PART 2 READING PASSAGE 2

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.

THE BIRTH OF THE 10,000-HOUR RULE

A study on violinists in the early 1990s inspired the idea that 10,000 hours of practice is the key to success

A. The so-called 10,000-hour rule can be traced back to a 1993 paper, ‘The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance’, co-authored by a Swedish psychologist and a US psychological scientist. The paper is one of the most cited in its field. Its most striking claim is that the difference between expert performers and normal adults is not due to innate talent, but rather is a reflection of the amount of deliberate practice they have undergone. ‘Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years,’ the authors wrote. They concluded: ‘The maximal level of performance for individuals in a given domain is not attained automatically as a function of extended experience, but the level of performance can be increased even by highly experienced individuals as a result of deliberate efforts to improve.’

B. The study looked at three groups of violinists at the Music Academy of West Berlin, in Germany. The authors set out to find out what had caused the ‘best’ violinists to be better than the merely ‘good’ ones, who were in turn better than the ‘least accomplished’ ones. All of the violinists were asked how much they had practised, alone, with a teacher, and with others, every week, ever since they had first picked up a violin. What they found was that by the age of 20, the best violinists had practised an average of 10,000 hours, the good ones had practised 8,000 hours, and the least skilled had practised 4,000 hours. The psychologists concluded that what mattered was not the time spent obtaining any old experience, but the amount of time spent on ‘deliberate practice’, which they defined as an effortful activity designed to improve individual target performance. The authors also noted that the most accomplished individuals in their study had each followed the same learning structure, and had all acquired their skills in a similar way: ‘All of the expert violinists had started playing at approximately five years of age, and had selected a music teacher who was a violinist. All of them had been admitted to a music academy by eight years of age, where they had been taught by skillful violin teachers. All of them had started solo practice at around the age of eight. All of them had been rated very highly by their violin teachers at the music academy, and had given their first public performance at around the age of eight.’

C. The theory of deliberate practice was popularised by the writer Malcolm Gladwell, who argued that talent is irrelevant to performance in his book Outliers, published in 2008. ‘The striking thing about Ericsson’s study is that he and his colleagues couldn’t find any “naturals”, musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practising a fraction of the time their peers did. Nor could they find any “grinds”, people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn’t have what it takes to break the top ranks,’ he wrote. ‘Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.’

D. But while Ericsson and his colleagues had found a correlation between the number of hours spent on deliberate practice and the level of expertise achieved, their research didn’t determine whether practice was the cause of that expertise. The idea that 10,000 hours of practice will make you an expert is appealing, not least because it suggests that anyone can achieve anything if they just work hard enough. But while practice is undeniably important, it is not the only factor that contributes to performance. In 2014, a group of psychologists led by Brooke Macnamara of Princeton University re-analysed data from all of the studies they could find on the relationship between deliberate practice and performance in various domains, including music, sports and education, and estimated that the average amount that practice contributes to mastery of these is just 12 percent. That leaves a lot of the variance in expert performance unexplained, which means factors other than practice must be involved.

E. In a rejoinder, Ericsson argues that Macnamara’s analysis actually showed the opposite of what she claimed. In each of the domains she looked at, he says, practice was the single most important factor in predicting a person’s level of expertise. The problem, he argues, is that Macnamara’s analysis looked at the total number of hours of practice undertaken by the participants in the studies she reviewed, rather than the number of hours of deliberate practice. ‘The paper is important because it shows that the amount of time with relevant experience is not a good predictor of attained performance,’ he says. ‘But it does not invalidate the body of research on deliberate practice, nor its utility as the most important predictor of expertise.’