I am reading Ericson’s “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance” which you linked to in your spaced repetition review. It’s quite interesting but seems to focus mostly on expert skill which doesn’t seem that useful for most people. Do you know if there is an experimental literature on the more general topic of “skill acquisition and improvement”? Literature that deals with questions like if I’m trying to learn to do and understand math proofs easily or to learn to type correctly and efficiently or learning to do literature reviews well what are the strategies that I should expect to work well?
Since I am currently trying to do skill acquisition along several fronts getting a lit review on this topic is very attractive to me. If you need papers you don’t have access to, please email me as I have university library website access and will gladly search for them.
I’m afraid I can’t since I’ve only read part-way through it. The best I can say is read the first chapter or the table of contents and look at the ones that look interesting.
Oh sorry, I do strongly suspect that deliberate practice is useful for skill improvement from at low to moderate levels, I am just curious what kinds are best and interested in seeing more experimental results (though maybe ericsson does this, I haven’t finished).
I am reading Ericson’s “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance” which you linked to in your spaced repetition review. It’s quite interesting but seems to focus mostly on expert skill which doesn’t seem that useful for most people. Do you know if there is an experimental literature on the more general topic of “skill acquisition and improvement”? Literature that deals with questions like if I’m trying to learn to do and understand math proofs easily or to learn to type correctly and efficiently or learning to do literature reviews well what are the strategies that I should expect to work well?
(I think you may be underestimating the value of deliberate practice, but if you don’t like that, read the Handbook as well.)
Funnily enough, I just linked someone on IRC about that topic… I plan to start with page 43 of http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2011/RAND_MG1120.pdf and see where the citations lead me.
Since I am currently trying to do skill acquisition along several fronts getting a lit review on this topic is very attractive to me. If you need papers you don’t have access to, please email me as I have university library website access and will gladly search for them.
The Handbook is at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/cambridge-expertise.pdf BTW.
That is a huge document. Could you provide a useful pointer or two inside of it for useful findings for autodidacts?
I’m afraid I can’t since I’ve only read part-way through it. The best I can say is read the first chapter or the table of contents and look at the ones that look interesting.
Thanks!
Oh sorry, I do strongly suspect that deliberate practice is useful for skill improvement from at low to moderate levels, I am just curious what kinds are best and interested in seeing more experimental results (though maybe ericsson does this, I haven’t finished).