Complete Individualization: an Often-Forgotten yet Critical Component of True Deliberate Practice

There are many studies demonstrating a benefit of some component of deliberate practice, but these studies often get mislabeled or misinterpreted as demonstrating the full benefit of true deliberate practice. The field of education is particularly susceptible to this issue because it is impossible for a teacher with a classroom of students to provide a true deliberate practice experience without assistive technology that perfectly emulates the one-on-one pedagogical decisions that an expert tutor would make for each individual student.

True deliberate practice is completely individualized.

People – even researchers – will sometimes forget or not be aware of this condition, or will not realize the extent of individualization that is necessary.

Even in the academic literature, many studies claim to measure the effect of deliberate practice when the experimental condition is not actually deliberate practice.

(See Debatin et al., 2021, The meta-analyses of deliberate practice underestimate the effect size because they neglect the core characteristic of individualization—an analysis and empirical evidence)

Deliberate practice requires a high volume of action-feedback-adjustment loops, but every single one of those loops has to be tailored to the individual student.

In particular, in the context of math education:

Actively working through problems is necessary but not sufficient for deliberate practice.

Different students have different knowledge profiles, and at every moment in time, each student needs to be working on a problem that is specifically chosen based on their personal knowledge profile.

Even more generally:

In education, true deliberate practice can only be implemented one-on-one.

It’s impossible for a teacher with a classroom of students to provide a true deliberate practice experience, unless they are using assistive technology that perfectly emulates the one-on-one pedagogical decisions that an expert tutor would make for each individual student.

I realize that’s a big claim, but here’s a “proof by contradiction” to back it up, that I laid out in Holly Korbey’s recent Education Next article, The Tutoring Revolution.

As a thought experiment, suppose that by some miracle the teacher found a problem that was appropriate for all the students in the class – that’s not even realistic, because it would be too advanced for some students and too simple for others, but just suppose that this miracle happened.

• Some students would finish the problem correctly and quickly.
• Others would finish it correctly but need more time.
• Others would get it incorrect and need to go through a remedial process (identifying their mistake and engaging in additional practice on the same problem type).

So, even if a miracle of “here’s a problem that’s appropriate for everyone” were to exist at one moment in time, it would cease to exist at the next moment in time.

In Summary:

1) There are many studies demonstrating a benefit of some component of deliberate practice, but these studies often get mislabeled or misinterpreted as demonstrating the full benefit of true deliberate practice.

2) The field of education is particularly susceptible to this issue because it is impossible for a teacher with a classroom of students to provide a true deliberate practice experience without assistive technology that perfectly emulates the one-on-one pedagogical decisions that an expert tutor would make for each individual student.

3) Why is it impossible? Because different students have different knowledge profiles, and at every moment in time, each student needs to be working on a problem that is specifically chosen based on their personal knowledge profile.