The Myth of Massed Practice (opens in new tab)

The title is link-baity and overreaching, but the article itself is actually good. It's a shame.

The author misses Gladwells premise from go. He said deliberate, not obsessive. His discussion was specifically focused on variance of experience and learning over that time.

Malcolm specifically said that "it takes 10000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve mastery."

There are two component here: 1) 10000 hours and 2) deliberate practice.

What op present us are "you can ditch 10000 hours because deliberate practice is enough" but when you go through the article it shows that all test subject were trained for very narrow set of mastery for short time period (bean bag tossing, microsurgey) or very wide set of mastery for long period of time (football play)

There is no such myth. Until seeing this headline (which is linkbait, even after the title change by dang of the HN moderation team), I had never seen the term "massed practice." That's not the term in the scientific literature on the development of expertise. The term in that literature is "deliberate practice," and what deliberate practice is gets a lot of detailed description in that literature.[1] Even the example at the beginning of the article is contrary to the spirit of the deliberate practice literature, which makes me wonder how well they've really thought about the prior literature.

The byline of this article is interesting: "Peter C. Brown is a writer and novelist in St. Paul, Minn.; Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel are professors of psychology at Washington University in St. Louis." That looks to me like two professors of psychology were hacked off that they weren't getting as much attention as the originators of the deliberate practice research, so they decided to hire a ghostwriter to help them write a popular book. (I could be mistaken about how this collaboration originated.) Anyway, the book is gaining some favorable reviews[2] (with the help of their university press office?[3]), so maybe it will be worth a read for us even thought it isn't really a response to what this excerpt suggests it's a response to. Another excerpt from the book[4] has actionable advice that is quite good.

[1] http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=%22deliberate+prac...

[2] http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/books/make-it-stick-th...

http://blog.coreknowledge.org/tag/henry-l-roediger/

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/is-america/201404/test-p...

[3] http://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/26780.aspx

[4] http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2014/03/09/how-learn-bet...