For example, heritability estimates for measures of general cognitive ability are typically in the 50 to 70% range in samples drawn from developed countries (e.g., Tucker-Drob and Bates, 2016), with the remaining variance (as much as 50%) explained by shared and/or non-shared environmental factors. This means that correlations between a measure of some trait (e.g., general cognitive ability) and a measure of expertise could be driven by the genetic variance or the environmental variance in the trait measure, or by both types of variances. In other words, the finding that a measure of a heritable trait correlates with expertise is only consistent with the possibility that genetic variance is a component of individual differences in expertise.
It is also critical to note that genes and environments cannot generally be assumed to be uncorrelated across people. Rather, across people, genetically influenced factors may contribute to variance in the environments which people seek out and are exposed to. This is the idea of gene-environment correlation, or rGE (Plomin et al., 1977). For example, just as children who are tall might be more interested in playing basketball and more likely to be selected to play on basketball teams than children who are shorter, those with a high level of music aptitude may be more likely to take up, be selected for, and persist in music than those with a lower level of this aptitude. Consistent with this sort of speculation, there is now evidence to indicate that the propensity to practice in a domain is substantially heritable. In a large twin study, Mosing, Ullén, and colleagues found an average heritability of around 50% for accumulated amount of music practice (Mosing et al., 2014; see also Hambrick and TuckerDrob, 2015). A possible explanation for this finding is that music aptitude, as well as more general ability and non-ability factors, differentially predispose people to engaging in music practice.
...
[15]
...“A typical human behavioral trait is associated with very many genetic variants, each of which accounts for a very small percentage of the behavioral variability” (Chabris et al., 2015, p. 305). Research is uncovering genetic variants that may contribute to individual differences in expertise, but it is highly unrealistic to expect that any one of these factors will account for a large amount of the variance in expertise.
Putting It All Together
...
THE PATH AHEAD IN EXPERTISE RESEARCH
...
Recommendations For Expertise Research
...
... It is axiomatic in the psychological methods literature that virtually no observed measure (or indicator) is “construct pure.” That is, a score collected by an instrument (test, questionnaire, etc.) designed
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to measure a given hypothetical construct may reflect that construct to some degree, but it will certainly reflect other, construct-irrelevant factors, such as participants’ familiarity with a particular method of assessment... and psychological states that may affect their responding... There is no perfect way to deal with this problem, but when multiple measures of a construct are obtained, it becomes possible to use data-analytic techniques... that are explicitly designed to deal with this issue by allowing researchers to model latent variables that are closer to theoretical constructs of interest than observed variables are.
...the sample of participants from the targeted domain should ideally represent a wide range of performance rather than extreme groups. ...categories such as “novice” and “expert” are not naturally occurring—they are groups of performers created based on ultimately arbitrary cuts on performance scores. Accordingly, scientific research on expertise should endeavor to explain the full range of performance differences within different domains rather than differences between artificial groups of performers, and also continuities and discontinuities across this range (see Bliese and Lang, 2016).
For once the the woolly-headed pomos reached the destination before the hardnecked empiricists, this via the superficial political appeal of "studying everybody."
If these scientists really have found that the cuts between categories such as “novice” and “expert” really, truly have been made arbitrarily by previous generations of researchers, then I ought to be willing to take their word for it. I do wonder even so if pointing out that said "categories" are not naturally occurring is not a bit of a strawman. The social demarcation of novice and expert in music, e.g., though it certainly is an "arbitrary" demarcation in a sizable minority of cases, is on the whole rooted in some discernible fundamentals, some of which, I would think, could actually be isolated, classified, and observed "scientifically." If, on the other hand, these types of social factors are found to be really no different than those aspects of SCRABBLE which can be practiced "purposefully" but not "deliberately," then that would resolve the tension and set the stage for consideration of the full range .
e.g. Some musicians who are, let's say, not very good, nonetheless find some work based on their knowledge of particular repertoire, of various written and unwritten codes of comportment, and a thousand other "skills" which could be acquired by almost anybody regardless of musical or cognitive aptitude. It's totally reasonable for laboratory psychologists to decide that these are not actually experts, not even if pet columnists for the International Musician, Maoists in Hollenbeck park, the IRS, et al, for their own reasons persist in arguing the contrary. But the question then becomes, where out here in the so-called Real World can one lay one's own eyes and ears on the "empirical" reality of skill acquisition? If the musicians playing for your kid's birthday party are mere kleine-experts, where can we find the uber-experts?
In other words: on one side we have "expertise researchers" looking into how people get good at things, but necessarily compartmentalized from the question of whether other people actually think and behave as if people who have gotten good at things are good at them. And on the other side we have "people" living their lives, having various wants and needs arise therein, and unable to fully optimize the meeting of said wants and needs in part because they will not/cannot quite accept experthood where and how it actually exists: they want medical advice that doesn't conflict with their designer religion; they prefer musical performers and major-league athletes who look, talk and act like them; etc. "Where does expertise come from?" is one question. "...and where does it go?" is another question.
Michael Barth · Arne Güllich · Brooke N. Macnamara · David Z. Hambrick
Predictors of Junior Versus Senior Elite Performance are Opposite: A Systematic Review and Meta‑Analysis of Participation Patterns
(2022)
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1 Introduction
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[1400, boxed] Key Points
Short-term junior-age athletic success is facilitated by an early start in the main sport, rapid initial progress, and intensive specialized coach-led practice in the main sport, with little or no practice in other sports.
Long-term adult-age success is facilitated by extensive childhood/adolescent multi-sport practice, relatively late start in the main sport, gradual initial progress, and only moderate childhood/adolescent specialized main-sport practice.
Peer-led play in the main sport or in other sports has negligible efects on both junior and senior performance.
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Ericsson et al. proposed that performance is monotonically related to the cumulative amount of deliberate practice:... By inference, investing time and efort in other types of sport activities... reduces the amount of deliberate practice and thereby performance. Ericsson et al. also emphasized the importance of rapid initial performance progress...
In contrast, the early diversifcation path of the DMSP ["Developmental Model of Sport Participation"] holds that, although deliberate practice is necessary, single-sport specialization and intensive deliberate practice should not commence until adolescence. This late specialization should be preceded by extensive childhood/adolescent deliberate play in various sports: “pick-up” games that are regulated by the participants, not by a coach (i.e., peer-led play), and are undertaken for the inherent enjoyment of the game rather than to improve performance...
Early specialization and early diversifcation have typically been regarded as two contrasting, dichotomous participation patterns , but this is an imprecise characterization. An athlete’s participation pattern is generally characterized by several continuous, quantitative variables, including starting age and amounts of coach-led practice and peer-led play, both in the athlete’s main sport and in other sports . These continuous variables thus provide a more accurate and detailed description of athletes’ participation patterns. In addition, to investigate relationships between these participation variables and performance, an artifcially dichotomized specialization–diversifcation construct is neither needed nor benefcial. Therefore, we do not follow the dichotomized specialization–diversifcation approach, but rather focus on continuous, quantitative participation variables.
The empirical evidence from studies using these continuous predictor variables is mixed... However, when distinguishing studies based on the performance levels compared and whether the samples were junior (youth) or senior (adults competing in the open-age category, typically in their 20s and 30s) athletes, some consistency became apparent . In numerous studies, higher junior performance was correlated with a faster rate of childhood/adolescent performance progress, greater amounts of main-sport coach-led practice, and less other-sports practice. By contrast, studies comparing the highest adult performance levels—senior world class and national class—suggested that world-class performance was associated with greater amounts of (earlier, childhood/adolescent) other-sports coach-led practice and slower childhood/adolescent progress and was uncorrelated or negatively correlated with the amount of main-sport coach-led practice.
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2 Methods
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3 Results
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4 Discussion
Across diferent types of sports, analyses revealed five central fndings that answered our research questions.
- Participation patterns predicted performance. ...
- Compared with their national-class counterparts, senior world-class athletes engaged in more childhood/adolescent coach-led practice in sports other than their main sport and, relatedly, began playing their main sport later; accumulated less main-sport practice; and reached performance milestones in their main sport at a slower rate.
- Predictors of junior-age performance were opposite of those of senior-age performance: ...
- Peer-led play in either the athlete’s main sport or in other sports had negligible efects on both junior and senior performance.
- Efects of age to reach milestones, starting age, amount of main-sport practice, and amount of other-sports practice were not independent but were closely associated with one another.
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4.1 Theoretical Implications
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...The data indicate that athletes whose development was particularly accelerated in childhood/adolescence—typically through intensive specialized main-sport practice—were frequent among the eventual senior national-class athletes (and also among the most successful junior athletes) but were infrequent among the eventual senior world-class performers.
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How can this complex and partly counterintuitive pattern of fndings be explained? ... The aforementioned concepts—deliberate practice, deliberate play, and giftedness —are partly consistent with the predictors of junior performance. However, they do not provide adequate approaches to explain the highest adult performance levels, primarily because their central premises are inconsistent with the empirical evidence. Alternatively, we suggest that approaches from neoclassical economics may provide a fruitful heuristic, especially the concepts of efficiency and sustainability.
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- The goal is to achieve success at international senior championships,... However, international senior success is an extremely scarce good... An athlete’s career is therefore characterized by great uncertainty of success.
- Resources are restricted and must be economized:...
- ... Coaches and athletes pursue the participation pattern that yields the optimal ratio of benefts, costs, and risks over the short and long term; i.e., a classical problem of the optimization of the allocation of resources. ...
- Because (1) resources are limited and (2) one endeavors to increase benefits while limiting costs and risks, the efficiency of practice is paramount. In economic terms: the marginal productivity, Δ performance / Δ practice over time, see Eq. 1. Following the Gossenian law of diminishing marginal productivity , the more main-sport practice previously accumulated, the lower the added gain in performance per added unit of mainsport practice .
- The higher the competition level, the greater the value of every unit of absolute performance improvement: small differences in absolute performance (velocity run, distance jumped, successful shots made) make great diferences to an athlete’s championship level and placing, i.e., relative performance. For example, at an international level, 0.1 s in a race may distinguish the gold medalist from a non-medalist. In economic terms, the marginal revenue product increases with age and competition level .
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...the world-class athletes’ combination of reduced childhood/adolescent investment in specialized main-sport practice with greater diversifed engagement in multi-sport practice was associated with lower initial marginal productivity, but greater sustainability, in that it yielded greater long-term marginal productivity (efficiency of practice, Δ relative performance/Δ practice amount,...
Notably, world-class athletes’ enhanced efficiency of practice was exactly located in the age period and competition level of the greatest marginal revenue product, i.e., where relatively small differences in absolute performance made great differences in championship level and placing (relative performance)
Most of this seems inapplicable to music, but I think this last part might be.
And, uh...hate to say it, but the obvious folk-explanation is that the eventual senior world-class types didn't have to practice in order to achieve success at the junior levels. This is also consistent with neoclassical economics , no?
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... Our economic interpretation is underpinned by three inter-related hypotheses discussed in the literature:
- Childhood/adolescent multi-sport engagement is associated with reduced risks of later overuse injuries and burnout...
- Practice and competition experiences in various sports increase the odds that athletes fnd the sport that best matches their talent and preferences... ...the “talent identifcation” for a sport occurs a posteriori not a priori...
- Varied learning experiences... may expand the potential for future long-term learning,... First, varied learning experiences facilitate the athlete’s ability to adapt to diferent learning tasks, situations, methodologies, and available information for learning. ... Second, the athlete experiences various learning designs that vary in efficacy for the individual athlete; these experiences help them understand individually more and less athlete-functional learning solutions...
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...According to these hypotheses, athletes who engage in excess childhood/adolescent specialized main-sport practice may more likely be hampered by (later) overuse injuries and/or burnout, may have a greater risk of “malinvestment” in a suboptimal sports match, and may have limited opportunities to expand their learning capital for future long-term learning. In contrast, senior world-class athletes’ pattern of childhood/adolescent multi-sport practice with relatively less main-sport practice was likely associated with reduced risks of (later) overuse injury and/or burnout, increased odds that they selected a main sport at which they are particularly talented, and improved long-term perceptual–motor skill learning.
The hypotheses are also supported by three fndings from several previous studies... (1) Childhood/adolescent multi-sport practice did not have a direct effect on main-sport performance but had a delayed moderator effect, such that it facilitated the athlete’s later main-sport efficiency of practice; (2) the effect rested on improved later perceptual–motor learning, not physical development; (3) the effect was not moderated by the relatedness of the different sports an athlete engaged in. ...
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4.2 Methodological Considerations
The study has several strengths,... But it does have limitations. First, the retrospective and correlational design of many original studies may not have controlled for potential confounds or selection effects (e.g., survivor bias). ... Nevertheless, the major findings are entirely consistent with recent studies that controlled for potential confounds through matched-pairs designs and multivariate analyses,... Second, we did not consider the “micro-structure” of an athlete’s main-sport practice (e.g., types of exercises, ways of executing them). However, several studies reported consistent findings from athletes who participated in the same training groups and thus the same main-sport practice... Third, we did not analyze potential interactions of other factors with participation patterns, such as athletes’ genotype, gene–environment interaction, familial support, or psychological characteristics. Fourth, male samples were over-represented and female samples were under-represented... Fifth, sample sizes and statistical power varied across meta-analytic models. Sixth, as in any systematic review and meta-analysis, although we used multiple databases, bias of availability, country, and language was possible. Finally, the quality of evidence was low for main-sport play and other-sports play.
Jonathan S. Daniels, David Moreau and Brooke N. Macnamara
Learning and Transfer in Problem Solving Progressions
(2022)
1. Introduction
People are often challenged when having to learn new skills in a limited amount of time. In many cases, the most efficient way to learn a skill is to break it down to its core components and gradually increase complexity. ...
However, not all learning occurs from early, formal instruction... Without guided instruction, we typically apply various solutions to new situations often making numerous errors . Slowly, patterns that lead to more directed and efficient manners of problem-solving are discovered . ...
... One important component in the study of learning and memory is the transfer of learning—the idea that the concepts learned from one situation can be applied to another . Numerous studies have shown that transfer of learning through training can improve one’s performance on more complex tasks .
The transfer of learning can be divided into two types: near and far transfer. Near transfer—the application of learned situations to new, yet similar situations (as opposed to far transfer, which is associated with new and relatively different situations;...
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...—has often been studied for its application to spatial problems...
Spatial problem-solving is considered a key component in a number of performance domains... ...only a small percentage of studies [of the "Tower of Hanoi" spatial task] has investigated training progressions,... The schema theory of discrete motor learning posits that schemas form as rules and parameters that are compared to novel situations. ... In support of the theory of discrete motor learning, Vakil and Heled (2016) found that participants in the varied training condition yielded better learning transfer than participants in the constant training condition.
However, in spatial problem-solving tasks, it has yet to be tested what type of varied training leads to better transfer. ... Outside of spatial problem-solving, a working-memory training study (von Bastian and Eschen 2016) suggested that random variation may be sufficient.
von Bastian and Eschen (2016) were not the first to suggest that random variation may be beneficial for learning and perhaps more so than progressive sequences. ... According to schema theory , variability in practice is beneficial because it enhances the effectiveness of rules (schemata). ...
Present Study
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We specifically chose the Rubik’s Cube for its difficulty. Whereas the Tower of Hanoi is fairly simple and training gains are easily found, only six percent of the global population has solved a Rubik’s Cube . ...
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2. Materials and Methods
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3. Results
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4. Discussion
... Our results demonstrated no difference between the progression and variable-order conditions. However, we also did not find that participants in these conditions outperformed participants in the consistent-difficulty condition, limiting the support our results offer for suggesting any variability is important or for the schema theory of discrete motor skill learning, which also suggests participants should yield better transfer from varied versus consistent training.
Our results support our hypothesis that participants’ fluid reasoning would be positively correlated with performance on the spatial reasoning test, across conditions. ...
...our results are in line with other studies that have found that spatial reasoning predicts performance but does not interact with the type of training. ...
Considering the results of Vakil and Heled (2016), in which varied training on the Tower of Hanoi led to better schematic representation of the problem, we believe the lack of a superior method of learning may arise from the difficulty of the Rubik’s Cube. ...
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...it may also be the case that varied training may be paradigm specific rather than widespread across spatial reasoning problems.
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