Thank you for sharing this. I think you're asking good questions at the end. Personally, I find myself skeptical about studies like this, and specifically about the way that they reframe the real work of learning in more measurable but less meaningful forms. "Deliberate practice was operationally defined simply as the amount of time students chose to spend on-task versus off-task." OK, but isn't deliberate practice more than a matter of which screen you're staring at? And doesn't a truly "wise intervention" entail more than infodumping a module of text and video content?
Part of my concern is the way that what is measurable becomes what is packageable becomes what is prescribeable, so that we end up with school systems adapting a Deliberate Practice Curriculum that's really just a reskinned form of rote learning, while the actually meaningful work of learning and teaching gets denatured away in the standardization process.
As you saw at the end of the post, I have my questions about that operationalization of "deliberate practice". However I think it kind of works here, because the subjects were in a controlled environment where they could do only one of two things: Work on the math problems which were set up to follow the principles of deliberate practice (I may not have described that Deliberate Practice Task as well as I could have -- check the original paper for more) or they could look at Facebook. I also believe the intervention itself was more than an infodump -- students were doing activities, too, for example the letter-writing activity (designed with a psychological framework in mind to help the students writing the letter believe in deliberate practice more deeply -- again there's more on this in the original article).
What's really missing here, is how instructors followed up on the original intervention. That's something actually not in the scope of the study since it wasn't done in an actual class. That's my point at the end -- one of these interventions seems best situated at the start of a semester to introduce a common language and framework around deliberate practice and then the hard work of getting it to happen falls to Helpful Feedback.
Thank you for sharing this. I think you're asking good questions at the end. Personally, I find myself skeptical about studies like this, and specifically about the way that they reframe the real work of learning in more measurable but less meaningful forms. "Deliberate practice was operationally defined simply as the amount of time students chose to spend on-task versus off-task." OK, but isn't deliberate practice more than a matter of which screen you're staring at? And doesn't a truly "wise intervention" entail more than infodumping a module of text and video content?
Part of my concern is the way that what is measurable becomes what is packageable becomes what is prescribeable, so that we end up with school systems adapting a Deliberate Practice Curriculum that's really just a reskinned form of rote learning, while the actually meaningful work of learning and teaching gets denatured away in the standardization process.
As you saw at the end of the post, I have my questions about that operationalization of "deliberate practice". However I think it kind of works here, because the subjects were in a controlled environment where they could do only one of two things: Work on the math problems which were set up to follow the principles of deliberate practice (I may not have described that Deliberate Practice Task as well as I could have -- check the original paper for more) or they could look at Facebook. I also believe the intervention itself was more than an infodump -- students were doing activities, too, for example the letter-writing activity (designed with a psychological framework in mind to help the students writing the letter believe in deliberate practice more deeply -- again there's more on this in the original article).
What's really missing here, is how instructors followed up on the original intervention. That's something actually not in the scope of the study since it wasn't done in an actual class. That's my point at the end -- one of these interventions seems best situated at the start of a semester to introduce a common language and framework around deliberate practice and then the hard work of getting it to happen falls to Helpful Feedback.