Peak Ch. 4 Flashcards
purposeful practice among people
- Purposeful practice as done by different people can have very different results
- Ex. Steve and Renee’s performance in Ericsson’s memory study
what is the gold standard of practice?
Deliberate practice is the gold standard of practice that everyone should aspire to
common characteristics of fields with widely accepted training methods:
- There are objective or at least semi-objective ways to measure performance
- They tend to be competitive
- They are generally well-established
- Teachers or coaches have developed increasingly sophisticated training techniques that make increasing one’s skill level possible
Ericsson et al. violin study method
studied the performance of great, very good, and good musicians to see what differentiated them
Ericsson et al. violin study findings
- Most factors that the students identified as being important to their improvement were seen as labour-intensive and not very fun
- The only major difference between the groups was the amount of time they devoted to solitary practice
- The largest differences in practice time came in the preteen and teen years
Ericsson et al. violin study takeaways
- Becoming an excellent violinist requires several thousand hours of practice
- Even among gifted musicians, those who spent more time practicing were more accomplished
Ericsson et al. ballet dancers study
found a similarly strong relationship between practice time and accomplishments in ballet dancers
2 ways deliberate practice is different from purposeful practice
- It requires a relatively well-developed field
- It requires a teacher who can provide practice activities that have been designed to help a student improve their performance
principles of deliberate practice
- Develops skills through established training techniques
- Takes place outside one’s comfort zone
- Involves well-defined, specific goals
- Requires a person’s full and conscious actions
- Involves feedback and the modification of efforts in response to feedback
- Involves producing and depends on effective mental representations
- Involves building or modifying previously acquired skills by focusing on particular aspects of those skills and working to improve them specifically
can you use deliberate practice in a field that is not well-established?
yes
example of deliberate practice in a field that is not well-developped
Feng Wang used images of objects and maps of physical locations to encode digits in his long-term memory
problem with subjective judgments
they are inherently vulnerable to all sorts of biases
are “experts” always experts?
In many fields, people who are seen as experts are not experts
Hodgson’s wine experts and expertise study
Hodgson found that wine experts will rate the same wine differently; their ratings aren’t consistent
Dawes psychologists and expertise study
found that licensed psychologists and psychiatrists were no better at performing psychotherapy than people who had received minimal treatment
financial experts and expertise study
Many studies have shown that financial experts are no better than novices or random chance of picking stocks effectively
general practitioners and expertise study
General practitioners with several decades of experience perform worse on several objective measures of performance than newly-trained doctors, likely because younger doctors attended medical school more recently and remember their training better
how can you identify an expert performer in a field?
- Seeking out those who work closely with many other professionals and can help you identify the best
- Seeking out people that professionals talk to when they need help with a particularly difficult situation
what should you do once you’ve identified an expert in a field?
- Figure out what they do that separates them from less accomplished people in the same field
- This can be difficult because mental representations are not directly observable
- In some cases, you can bypass this by figuring out what sets their training apart
importance of a good coach or teacher
- They can help a student develop a good foundation and gradually build on it
- They can help a student get through challenges
- They can give a student valuable feedback that they couldn’t get any other way
Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule
it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at anything
problems with the 10,000-hour rule
- There is nothing special about 10,000 hours
- 10,000 hours at age 20 for the best violinists was only an average
- Doesn’t distinguish between deliberate practice and practice
- Many people have interpreted it as a promise
the core message of the 10,000-hour rule
in pretty much any endeavour, people have a tremendous capacity to improve their performance as long as they train the right way
