📖Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions: A Meta-Analysis

May 21, 2020

authors: Macnamara, Brooke N. and Hambrick, David Z. and Oswald, Frederick L.
year: 2014
url: https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614535810

Critique of deliberate practice
- Ignored decades of psychological theorizing (meh)
- Deliberate practice might be correlated with success because we stop practicing what we’re not good at. (p.2)
- Deliberate practice and talent are not mutually exclusive
- The amount of deliberate practice for master-level chess players varies greatly (from ~3,000 to 23,000 hours)
- (I haven’t done much deliberate practice with programming. perhaps besides contests)
Deliberate practice is important but not the sole factor (it only explains about one third)
Goals
- Investigate correlation between deliberate practice and performance
- Find factors that influence deliberate practice relevance
  - domain: music, games, sports, education, profession
  - predictability of environment (how much environment changes unpredictably under you while you perform the task)
    - (programming seems to be highly predictable environment)
  - methodological moderators: how deliberate practice was assessed in the original paper
88 studies analyzed
Data: https://osf.io/rhfsk
Professions are the least-studied with only 7 studies and 321 people
- Seems to only include non-solitary deliberate practice
Results:
- In most studies, the correlation between deliberate practice and performance is positive. Only 10 (out of 157) showed negative correlation, and 8 of them were statistically insignificant (p < .05)
- Variability explained by deliberate practice:
  - per domain
    - games 26%
    - music 21%
    - sports 18% (19% if team performance is excluded)
    - education 4%
      - primarily included students, where performance = grade
    - professions 1% (and not statistically significant)
  - predictability of task environment
    - high 24%
    - intermediate 12%
    - low 4%
  - by methodology
    - retrospective interview 20%
    - retrospective questionnaire 12%
    - log method 5%
      - (in Ericsson…₁₉₉₃ (original study) there was little correlation between good and best groups in terms of current practice per day—but best groups had more accumulative practice)
  - how assessed
    - user group membership 26%
    - laboratory tasks 14%
    - expert ratings 9% (might be affected by Experts judge others by their own rules)
    - standardized objective scoring measures 8%
theory
- low correlation in professions might be explained by lack of well-defined deliberate practices for professions
- Starting age negatively predicts performance in chess (even after statistically controlling for deliberate practice)
- General intelligence might explain some performance results
- Another predictor might be working memory capacity
Q:
- the study seems to cram in different methodologies. According to Ericsson…₁₉₉₃, only accumulated practice matters, so log method is off the table (?)

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