My seven-year-old daughter came home from school a few days ago with an important message from her teacher. “Practice doesn’t actually make perfect,” she informed me. Mindless repetition, going through the motions, hurrying through exercises to get them done more quickly—none of this will help you master the intricacies of, say, getting the letter j to dip below the line and face in the right direction.
The same is true, of course, in other fields like music and sports. But figuring out how to practice better is tricky and has been the topic of long-running debates—think, for example, of the controversy around the concept of “deliberate practice” and the 10,000-hour rule. A new paper in the Journal of Sports Sciences, from Mark Williams of the Institute of Human and Machine Cognition in Florida and Nicola Hodges of the University of British Columbia, digs into the intricacies of skill acquisition research to extract five key principles for coaches and athletes.
Balance Performance and Learning
Here’s one model of coaching: provide lots of detailed instruction with plenty of feedback, and focus on…
