Because people in this thread are (as usually) unable to read the article before commenting, here the relevant excerpt: > But according to a new study publish

Because people in this thread are (as usually) unable to read the article before commenting, here the relevant excerpt: > But according to a new study published in Royal Society: Open Science that attempted to replicate the findings of the original, practice alone doesn't account for mastery. In the study, deliberate practice only accounted for a quarter percentage of the skills difference, which doesn't account for what makes someone an expert. > Brooke Macnamara, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve University, and researcher Megha Maitra interviewed three groups of 13 violinists, each rated as less accomplished, good, and best. The violinists were told to keep a diary to log practice hours, and those hours were then tallied. While the less accomplished violinists had logged an estimated 6,000 hours by age 20, the good and best had both logged around 11,000 hours. > That is to say: The good and best violinists saw no huge difference, as opposed to the not so good violinists, who didn't practice as much. The implication: practice didn't account for all the differences in performance. And the abstract: > We sought to replicate Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer's (Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer 1993 Psychol. Rev.100, 363–406) seminal study on deliberate practice. Ericsson et al. found that differences in retrospective estimates of accumulated amounts of deliberate practice corresponded to each skill level of student violinists. They concluded, ‘individual differences in ultimate performance can largely be accounted for by differential amounts of past and current levels of practice’ (p. 392). We reproduced the methodology with notable exceptions, namely (i) employing a double-blind procedure, (ii) conducting analyses better suited to the study design, and (iii) testing previously unanswered questions about teacher-designed practice—that is, we examined the way Ericsson et al. operationalized deliberate practice (practice alone), and their theoretical but previously unmeasured definition of deliberate practice (teacher-designed practice), and compared them. We did not replicate the core finding that accumulated amounts of deliberate practice corresponded to each skill level. Overall, the size of the effect was substantial, but considerably smaller than the original study's effect size. Teacher-designed practice was perceived as less relevant to improving performance on the violin than practice alone. Further, amount of teacher-designed practice did not account for more variance in performance than amount of practice alone. Implications for the deliberate practice theory are discussed.