How experts practice: A novel test of deliberate practice theory.

Abstract

Performance improvement is thought to occur through engagement in deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is predicted to be challenging, effortful, and not inherently enjoyable. Expert and intermediate level Gaelic football players executed two types of kicks during an acquisition phase and pre-, post-, and retention tests. During acquisition, participants self-selected how they practiced and rated the characteristics of deliberate practice for effort and enjoyment. The expert group predominantly practiced the skill they were weaker at and improved its performance across pre-, post-and retention tests. Participants in the expert group also rated their practice as more effortful and less enjoyable compared to those in the intermediate group. In contrast, participants in the intermediate group predominantly practiced the skill they were stronger at and improved their performance from pretest to posttest but not on the retention test. Findings provide support for deliberate practice theory and give some insight into how experts practice and improve their performance beyond its current level.Keywords: learning, skill acquisition, expert performance An activity that is central to learning is deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is designed to improve key aspects of current performance, is challenging, effortful, requires repetition and feedback, and may not be inherently enjoyable or immediately rewarding (Ericsson, 2003(Ericsson, , 2007(Ericsson, , 2008. Ericsson, Krampe, and TeschRömer (1993) provided a theoretical framework detailing how deliberate practice leads to improvements in performance and the attainment of expertise. First, the "monotonic benefits assumption" (p. 368) holds that the amount of time invested in domain-specific deliberate practice activities is positively, even monotonically, correlated to the attained performance level. Second, the individual requires resources, including good teachers and suitable facilities, in order to optimize practice. Third, individuals who engage in deliberate practice are predicted to rate it as more relevant to improving performance, more effortful, and less enjoyable when compared to other activities. The predictions of deliberate practice theory have typically been tested using the retrospective recall methodology in which participants are required to evaluate activities they have engaged in previously. However, ratings of practice may be confounded by a number of factors, such as lapses in memory between engaging in the practice and retrospectively rating it sometime later. To our knowledge, no researchers have previously measured the ratings of deliberate practice during a practice session. A novel test of deliberate practice theory is reported in this manuscript in which ratings of practice are recorded during practice itself, rather than retrospectively sometime after the practice has occurred. used recall interviews and diaries to retrospectively examine the activities that musicians attending the West Berlin Music Academy had engaged in since startin...

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“…Rheinberg and Engeser, 2010 as well as Christophel et al, 2014, for training of motivational competence). Underlining this challenge, Coughlan et al, 2014 reported that participants in the expert group of their study rated their practice as more effortful and less enjoyable compared to other participants. The experts were successful in improving performance, by predominantly practicing the skill they were weaker at.…”

20 years later: deliberate practice and the development of expertise in sport

“…In an effort to remedy concerns about the reliability of retrospective DP activity ratings, Coughlan, Williams, McRobert, and Ford (2013) recently employed a novel paradigm where they collected in situ ratings of Gaelic football players' practice activity. In a laboratory setting, investigators first confirmed that the practice trials in which experts and intermediates engaged had indeed improved performance (i.e., they ensured relevance of the practice using pre-to-post analyses and retention tests).…”

Using the ‘Expert Performance Approach’ as a Framework for Examining and Enhancing Skill Learning: Improving Understanding of How Experts Learn

“…Such an approach is especially important when studying expert learning, where subtleties in processes may be more evident following practice than (positive) changes in behavioural outcomes. Moreover, there is a paucity of research where verbal reports have been gathered on a pre-test as well as on subsequent retentionand transfer-tests (for an exception, see Coughlan et al, 2014). Whilst kinematic measures are commonly employed on simple tests of motor skill learning, detailed motion analysis is less common for the acquisition of more complex skills, such as those involved in sport.…”

“…The need to be able to draw firmer inferences about causality may necessitate moving away from retrospective, historical accounts of practice (i.e., the 'bean counting' approach) towards more prospective approaches combining some of the tenants of deliberate practice theory with more traditional, quasi-experimental designs. A published report by Coughlan, Williams, and Ford (2014) nicely illustrates how the tenants of deliberate practice may be studied under controlled conditions involving a traditional learning design, including measures of transfer and retention, and process measures of learning. The need remains to specify not just how much deliberate practice occurs amongst learners, but also how deliberate the learners are during practice itself.…”

“…Pre-to post-test intervention designs have also been used to study the efficacy of short-to medium-term training interventions on performance and learning. Such interventions have focused on determining whether the practice behaviours of experts differ from less skilled individuals and how these behaviours relate to current understanding of best practice methods (e.g., Coughlan, Ford, McRobert, & Williams, 2014;Hodges, Edwards, Luttin, & Bowcock, 2011). Other researchers have studied how the perceptual-cognitive skills that underpin anticipation and decision making can be trained using simulation-or field-based interventions (e.g., see Broadbent, Causer, Williams, & Ford, 2015a;Williams, Ward, & Chapman, 2003;Williams, Ward, Knowles, & Smeeton, 2002).…”