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"It completely ignores the possibility that the behavioral difference might be caused by a difference in ability, rather than the behavior changing the ability."

Exactly why I clicked the comment link. The differences in behavior could also be caused by a difference in psychology between students. e.g. the elite group love what they do and the other group don't. Which could indicate why the other group spread their practice throughout the day - because they're procrastinating all day long.

No, I don't think so.

I love what I do (my hobby - swing dancing). I do it for 3-5 hours a day (after work). I would improve much faster if I danced less, spent most of the time doing hard work (cleaning my moves, learning more moves, more cardio, ...) and rested more.

Right now I'm always on a tired state, and improving quite well, but finding myself lacking in a lot of ways. When I take a break my improvement is greatly enhanced.

My thinking was also along the lines of procrastination vs. discipline, though love of the activity may or may not be correlated strongly.

What it may come down to is simply strength of self-discipline. What separates the achievers from the middle-of-the-roaders is self-control. The classic "marshmallow experiment"[1] would seem to bear this out.

[1]A famous longitudinal, social-psychology experiment in which children were offered a marshmallow (or a cookie, depending on which study), and told that if they didn't eat it, they could receive a second marshmallow in five minutes. Then they were left alone for five minutes. Most children ate the marshmallow. The ones who didn't -- who waited it out and resisted temptation -- were also the ones who grew up to be more successful, earn higher incomes, and perform higher on tests of intelligence.

> The best the study can say is "if you want music teachers in Berlin to rate you highly, then behave this way".

And this is exactly what they should have done. Take two groups of average players, and tell one of them to change their training style to that of the top players, and then after half a year or a year, check if their scoring improved, relative to that of the control group.

>Also, another problem is that student classification is based on faculty opinion.

This is not strictly true. The elite group were taken from students who were violin performance majors. The non-elite group were taken from students who were education majors but played the violin.

There may be bias from teachers built in, but there's the added component of their assessment of their own abilities as well.

I would hope that those excelling as violin performance majors would actually be better performers than education majors that the instructors thought were poor players, bias or no bias.

This is quite important. You'll probably have the brightest kids isolated from the group and practicing at their own pace with their own rules and thinking.

Keep in mind the context-this isn't the first, second, or even tenth study that Cal has posted arguing that intensely focused periods of work are more beneficial than working the same number of hours but spread throughout the day.

For Cal's readers, this article isn't presenting a new argument. It's one more example in a long line supporting his overall thesis.

Yes. You could also say that the study shows how students behave when you tell them they're average. I believe there was another study that showed how a good music student could be turned into a bad music student just by telling him he was bad.

I do believe the results of the study is about right.. there's also an awesome book on the topic of deliberate practice called "talent is overrated".

Cheers, Daniel

how do you measure musical ability other than by expert assessment ? don't say "can play X notes per second".

All assessment of music ability is subjective. However, you can make it double blind. The students don't know they are being evaluated, and the evaluators don't know who is playing when they make their evaluations.

That would measure "subjective music ability".