astronomy

K. Anders Ericsson

K. Anders Ericsson is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand K. Anders Ericsson rather than just read about it. In short: K. Anders Ericsson (23 October 1947 – 17 June 2020) was a Swedish psychologist and Conradi Eminent Scholar and Professor of Psychology at Florida State University who was internationally recognized as a researcher in the psychological nature of expertise and human performance.

Key takeaways

K. Anders Ericsson belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect K. Anders Ericsson to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of K. Anders Ericsson from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

K. Anders Ericsson (23 October 1947 – 17 June 2020) was a Swedish psychologist and Conradi Eminent Scholar and Professor of Psychology at Florida State University who was internationally recognized as a researcher in the psychological nature of expertise and human performance. Ericsson studied expert performance in domains such as medicine, music, chess, and sports, focusing exclusively on extended deliberate practice (e.g., high concentration practice beyond one's comfort zone) as a means of how expert performers acquire their superior performance. Critically, Ericsson's program of research served as a direct complement to other research that addresses cognitive ability, personality, interests, and other factors that help researchers understand and predict deliberate practice and expert performance. In a highly cited 1993 paper, Ericsson and colleagues conducted studies in which they concluded that expert violinists derived their talent not from innate abilities but rather from large amounts of deliberate practice over a period of 10 years or more. Canadian journalist Malcolm Gladwell drew upon Ericsson's research to establish his so-called 10,000 hour rule in the book Outliers. Ericsson later wrote that 'this rule...is wrong in several ways'. 10,000 was the average number of deliberate practice hours that the violinists had achieved by age 20, at which point the violinists 'were nowhere near masters'. Furthermore, the number of hours required to become an expert has been demonstrated to vary depending on field. In addition, Gladwell did not differentiate between deliberate practice and other forms of practice.

Career Ericsson received a PhD in 1976 from Stockholm University. With Bill Chase, he developed the Theory of Skilled Memory based on detailed analyses of acquired exceptional memory performance (Chase, W. G., & Ericsson, K. A. (1982). Ericsson's research with Herbert A. Simon on verbal reports of thinking is summarized in a book Protocol Analysis: Verbal Reports as Data, which was revised in 1993. In G. H. Bower (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation, (Vol. 16). New York: Academic Press). One of his most striking experimental results was training a student to have a digit span of more than 100 digits. With Walter Kintsch, he extended this theory into long-term memory to account for the superior working memory of expert performers and memory experts. (Ericsson & Kintsch 1995) In the domain of deliberate practice, Ericsson published an edited book with Jacqui Smith Toward a General Theory of Expertise in 1991 and edited a book The Road to Excellence: The Acquisition of Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports and Games that appeared in 1996, as well as a collection edited with Janet Starkes Expert Performance in Sports: Recent Advances in Research on Sport Expertise in 2003. In 2016 he and Robert Pool published the book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. Ericsson was the co-editor of The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, a volume released in 2006. He was also Fellow of the American Psychological Association.

Publications Anders Ericsson, K; Krampe, Ralf Th; Tesch-Romer, Clemens (1993). "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance". Psychological Review. 100 (3): 363–406. doi:10.1037/0033-295x.100.3.363. Ericsson, Anders K.; Prietula, Michael J.; Cokely, Edward T. (2007). "The Making of an Expert". Harvard Business Review. 85 (July–August 2007): 114–21, 193. PMID 17642130. Ericsson, Anders K.; Roring, Roy W.; Nandagopal, Kiruthiga (2007). "Giftedness and evidence for reproducibly superior performance" (PDF). High Ability Studies. Ericsson, Anders K.; Kintsch, W. (1995). "Long-term working memory". Psychological Review. 102 (2): 211–245. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.102.2.211. PMID 7740089. Ericsson, K. Anders (2003). "The Search for General Abilities and Basic Capacities: Theoretical Implications from the Modifiability and Complexity of Mechanisms Mediating Expert Performance". In Sternberg, Robert J.; Grigorenko, Elena L. (eds.). The Psychology of Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 93–125. ISBN 978-0-521-00776-4. Charness, Neil; Feltovich, Paul J.; Hoffman, Robert R.; Ericsson, K. Anders, eds. (2006). The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521840972. Ericsson, Anders; Pool, Robert (2016). Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 978-0544456235.

Notes and references

External links Florida State University faculty profile Archived 2016-07-27 at the Wayback Machine

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with K. Anders Ericsson

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what K. Anders Ericsson claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to K. Anders Ericsson before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about K. Anders Ericsson ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of K. Anders Ericsson

In research: K. Anders Ericsson appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses K. Anders Ericsson in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: K. Anders Ericsson is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1947 births, 2020 deaths, Fellows of the American Psychological Association, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for K. Anders Ericsson outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study K. Anders Ericsson in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what K. Anders Ericsson means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain K. Anders Ericsson out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is K. Anders Ericsson in simple terms?

Why does K. Anders Ericsson matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study K. Anders Ericsson?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on K. Anders Ericsson.