Traditionally, professional expertise has been judged by length of experience, reputation, and perceived mastery of knowledge and skill. Unfortunately, recent research demonstrates only a weak ...relationship between these indicators of expertise and actual, observed performance. In fact, observed performance does not necessarily correlate with greater professional experience. Expert performance can, however, be traced to active engagement in deliberate practice (DP), where training (often designed and arranged by their teachers and coaches) is focused on improving particular tasks. DP also involves the provision of immediate feedback, time for problem‐solving and evaluation, and opportunities for repeated performance to refine behavior. In this article, we draw upon the principles of DP established in other domains, such as chess, music, typing, and sports to provide insight into developing expert performance in medicine.
Over 25 years ago
Ericsson et al. (1993)
published the results of their search for the most effective forms of training in music, a domain where knowledge of effective training has been accumulated ...over centuries. At music academies master teachers provide students individualized instruction and help them identify goals and methods for their practice sessions between meetings – this form of solitary practice was named
deliberate practice
, and its accumulated duration during development was found to distinguish groups with differing levels of attained music performance. In an influential meta-analysis
Macnamara et al. (2014)
identified studies that had collected estimates of practice accumulated during development and attained performance and reported that individual differences in deliberate practice accounted for only 14% of variance in performance. Their definition of “deliberate practice” differs significantly from the original definition of deliberate practice and will henceforth be referred to as
structured practice
. We explicate three criteria for reproducible performance and purposeful/deliberate practice and exclude all effect sizes considered by
Macnamara et al. (2014)
that were based on data not meeting these criteria. A reanalysis of the remaining effects estimated that accumulated duration of practice explained considerably more variance in performance (29 and 61% after attenuation correction). We also address the argument that the limited amount of variance explained by the duration of practice necessarily implies an important role of genetic factors, and we report that genetic effects have so far accounted for remarkably small amounts of variance – with exception of genetic influences of height and body size. The paper concludes with recommendations for how future research on purposeful and deliberate practice can go beyond recording only the duration of practice to measuring the quality of practice involving concentration, analysis, and problem solving to identify conditions for the most effective forms of training.
In their commentary, Macnamara and Hambrick (Psychol Res, 2017) accused my colleagues and me of systematically changing the definition of the concept of deliberate practice. Deliberate practice was ...the result of a search for characteristics of effective practice in the laboratory that was shown to improve expert professional performance in domains, such as music. In this reply, I will first describe five different criteria that defined the original concept of deliberate practice and each of them is presented with directly supporting quotes from Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer (Psychol Rev 100:396–406, 10.1037/0033-295X.87.3.215, 1993) paper. Unfortunately, Macnamara, Hambrick, and Oswald (Psychol Sci 25:1608–1618, 10.1177/0956797614535810, 2014) misinterpreted our concept of deliberate practice, and defined it much more broadly: “as engagement in structured activities created specifically to improve performance in a domain” (p. 914). This definition led them to include activities, such as attending lectures, studying alone by students, and group activities led by a coach, where each activity does not meet one or more of our criteria for deliberate practice. In this commentary, I will argue that Macnamara and Hambrick (2020) became aware of some of the original criteria for deliberate practice, such as the role of individualized training by a teacher, and these discoveries misled them to assume that we had changed our definition. The intended meaning of sentences that Macnamara and Hambrick (2020) had carefully selected is shown to have an appropriate interpretation in Standard English that is consistent with our original definition of deliberate practice. In conclusion, I will give a proposal for how the different perspectives can be reconciled.
In this updated and expanded edition of The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, some of the world's foremost experts on expertise share their scientific knowledge of expertise and ...expert performance and show how experts may differ from non-experts in terms of development, training, reasoning, knowledge, and social support. The book reviews innovative methods for measuring experts' knowledge and performance in relevant tasks. Sixteen major domains of expertise are covered, including sports, music, medicine, business, writing, and drawing, with leading researchers summarizing their knowledge about the structure and acquisition of expert skills and knowledge, and discussing future prospects. General issues that cut across most domains are reviewed in chapters on various aspects of expertise, such as general and practical intelligence, differences in brain activity, self-regulated learning, deliberate practice, aging, knowledge management, and creativity.
Current theories argue that human decision making is largely based on quick, automatic, and intuitive processes that are occasionally supplemented by slow controlled deliberation. Researchers, ...therefore, predominantly studied the heuristics of the automatic system in everyday decision making. Our study examines the role of slow deliberation for experts who exhibit superior decision-making outcomes in tactical chess problems with clear best moves. Our study uses advanced computer software to measure the objective value of actions preferred at the start versus the conclusion of decision making. It finds that both experts and less skilled individuals benefit significantly from extra deliberation regardless of whether the problem is easy or difficult. Our findings have important implications for the role of training for increasing decision making accuracy in many domains of expertise.
Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch- Römer published their research on "The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance" over 25 years ago. Since then, hundreds of new articles have ...been published with findings regarding the effects of practice on performance in sports. The original paper searched for conditions underpinning optimal acquisition of reproducibly superior (expert) performance in domains, where methods for producing such performance had been refined over centuries. At an elite music academy, superior music students were found to have engaged for longer periods in solitary practice guided by their music teachers - an explication of the conditions of this type of practice led to a definition of deliberate practice. When other researchers in sports started searching for optimal practice, they could not find any practice activities meeting all the criteria for "deliberate practice", yet referred to somewhat similar activities using that same term. This paper shows that the effects of these different types of practice activities on attained performance differ from those of deliberate practice and should be given different distinct names. The paper concludes with recommendations for how future research on purposeful and deliberate practice can inform, not just athletes and their coaches, but all adults about how their achievements can be improved with individualized forms of effective practice.
As a part of a special collection in this issue of Academic Medicine, which is focused on mastery learning in medical education, this Perspective describes how the expert-performance approach with ...deliberate practice is consistent with many characteristics of mastery learning. Importantly, this Perspective also explains how the expert-performance approach provides a very different perspective on the acquisition of skill. Whereas traditional education with mastery learning focuses on having students attain an adequate level of performance that is based on goals set by the existing curricula, the expert-performance approach takes an empirical approach and first identifies the final goal of training-namely, reproducibly superior objective performance (superior patient outcomes) for individuals in particular medical specialties. Analyzing this superior complex performance reveals three types of mental representations that permit expert performers to plan, execute, and monitor their own performance. By reviewing research on medical performance and education, the author describes evidence for these representations and their development within the expert-performance framework. He uses the research to generate suggestions for improved training of medical students and professionals. Two strategies-designing learning environments with libraries of cases and creating opportunities for individualized teacher-guided training-should enable motivated individuals to acquire a full set of refined mental representations. Providing the right resources to support the expert-performance approach will allow such individuals to become self-regulated learners-that is, members of the medical community who have the tools to improve their own and their team members' performances throughout their entire professional careers.
Some have explained large sex differences in visuospatial abilities by genetic adaptations to different roles in primitive hunter-gatherer societies and the interaction of innate biological ...differences and environmental factors. We explored the extent to which variations in behavior and acquired skills can provide alternative accounts for sex differences in the performance of a complex spatially-demanding video game (Space Fortress). Men and women with limited video game experience were given 30 hours of training, and latent curve analyses examined the development of their ship control performance and behavior. Men had significantly better control performance than women before and after training, but differences diminished substantially over the training period. An analysis of participants' joystick behaviors revealed that initially men and women relied on different patterns of control behaviors, but changes in these behaviors over time accounted for the reduced sex differences in performance. When we controlled for these differences in behavior, sex effects after training were no longer significant. Finally, examining the development of control performance and control behaviors of men and women categorized as initially high and low performers revealed the lower-performing women may have been controlling their ship using an approach that was very different from the men and higher-performing women. The potential problems of analyzing men and women's spatial performance as homogenous groups are discussed, as well as how these issues may account for sex differences in skilled video game performance and perhaps other domains involving spatial abilities.
Investigations of expert performers across many domains have suggested the accumulation of deliberate practice over many years is a key component of developing expertise. Researchers propose ...deliberate practice is effective for improving performance in the long term because it includes several structured elements that facilitate learning. However, the effects of such structured practice across shorter training periods are less understood. The current study examined the acquisition of manual control skill in the experimental video game Space Fortress. Video demonstrations and continuous auditory feedback were combined in a 90-min intervention session designed to discourage behaviors correlated with low performance and encourage behaviors associated with high levels of skill. After 4 h of gameplay, the initially lower-performing participants who received the intervention displayed significantly greater manual control performance than the initially lower-performing participants who received undirected training. This performance difference corresponded with durable improvements in behaviors targeted by the intervention once feedback was removed. These findings suggest training that incorporates elements of deliberate practice can be successfully applied in short-term skill acquisition settings.
PDF
