Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions: A Meta-Analysis
Brooke Macnamara, David Hambrick and Frederick Oswald pooled 88 studies of deliberate practice and performance. Practice explained a modest share of the differences in performance overall, with the largest shares in games, music and sport and much smaller shares in education and the professions. The practice effect was weaker when practice and performance were measured more precisely, for example with practice logs. The authors conclude that deliberate practice is important but not nearly as important as proponents of the view have claimed, and suggest that the age at which people start and working memory may also matter.
Brooke Macnamara, David Hambrick and Frederick Oswald pooled 88 studies of deliberate practice and performance. Practice explained a modest share of the differences in performance overall, with the largest shares in games, music and sport and much smaller shares in education and the professions. The practice effect was weaker when practice and performance were measured more precisely, for example with practice logs. The authors conclude that deliberate practice is important but not nearly as important as proponents of the view have claimed, and suggest that the age at which people start and working memory may also matter.
Written from the news release of the Association for Psychological Science read 2026-10-26; the paper itself was not read.
What our sources record
Recorded when this source was checked, figures included, with page references and quotation marks removed.
Macnamara, B. N., Hambrick, D. Z., & Oswald, F. L. (2014). Deliberate practice and performance in music, games, sports, education, and professions: A meta-analysis. Psychological Science, 25(8), 1608-1618. doi:10.1177/0956797614535810