Lecture 7: Tiger Woods and the development of expertise

Question 1

Class survey

Answer 1

Expertise most common in:
– Sports 52%
– Music 22%
– Fine arts 15%
– Language Arts 11%

• Start Age = 8
• Hrs per week = 8
• To what extent do you
  attribute your good
  performance to ….
  Natural Talent – 45%;
  Training and Practice
  55%

Question 2

Tiger Woods, Golf Prodigy

Answer 2

• Youngest Junior Amateur;
• Youngest Amateur Champ;
• 3 x Amateur Champ;
• 14 Major Championships;
• Wins 30% of tournaments;
• Lowest Career Scoring Ave;
• Highest Career Earnings
• He is 41 years old now

Young Tiger:
Very hardly pushed by his father
Dad made him start very young

How did Tiger Become a Prodigy?
* 6 months;
* 14 months;
* 2 years old;
* 4 years old: putting; challenge re teaching pro.
* 6 years old
* 8 years old
* 10 years old

Question 3

Expert performance

Answer 3

• Consistently superior performance on
  specified set of representative tasks for the
  domain that can be administered to any
  subject.

Question 4

What role do talent and motivation play in the
acquisition of expert performance?

Answer 4

Traditional view;
* Most common current
view;
* “Giftedness for a given
activity is necessary to
attain the highest level of
performance in that
activity.”
Performance = Ability X Effort

Best Evidence for the Talent View?
1. The performance of prodigies
- children who acquire expert
levels of performance at a
very young age.
Q: environment?
Q: future success?
2. The performance of savants.
Individuals without normal
intelligence but who display
very unusual abilities that
other people do not have.
3. Seemingly superior basic
abilities that predestine
one for success in a
certain domain:
e.g.:
a) Absolute pitch in music.
b) Spatial memory of chess-players.

Question 5

Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple
intelligences

Answer 5

linguistic-verbal - creative writers
logical-mathematical - engineers
spatial - architects
musical – musicians
bodily kinaesthetic - athletes and dancers
interpersonal - managers, teachers
intrapersonal - writers

Howard Gardner Point of View
“The single most important contribution education can make to
a child’s development is to help her toward a field where her
talents are best suited, where she will be satisfied &
competent. We’ve completely lost sight of that. Instead, we
subject everyone to an education where, if you succeed, you
will be best suited to be a college professor. And we evaluate
everyone according to that narrow standard of success. We
should spend less time ranking children and more time
helping them to identify their natural competencies and gifts,
and cultivate those. There are hundreds and hundreds of
ways to succeed, and many, many different abilities that will
help you get there.”

Gardner believes people have natural competencies and gifts

Question 6

Wesley Chu: A Canadian music prodigy

Answer 6

• Role of Environment?
• Early ability reflected in
  absolute pitch.
• Future success.

Both parents were piano teachers

Question 7

The performance of savants

Answer 7

Summer Camp, 1980

Individuals with below normal
intelligence who display very unusual
abilities that other people do not have

Story about the kid who made complex structures out of wood (turns out it’s the reason he was sent to the camp)

Question 8

Superior Basic Abilities

Answer 8

• Absolute pitch perception among musicians.
  – “the ability to recognize or sing a given isolated note
  (also called perfect pitch)
• Visual-spatial memory of chess players.
  -U.S Chess Prodigy plays 50
  opponents simultaneously (47-1-2)

Memory for chess positions
Turns out, chess prodigies have a good memory for games that make sense. If goofy arrangement, no better than anyone else.

Question 9

Evidence against basic abilities as a prerequisite:

Answer 9

• Failure to find basic abilities that predict later expertise;
• Failure to find experts with less than 10 years of training;

Simon & Chase (1973) study of chess-masters.
* Are there naturally talented performers who
quickly emerge as the best in their field?
* Found out there is a minimum Period of Attainment of Expert
Performance.

Ericsson and Charness’s conclusion.
* “Even for the most successful individuals, the
major domains of expertise are sufficiently
complex that mastery of them requires
approximately ten years of essentially fulltime preparation, which corresponds to
several 10,000’s of hours of practice.”
-3,000 hrs for good
amateur player

Question 10

What it the key to developing
expertise in a domain?

Answer 10

• E & C’s Controversial Theory!
• “The traditional view that successful individuals
  have special innate abilities and basic capacities
  is not consistent with the evidence… Differences
  between expert and less accomplished
  performers instead reflect acquired knowledge
  and skills or physiological adaptations that result
  from training..”

Question 11

Conclusions
Why did Tiger become so good?

Answer 11

Answer: Early exposure,
extensive training, involved
parents.
(Also, keen interest, high self
control).