Re: 10 years and 10,000 hours = elite level?

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Members may enjoy reading the below extracts:

Expert Performance and Deliberate Practice

An updated excerpt from sson (2000)

http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.exp.perf.html

EXPERTISE refers to the mechanisms underlying the

superior achievement of an expert, i.e. " one who has acquired special

skill in or knowledge of a particular subjects through professional

training and practical experience " (Webster's dictionary, 1976, p.

800). The term expert is used to describe highly experienced

professionals such as medical doctors, accountants, teachers and

scientists, but has been expanded to include any individual who

attained their superior performance by instruction and extended

practice: highly skilled performers in the arts, such as music,

painting and writing, sports, such as swimming, running and golf and

games, such as bridge and chess.

When experts exhibit their superior performance in public

their behavior looks so effortless and natural that we are tempted to

attribute it to special talents. Although a certain amount of

knowledge and training seems necessary, the role of acquired skill

for the highest levels of achievement has traditionally been

minimized. However, when scientists began measuring the experts'

supposedly superior powers of speed, memory and intelligence with

psychometric tests, no general superiority was found --the

demonstrated superiority was domain specific. For example, the

superiority of the chess experts' memory was constrained to regular

chess positions and did not generalize to other types of materials

(Djakow, Petrowski & Rudik, 1927). Not even IQ could distinguish the

best among chessplayers (Doll & Mayr, 1987) nor the most successful

and creative among artists and scientists (, 1975). In a recent

review, sson and Lehmann (1996) found that (1) measures of

general basic capacities do not predict success in a domain, (2) the

superior performance of experts is often very domain specific and

transfer outside their narrow area of expertise is surprisingly

limited and (3) systematic differences between experts and less

proficient individuals nearly always reflect attributes acquired by

the experts during their lengthy training.

In a pioneering empirical study of the thought processes

mediating the highest levels of performance, de Groot (1946/1978)

instructed expert and world-class chessplayers to think aloud while

they selected their next move for an unfamiliar chess position. The

world-class players did not differ in the speed of their thoughts or

the size of their basic memory capacity, and their ability to

recognize promising potential moves was based on their extensive

experience and knowledge of patterns in chess. In their influential

theory of expertise, Chase and Simon (1973; Simon & Chase, 1973)

proposed that experts with extended experience acquire a larger

number of more complex patterns and use these new patterns to store

knowledge about which actions should be taken in similar situations.

According to this influential theory, expert performance

is viewed as an extreme case of skill acquisition (Proctor & Dutta,

1995; Richman, Gobet, Staszewski & Simon, 1996; VanLehn, 1996) and as

the final result of the gradual improvement of performance during

extended experience in a domain. Furthermore, the postulated central

role of acquired knowledge has encouraged efforts to extract experts'

knowledge so that computer scientists can build expert systems that

would allow a computer to act as an expert (Hoffman, 1992).

Among investigators of expertise, it has generally been

assumed that the performance of experts improved as a direct function

of increases in their knowledge through training and extended

experience. However, recent studies show that there are, at least,

some domains where " experts " perform no better then less trained

individuals (cf. outcomes of therapy by clinical psychologists,

Dawes, 1994) and that sometimes experts' decisions are no more

accurate than beginners' decisions and simple decision aids (Camerer

& , 1991; Bolger & , 1992). Most individuals who start

as active professionals or as beginners in a domain change their

behavior and increase their performance for a limited time until they

reach an acceptable level. Beyond this point, however, further

improvements appear to be unpredictable and the number of years of

work and leisure experience in a domain is a poor predictor of

attained performance (sson & Lehmann, 1996). Hence, continued

improvements (changes) in achievement are not automatic consequences

of more experience and in those domains where performance

consistently increases aspiring experts seek out particular kinds of

experience, that is deliberate practice (sson, Krampe & Tesch-

Römer, 1993)--activities designed, typically by a teacher, for the

sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an

individual's performance. For example, the critical difference

between expert musicians differing in the level of attained solo

performance concerned the amounts of time they had spent in solitary

practice during their music development, which totaled around 10,000

hours by age 20 for the best experts, around 5,000 hours for the

least accomplished expert musicians and only 2,000 hours for serious

amateur pianists. More generally, the accumulated amount of

deliberate practice is closely related to the attained level of

performance of many types of experts, such as musicians (sson et

al., 1993; Sloboda, et al., 1996), chessplayers (Charness, Krampe &

Mayr, 1996) and athletes (Starkes et al., 1996).

The recent advances in our understanding of the complex

representations, knowledge and skills that mediate the superior

performance of experts derive primarily from studies where experts

are instructed to think aloud while completing representative tasks

in their domains, such as chess, music, physics, sports and medicine

(Chi, Glaser & Farr, 1988; sson & , 1991; Starkes & Allard,

1993). For appropriate challenging problems experts don't just

automatically extract patterns and retrieve their response directly

from memory. Instead they select the relevant information and encode

it in special representations in working memory that allow planning,

evaluation and reasoning about alternative courses of action

(sson & Lehmann, 1996). Hence, the difference between experts and

less skilled subjects is not merely a matter of the amount and

complexity of the accumulated knowledge; it also reflects qualitative

differences in the organization of knowledge and its representation

(Chi, Glaser & Rees, 1982). Experts' knowledge is encoded around key

domain-related concepts and solution procedures that allow rapid and

reliable retrieval whenever stored information is relevant. Less

skilled subjects' knowledge, in contrast, is encoded using everyday

concepts that make the retrieval of even their limited relevant

knowledge difficult and unreliable. Furthermore, experts have

acquired domain-specific memory skills that allow them to rely on

long-term memory (Long-Term Working Memory, sson & Kintsch, 1995)

to dramatically expand the amount of information that can be kept

accessible during planning and during reasoning about alternative

courses of action. The superior quality of the experts' mental

representations allow them to adapt rapidly to changing circumstances

and anticipate future events in advance. The same acquired

representations appear to be essential for experts' ability to

monitor and evaluate their own performance (sson, 1996; Glaser,

1996) so they can keep improving their own performance by designing

their own training and assimilating new knowledge.

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Carruthers

Wakefield, UK