Lecture 8: Expert Performance in Everyday Life Flashcards
play
activities that aim to foster the inherent enjoyment of the activity
work
public performances, competitions, or other performance motivated by money
naive practice
doing repeatedly and expecting repetition to result in improvement
purposeful practice
- Practice that is goal-oriented, thoughtful, and focused
- Well-defined specific goals
- Focused; requires full attention
- Involves feedback
- You must get out of your comfort zone
deliberate practice
- Activities designed to push you beyond your current level
- Requires a field that is relatively well-developed
- Can measure differences in performance
- There exist accepted training methods
- Requires expert instruction
Ericsson’s research and types of practice
Ericsson’s research combined purposeful and deliberate together under the term deliberate
why is deliberate practice so important?
- Goal to attend to the task and improve performance
- Explicit instructions about the best methods of improvement
- Immediate feedback on one’s performance
- Repeatedly performs the same or similar tasks
surprising fact
- In most domains, years of experience with an anctivity is only weakly related to the level of performance
- This includes accountants, therapists, medical doctors
how can you use deliberate practice to become a better therapist?
You can become a better therapist by recording and transcribing your sessions, and then reflecting on how you could have improved
The monotonic benefits assumption
performance is a monotonic function of the amount of deliberate practice accumulated since these individuals began deliberate practice in the domain
Accumulated deliberate practice
the amount of weekly practice and the age at which the individual began
critical study as described in peak
- Violinists at the best music school in Germany
- 3 groups of 10 performers identified by profs
- Also included 10 adult members of the philharmonic
- Carefully assessed time doing deliberate practice until the age of 18
- Found that there was a monotonic relationship between the level of the violinist and their number of hours of deliberate practice
- There was no example of any naturals (people who didn’t practice much but performed well) or grinders (people who practiced a lot and didn’t perform well)
message for the aspiring expert
“Crucial challenge is to avoid the arrested development associated with generalized automaticity of performance by deliberately acquiring and refining cognitive mechanisms to support continued learning and improvement.”
expertise among older performers
- 20- and 50-year-olds amateur and professional pianists performed general and piano-specific speed tasks
- Found that the 20-year-olds were generally much faster but in terms of a specific piece, the two groups were equally as fast
- Some 50-year-olds start slipping but others maintain their high level of performance
- This is mostly a function of deliberate practice
- For older musicians, it is important to maintain deliberate practice to avoid an age-related decline in performance
deliberate practice in non-experts
- Deliberate practice may sometimes be useful to just help individuals participate and to blend in
- This applies to everyday life (ex. Swimming, faculty meetings, etc.)
