Summing Up Hours of Any Type of Practice Versus Identifying Optimal Practice Activities

Abstract

In their original article, Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer (1993) reviewed the evidence concerning the conditions of optimal learning and found that individualized practice with training tasks (selected by a supervising teacher) with a clear performance goal and immediate informative feedback was associated with marked improvement. We found that this type of deliberate practice was prevalent when advanced musicians practice alone and found its accumulated duration related to attained music performance. In contrast, Macnamara, Moreau, and Hambrick’s (2016, this issue) main meta-analysis examines the use of the term deliberate practice to refer to a much broader and less defined concept including virtually any type of sport-specific activity, such as group activities, watching games on television, and even play and competitions. Summing up every hour of any type of practice during an individual’s career implies that the impact of all types of practice activity on performance is equal—an assumption that I show is inconsistent with the evidence. Future research should collect objective measures of representative performance with a longitudinal description of all the changes in different aspects of the performance so that any proximal conditions of deliberate practice related to effective improvements can be identified and analyzed experimentally.