Deliberate performance: Accelerating expertise in natural settings

Deliberate practice—meaning drill‐like practice under the direction of a coach—is key to developing expertise in sports and music. But working professionals and businesspeople typically have no time for practice. We propose deliberate performance as a type of practice that professionals and businesspeople can pursue while they work as a way to accelerate their progression to becoming experts. Four deliberate performance exercises are described: estimation, experimentation, extrapolation, and explanation.     

Early Maternal Employment and Children's Vocabulary and Inductive Reasoning Ability: A Dynamic Approach

This study investigates the relationship between early maternal employment history and children's vocabulary and inductive reasoning ability at age 5, drawing on longitudinal information on 2,200 children from the Growing Up in Scotland data. Prior research rarely addresses dynamics in maternal employment and the methodological ramifications of time‐variant confounding. The present study proposes various measures to capture duration, timing, and stability of early maternal employment and uses inverse probability of treatment weighting to control for time‐variant confounders that may partially mediate the effect of maternal employment on cognitive scores. The findings suggest only modest differences in the above ability measures between children who have been exposed to very different patterns of eary maternal employment, but with similar observed covariate history.     

Empirical Research on Performance Improvement

Renewed interest in research on performance improvement provides an ideal opportunity to examine how much empirical work is actually published and to identify the focus of research in the field. This paper describes a study conducted to examine the empirical research on performance improvement. The study involved a content analysis of articles published in PIQ from 1997 through 2000. Results indicated that empirical research accounted for about one‐third of all articles published in PIQ. A detailed analysis of the empirical research studies published in the journal is provided.