A recent CBC news post reveals that Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN), as well as other Canadian universities, have discovered that a musical background is a good predictor of success for medical students. Why? Constant, continual improvement is central to being a musician and this skill is crucial and transferable for future physicians. The study of music helps the learner to:
Avoid complacency
Constantly reassess what you are doing
Reflect on how to continually get better
Doctors have to continually reflect on how they can improve and continually get better especially if they are surgeons.
This post also confirms the research on deliberate practice by Anders Ericsson. According to Ericsson (2016), deliberate practice is much different than traditional practice because instead of just doing the same thing over and over again the learner focuses on the continual pursuit of personal improvement that is directed by well-defined, specific goals and continuous feedback that drives incremental gains. A skill or ability that a person is working towards is broken down into small enough components where feedback on the performance is used to help the learner make small adjustments that will lead to incremental improvements. The feedback can come from a teacher, mentor, or coach who observes where the adjustments need to be made. The continuous feedback can also come from peers, video, timing devices and other technologies that can provide the learner data that helps map their progress. As the learner gains experience and expertise they can also are able to see where they need to make the adjustments themselves—this is one of the key differences between amateurs and experts.
Another key aspect of deliberate pracitices is that the learner must constantly practices outside their comfort zone. Just far enough to push the boundries but not so far to cause fear and immeidate failure. This is where a few percentage points of pushing the boundry can cointribute the continous incremental gains that are so important to improvement. These incrimetnal gains can add up over time to enable one become an expert. Ericsson’s research into how long it takes one to become an expert was miscontrued and popularized by Malcom Gladwell in his 2008 book Outliers: The Story of Success where he posited the10,000-Hour Rule. Gladwell suggested that the key to achieving world-class expertise in any skill simply practicing the correct way, for a total of around 10,000 hours. Ericsson refuted Gladwell’s claims and pointed out that in some disciplines expertise can be achieved in as short as 5,000 hours and in other,s true expertise is achieved in over 20,000 hours. Furthermore, attaining the level of expertise is only the beginning because the world’s best continue their discipline of deliterate practice throughout their tenure of being at the top of their field. Regardless of how much time is conmitted, the key is deliberate practices with continual feedback that leads toward incremental gains.
Getting back to the story about musicians becoming good physicians because of their ability continually improve it is important for us to understand as educators are that there has to be a purpose for one to commit years of deliberate practice. Whether it is to become a Chessmaster, a world-class musician, a world-class athlete or to be the leader in a particular field the drive toward this end goal only happens if the goal is real world or authentic.
It takes real world or authentic learning opportunities to provide the context for learning and to drive the intrinsic motivation for the learner to persist in making those continuous incremental improvements over time. This is why it is so important as educators to recognize we must not only prepare our learners for the test but we need to prepare them for life. We can do so by creating a significant learning environment in which we give our learners choice ownership, and voice through authentic learning opportunities – the CLSE+COVA framework.
We need to continually ask – are we preparing them for the test or are we preparing them for life.
Ericsson, A., & Pool, R. (2016). Peak: Secrets from the new science of expertise. New York, NY: Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: The story of success. New York: Little, Brown and Co.
My son Caleb has been training for the 2018 DownHill Mountain Bike racing season and since it is his first year to compete as an Elite or Pro racer in the BC Cup and NorthWest cup he has been putting in some extra effort. He is also planning on competing in some Freeride competitions (Downhill plus stunts) so he is also working hard to add some new stunts to his repertoire of skills. I am always looking for ways to support Caleb’s training so I was planning on taking him and a few of his training partners out to do some training runs on one on one of the mountains on the North Shore the other day but the weather did not cooperate. We woke up to about 6 inches of snow and since we live at the base of the mountain you can imagine how much more snow there is as you go up in elevation.
An advantage of living in one of the most Mountain bike rider friendly locations in North America is that in addition to some of the best outdoor riding locations we also have indoor training facilities. Caleb and I spent the afternoon at the AiReCenter in a neighboring community. The following pictures reveal the scale training facility and the intensity of Caleb’s training:
In addition to major wooden features, the facility has 3 full lines of dirt jumps including a Pro Line with wooden kickers (launch ramps).
The following starting point/ramp should give you context for how big and intense the facility is:
The Pro Line dirt jumps are a great place to practice tailwhips, flips and many other stunts that Caleb will be using in FreeRide competitions:
Fortunately, one can practice backflips on the airbag or on a smaller ramp setup before doing the stunts on the dirt:
So what does Caleb’s training for his upcoming season have to do with learning? Or perhaps a better question is what can we learn about learning from Caleb’s training experience. The 20 hours a week of indoor training at the AiReCenter can be directly applied to Freeride but many of the bike control skills can also have a positive impact on racing. For example, a DH Racer spends a significant amount of time making split-second adjustments while in the air or as they skim the surface as they are propelled over the trail. The continual adjustments that Caleb makes as he repeatedly hits the dirt jump lines or performs black flips, tailwhips, and other stunts are very similar to the adjustments that he has to make in real time on a race or Freeride course. The better the bike control a rider has the more confident they are and the better equipped they are to deal with the challenges each unique course has to offer. The fastest racers also the best riders so the more diverse a rider’s skills the better they can perform in a race or Freeride course.
One of the most important lessons that Caleb has learned this past year in training and that we can also learn from is transfer. Being able to move from theory to practice or more specifically being able to apply knowledge or a skill from one instance to another is a crucial aspect of transfer. The skills and confidence that Caleb builds at the AiReCenter are transferable to his regular training runs and ulimate to his racing. In the next few weeks, Caleb is planning to move off his dirt jump bike and onto his DH race bike at the AiReCenter to practice his backflips and tailwhips so that when he is riding on the actual trails he can perform these stunts with greater confidence and ultimately limit the risk of injury. Downhill Racing and Freeride are rightly called extreme sports because the riders are always on the verge of serious injury. Reducing the risk of injury is so important to the long-term success of the rider and to the peace of mind of the rider’s parents.
On our way home from the AiReCenter Caleb informed me that he is ready for this upcoming season and is feeling very confident in his ability. The additional 20 hours a week of indoor training he has added to all this other training is paying off and in another three months when the season starts Caleb is confident that he will be best prepared he has ever been. He is also recognizing how important it is to build his skills slowly through consistent deliberate practice. He is breaking down each aspect of his stunts and is working on each component to make sure that he has addressed all the necessary factors. The continual and repetitive aspect of performing on the edge of one’s ability and then making slight but cumulative adjustments is the essence of deliberate practice. Making those small and cumulative adjustments are what separates the experts from the amateurs and in the case of extreme sports, it is what will keep an athlete out of the hospital–which is also a good thing for the athlete and his family.
The other morning a colleague sent me the tweet from Daniel Pink “The secret to learning is overlearning…” which pointed to Cari Romm’s (2017) New York Magazine post To Truly Learn Something, Study Until You’ve Mastered It — and Then Keep Studying. Since I am a learning theorist and am always searching for “the secret to learning” and since Pink’s book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us is still one of my favorite books on motivation I started down the rabbit trail by reviewing Romm’s article in the Science of Us section of the blog. The reason I used the terms “started down the rabbit trail” and also used “reviewed” rather the “read” is very significant because in order to get to the truth or the actual facts about what these various people were stating I ended up looking at several other magazine/blog posts and then a few journal articles and went back to a couple of books to get the full story and really see what the facts are. While I am referring to this process of going down the rabbit trail what I am really referring to is simply doing the due diligence of analytical thinking and getting to the facts by going back to the primary sources to see what is really being said. Let me explain why this is so important and why we need to encourage everyone to verify what is being said and written.
Getting back to Romm’s post about the secret to learning, the headline alone would suggest that the article is about learning. Romm’s opening statement also points to and questions deliberate practice and elite performance:
…On its own, deliberate practice isn’t enough to turn you into an elite performer, whether you’re talking about boosting your athletic prowess or learning to play the violin.
Since I have been studying Anders Ericsson’s research into deliberate practice for many years I was intrigued by this opening statement and immediately reviewed the short post and followed the link to the post that Romm had pointed to in her opening. Before I deal with this second stop on the rabbit trail I need to explain that Romm’s generalization did not line up with the findings of the article Overlearning hyperstabilizes a skill by rapidly making neurochemical processing inhibitory-dominant in Nature Neuroscience (2017) she referred to and while she used the term learning what the article was referring to was actually training and memorization. This is where we get into a problem that can be resolved with clearly defining terms. How is the term “learning” really being used?
The learning that the authors of the Nature article referred to was in the context of a learned response to a stimulus. They also referred to training and memorization and their primary conclusion was that after a training event or session the learned stimulus-response needs to be stabilized or reinforced in order to prevent it from being disrupted by a new learned response. To prevent this loss you need to spend a minimum of 20 more minutes after you have reached the training plateau to reinforce the effect of training – which they referred to as overlearning. The authors of the Nature article (2017) were researching how people responded to a visual-recognition task by asking the participants to identify patterns in images and then measured the concentrations of excitatory and inhibitory neuro-transmitter levels in the visual areas of the brain. In a nutshell these researchers have identified the biological reaction in the brain that reinforces a conditioned response by increasing the excitatory neuro-transmitters and they have generalized that overlearning rapidly and strongly hyperstabilizes this biological reaction (Shibata et al., 2017). While they have also gone as far as to generalize that overlearning will help you retain your training or memorization they do qualify that their work has only gone as far as exploring this within the visual context.
While there are elements of data to support Romm’s headline the generalization – to truly learn something you need to study until you master it and then keep on studying is not correct. A more accurate claim would be – to truly memorize something you need to study until you master it and then keep on studying. There is a big difference between memorizing something and learning something. Learning is making meaningful connections by connecting new information or ideas with existing information or ideas to come to know something new. While memorization plays a role in the learning process it is only part of the process and all too often is used by people to simply regurgitate information. Richard Feynman (2014) reminds us that there is a difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
I firmly believe that Romm has no malicious intent in or intentionally wanted to mislead people but this where it is our responsibility to analyze and assess the author’s argument for validity. While there are elements of truth in her generalization of benefits of studying the assertions of the opening statement “deliberate practice isn’t enough” are actually misleading and unfortunately false.
This leads us further down the rabbit trail. Rather than look at primary sources and Anders Ericsson’s actual research into deliberate practice Romm points and links to another Science of Us blog post 10,000 Hours of Deliberate Practice Aren’t Going to Get You Olympic Gold by Drake Baer (2017). Unfortunately for Romm, Baer isn’t much better at research and doesn’t bother by going to the primary sources either to really find out the what he is referring to as deliberate practice or the 10,000-hour rule. Baer mistakenly points to Galdwell’s book Outliers and suggests that deliberate practice is simply a matter of putting in 10,000 of hard work and links to his own 2013 FastCompany article that confirms that you just need to put in the time. To be fair to Baer he does suggest in that you need to work on the hard parts to get better but only refers to a BrainPickings article (Popova, 2013) rather than a primary source. To add an appeal to authority Baer also points to the Karl Smith’s (2016) Scientific America blog post No One Wins Gold for Practicing the Most which also gets it wrong. While Smith does point to Macnamara, Hambrick, and Oswald’s (2014) research article Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions: A Meta-Analysis in Psychological Science to support his argument I am relatively certain he hasn’t read the full article or even looked at Ericsson’s original research or most recent work because he incorrectly defines deliberate practice and overemphasizes the 10,000 hour aspect.
If you look at Ericsson’s research or his latest book Peak: Secrets from the new science of expertise (2016) which summarizes all his work on deliberate practice you will find that the 10,000-hour rule that Gladwell popularized is actually false. Ericsson (2016) actually stated that depending on the discipline and various other factors a rudimentary level of expertise could be reached after one put in 7500 – 15,000 hours. This is a big range and Gladwell generalized this idea by simply picking the 10,000 point because it would be easier to remember. Ericsson (2016) also points out that this is just the starting point of expertise and many world-class performers have put in more than 20,000 more hours to be the best. The 10,000-hour rule is not a rule but a popular myth and authors like Romm and Baer mistakenly refer to this myth.
But there is an even bigger problem with the arguments of bloggers Romm, Baer, Smith and the researchers Macnamara, Hambrick, and Oswald. They all define deliberate practice incorrectly. Deliberate practice is not just putting in the time or working harder or pushing oneself further, nor is it just using structured practice. Ericsson (2016) is quite clear when he states that just practicing countless hour after hour, in the same way, will not help one improve and in many instances this repetitive practice, even if it has some form of structure, can potentially degrade performance. It is not the total hours or the fact that there is a structure that matters it is how one practices in those hours and what that structure is that matters.
According to Ericsson (2016) deliberate practice involves the following four components:
Goals – you have to have a clear vision of what you are working toward or hope to accomplish. Watching or visualizing the activity performed perfectly either in a video of yourself or another expert will help you get to your goals.
Focus – you have to break down the activity into smaller chunks and slow down the process to get a higher degree of control and precision. Paradoxically you have to slow down to get smooth enough before you can get faster and better.
Feedback – you have to analyze your performance and look for ways to improve. Most experts have learned to continually error correct and look at and analyze what they are doing with an eye to continuous improvement. This is where coaches, good teachers and even video recordings of your performance come into play. Most novices will require a coach to provide the necessary feedback because they often don’t even know what they need to improve. A cycle of feedback and continuous error correction is the key to deliberate practice
Exit your comfort zone – you have to push yourself beyond your comfort zone order to make improvements. The key is to push just enough to be slightly uncomfortable but not so much that you will fail immediately. Experts have learned what that 3-4 % improvement feels like and to know when they are going to far out of their comfort zone to reach new levels of performance.
Ericsson also points out that experts have a deep set of mental representations of their discipline that make it easy for them to do things that look magical to the average person. Experts have done the mental reps that give them the highest levels of mental representation that enable them to operate at the highest level. This is a combination of mental and physical training at the highest level and is much more than working or practicing hard for 10,000 hours. So at this point in the rabbit trail, I hope one can see that these first few authors really shouldn’t be trusted. It appears that the bloggers Romm and Baer may be more interested in building their following with catchy headlines to promote their writing then they are with the facts. If we can’t trust these authors then who can we trust—the academics? Smith is a Ph.D. candidate who published in the Scientific America blog and the researchers Macnamara, Hambrick, and Oswald are publishing in peer-reviewed journals but can we trust their findings just based their credentials and a perceived higher quality of the publication. Unfortunately, not. Smith didn’t bother looking at the primary sources to get a clear definition of deliberate practice and was too willing to simply run with the notion that deliberate practice involves harder work. If you compare the notion of harder work with the 4 components of deliberate practice listed above it is clear that deliberate practice is much more than hard work.
When you review the work of Macnamara, Hambrick, and Oswald (2014) you will find that they have gone to the primary sources but unfortunately, you will also see that they define deliberate practice as
engagement in structured activities created specifically to improve performance in a domain. (p. 1608)
which is not an accurate definition to use in their meta-analysis. Such a vague definition of deliberate practice not only cast doubts on the authors’ findings that deliberate practice only explained 26% of the variance in performance for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports it calls into question their entire research. The key to deliberate practice is the details of the purposeful goals, focus, feedback while pushing the limits. This is much more than just structure. While Macnamara, Hambrick, and Oswald do confirm that deliberate practice is still important they posit that it is not as important Ericsson argues.
This is where one has to be careful in examining the data, the research methods and exactly what the researchers are looking for. While I have stated earlier that I am calling their findings into question I will also state that it appears that their research is accurate. Let me explain, if you use a very loose definition of deliberate practice and simply point to structured activity then you will get the results that they point to. This is what they found in their meta-analysis. However, if you use the authentic definition of deliberate practice from the primary sources I would argue that there would be a very different result. Macnamara, Hambrick, and Oswald did a very thorough job on some aspects of their research like their methods, their analysis, and coding of the information but their research question was based on an inaccurate or overly broad definition of deliberate practice (Ericsson, 2016b).
So at this point of the rabbit trail, we find out that many of the claims made by numerous authors are simply wrong because they did not go to the original sources and kept referring to other authors who also failed to go to the original sources. And when we finally found some authors who did go to the original sources their claims could not be trusted either because these authors did not use the same definitions that the original authors used.
Who can you trust? Trust yourself. We have the responsibility to verify what we read by reading critically and thinking analytically while looking at the evidence. While I referred to this process of going down the rabbit trail it really is just a matter of seeing if an author has supported what they are saying and can corroborate their statements with external sources. Ideally, the external source should be primary sources. There will always be differences of opinions and biases but if you are objective enough and can look at the facts you should be able to discern what is accurate regardless of your bias. Admitting your bias is also is a good way of assuring your reader that you are attempting to be objective—we all have biases.
In summary, the tweet the other morning led to the above explanation and the examination of the following sources, and the following conclusions. Contrary to the errant claims of several authors who demonstrated very poor research skills the actual facts show:
deliberate practice will help you become an elite performer,
overlearning is great for memorization but memorization itself shouldn’t be mistaken for learning,
the 10,000-hour rule isn’t a rule but a pop culture myth and an interesting rap song.
accurate definition of terms is crucial to valid and reliable research.
This whole process took much more time than I had hoped or expected but if you really want to know then you have to do the due diligence and look at all the facts. There is no a quick fix. The most efficient way is to go back to the primary sources and see what is really being claimed. In the information age, there is an abundance or overload of available information so the need to do this is greater than ever before. Anyone can put anything up on the Internet so we have to be even more diligent than ever before. Unfortunately, the notion of trusted sources is something that we cannot rely on upon anymore, at least not completely. I will go as far as to suggest that there are some sources that I may be more inclined to initially trust but I would still verify. Stating what those sources are is a whole other argument and post. There are just far too many examples of faulty research being exposed and if you consider my example above, all it takes is a definition of terms to be ignored and the results of the research will be inaccurate. Furthermore, we need to be willing to heed the warnings of Chuck Klosterman (2016) who asks the question What If We’re Wrong? If we look how our understanding of science and the world around has progressed in the last several centuries then we should be willing to admit that there may be some things that we hold to be true today that may be false 10, 20, 50 or more years into the future.
We do live in the most amazing time to be a learner. All the world’s information is available to us in the palms of our hands. Because so much information is available we must not only be prepared but be willing to take the time that it takes to critically and analytically assess all the information we are taking in.
References
Baer, D. (2013, October 29). Why “Deliberate Practice” is the only way to keep getting better [Magazine]. Retrieved June 9, 2017, from https://www.fastcompany.com/3020758/leadership-now/why-deliberate-practice-is-the-only-way-to-keep-getting-better
Baer, D. (2016, August 8). 10,000 hours of deliberate practice aren’t going to get you Olympic gold [Blog]. Retrieved June 9, 2017, from http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/08/deliberate-practice-isnt-going-to-get-you-olympic-gold.html
Ericsson, A., & Pool, R. (2016). Peak: Secrets from the new science of expertise. New York, NY: Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Ericsson, K. A. (2016). Summing up hours of any type of practice versus identifying optimal practice activities: Commentary on Macnamara, Moreau, & Hambrick (2016). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(3), 351–354.
Klosterman, C. (2016). But what if we’re wrong?: Thinking about the present as if it were the past. New York, NY: Blue Rider Press.
Macnamara, B. N., Hambrick, D. Z., & Oswald, F. L. (2014). Deliberate practice and performance in music, games, sports, education, and professions a meta-analysis. Psychological Science, 25(8), 1608–1618.
Popova, M. (2013, October 17). The psychology of getting unstuck: How to overcome the “OK Plateau” of performance & personal growth. Retrieved June 9, 2017, from https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/10/17/ok-plateau/
Richard Feynman : Knowing the Name of Something. (2014). [Video file] Retrieved from https://youtu.be/lFIYKmos3-s
Romm, C. (2017, January 31). To truly learn something, study until you’ve mastered It — and then keep going [Blog]. Retrieved June 9, 2017, from http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/01/to-truly-learn-something-study-way-more-than-you-need-to.html
Shibata, K., Sasaki, Y., Bang, J. W., Walsh, E. G., Machizawa, M. G., Tamaki, M., … Watanabe, T. (2017). Overlearning hyperstabilizes a skill by rapidly making neurochemical processing inhibitory-dominant. Nature Neuroscience, 20(3), 470–475.
Smith, K., J. (2016, August 5). No one wins gold for practicing the most. Retrieved June 9, 2017, from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/no-one-wins-gold-for-practicing-the-most/
