Amount of accumulated deliberate practice distinguishes more from less accomplished musicians¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · review r2 · q2
Currency · newest study 2005 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person
Evidence quality · No study behind this claim is a peer-reviewed article with a DOI: it rests on a source with no registered publication record (a web page, book or unpublished report). It is kept because 3 design pages cite it; treat it as a lead to check, not an established finding.

Subclaims¶

q2 i? By age 20 the best musicians had accumulated over 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, exceeding two less accomplished expert groups and amateur pianists. → Ericsson 2005

Evidence¶

Ericsson 2005¶

Ericsson, K. A., Nandagopal, K., & Roring, R. W. (2005). Giftedness viewed from the expert-performance perspective. Journal for the Education of the Gifted, 28(3/4). https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ746057

q2 · i? · the article prints no effect size for this finding · review · r2

Retrospective-interview and diary study of musicians at the Berlin music academy (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer, 1993, as reported here). Differences in "deliberate practice" time were "reliably observable before their admittance to the academy at around age 18."

"By the age of 20, the best musicians had spent more than 10,000 hours practicing, which is 2,500 to 5,000 hours more than the two less accomplished groups of expert musicians, respectively, and 8,000 hours more than amateur pianists of the same age"

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Deliberate practice research is largely correlational with large unexplained variability in accumulated practice hours — related
• Accumulated deliberate practice is associated with performance, explaining a domain-dependent share of its variance: about a quarter in games, 4% in education and under 1% in professions — related
• Historical increases in peak performance contradict fixed innate upper limits — related
• Deliberate practice can expand short-term memory capacity beyond the conventional seven-item limit — related
• Whether EF gains are seen depends on the amount of time children spend doggedly practicing and pushing themselves to improve — related