📖Summing up hours of any type of practice versus identifying optimal practice activities

authors

Ericsson, K. Anders

year

2016

url

https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691616635600

• Macnamara…₂₀₁₆ summed up different types of activities, not only deliberate practice

  • activities included group activities, watching games on television, and even play and competition

• designed by teacher or coach

• beginner’s performance is often correlated with general ability tests (like IQ), but expert’s rely on domain-specific skills and models which removes reliance on general abilities (and removes correlation)

Flaws of Macnamara…₂₀₁₆ (and Macnamara…₂₀₁₄)

• included studies that analyzed non-expert performance (small percentile of experts present in the study)

• some studies with real deliberate practice and very high correlation (0.87 / 0.92) were excluded from meta-analysis

• studies that included multiple activities (both deliberate practice and not) with different correlations from -0.51 to 0.62 were averaged to 0.17 and included in meta analysis

• includes studies with subjective estimates of performance

Backlinks

• 📖 How Important is Deliberate Practice? Reply to Ericsson (2016)
• 📝 Deliberate Practice: Macnamara–Ericsson argument