The Road To Excellence

Download or read book The Road To Excellence written by K. Anders Ericsson and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2014-03-05 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excellence and the highest levels of performance in the arts and sciences, sports, and games have always been an object of fascination to both scientists and lay people. Only during the last 20 years have scientists studied these levels of performance in the laboratory in order to identify their mediating mechanisms. Contrary to the common belief that innate talents are the critical factors for exceptional performance, investigators have found that acquired skills, knowledge, and physiological adaptations in response to intense practice are the primary mechanisms, mediating the highest levels of performance. This is the first and only book to examine how elite performers effect their exceptional accomplishments. The world's leading researchers on expert performance and creative achievement review theories and recent findings from many different domains of expertise on how experts optimize improvement in their performance and eventually attain excellence. Elite performers are shown to have engaged in deliberate-practice activities specifically designed to improve their performance from an early age. By age 20 they have often accumulated over 10,000 hours of practice! The essential elements of deliberate practice, such as specific goals to improve performance, successive refinement through repetition, feedback and instruction, are explicated for different domains. Although the content of practice tasks will necessarily differ from domain to domain, investigators have found invariant characteristics for the optimal duration of practice sessions, maximal amounts of daily practice, the length of intense preparation (around 10 years), and ages of peak performance. Some of the book's chapters extend the review to the acquisition of everyday-life skills such as reading, to the performance of teams of experts, and to the development of creative achievement, geniuses, and artistic child prodigies. The book concludes with commentaries by several outstanding scientists in psychology, education, and history of science who discuss the generalizability of presented ideas and raise issues for future issues. EXTRA COPY...It could be said that striving for excellence is what characterizes humanity, or perhaps what characterizes humanity at its best. Why do so few individuals ever reach the highest levels when so many start out on the Road to Excellence? In this book, the world's foremost researchers of expert performance in domains as diverse as sports, medicine, chess, and the arts explore the similarities and differences in the extended and strenuous Road to Excellence taken by the successful individuals in each domain. Their findings will intrigue and inspire readers who are themselves driven to achieve or who simply want to better understand the processes involved.

Download or read book Teaching Sport and Physical Activity written by Paul G. Schempp and published by Human Kinetics. This book was released on 2003 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book reveals the key techniques and strategies that all successful teachers and coaches use to help their students and athletes achieve success. It covers how to create stimulating learning environments, how to form effective relationships with students, how to teach motor skills, how to manage the lesson time and resources to aid students' learning, how to maintain a dynamic pace of instruction, and how to master other indispensable skills that apply no matter what sport is being taught.

Download or read book The Road to Academic Excellence written by Philip G. Altbach and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the experience of 11 universities in nine countries around the world that have grappled with the challenge of building successful research institutions in difficult circumstances and outlines key lessons of from this experience.

Download or read book The Baptist Health Care Journey to Excellence written by Al Stubblefield and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-01-31 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An insider's look at corporate culture at one of Fortune’s Top 100 Best Companies to Work for in America A business can purchase, imitate, or replicate most of its elements, but when a business places its competitive advantage with its people, it can become the market leader. The Baptist Health Care Journey to Excellence illustrates how Baptist Health Care went from a customer satisfaction rating of less than 20 percent to being consistently ranked in the 99 percent range. Written by the man who made it happen, this book sets benchmarks and best practices for organizations to measure themselves against by creating a service-centered culture that cares first and foremost about customer satisfaction. "This crystal-clear book offers to any who will listen invaluable, detailed guidance on how and why to move toward a true culture of excellence in hospital care. It isn't easy, but, as their results show, it's a journey well worth taking." —Donald M. Berwick, MD, president and CEO, Institute for Healthcare Improvement The Baptist Health Care Journey to Excellence presents tested principles and best practices to help improve your corporate culture and customer satisfaction, which will lead to loyalty, stability, sustained productivity, and profitability in your own organization. Order your copy today!

Download or read book Development of Professional Expertise written by K. Anders Ericsson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-22 with total page 571 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professionals such as medical doctors, aeroplane pilots, lawyers, and technical specialists find that some of their peers have reached high levels of achievement that are difficult to measure objectively. In order to understand to what extent it is possible to learn from these expert performers for the purpose of helping others improve their performance, we first need to reproduce and measure this performance. This book is designed to provide the first comprehensive overview of research on the acquisition and training of professional performance as measured by objective methods rather than by subjective ratings by supervisors. In this collection of articles, the world's foremost experts discuss methods for assessing the experts' knowledge and review our knowledge on how we can measure professional performance and design training environments that permit beginning and experienced professionals to develop and maintain their high levels of performance, using examples from a wide range of professional domains.

Download or read book Toward a General Theory of Expertise written by K. Anders Ericsson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1991-08-30 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the last twenty years our understanding of expertise has dramatically increased. Laboratory analysis of chess masters, experts in physics and medicine, musicians, athletics, writers, and performance artists have included careful examination of the cognitive processes mediating outstanding performance in very diverse areas of expertise. These analyses have shown that expert performance is primarily a reflection of acquired skill resulting from the accumulation of domain-specific knowledge and methods during many years of training practice. The importance of domain-specific knowledge has led researchers on expertise to focus on characteristics of expertise in specific domains. In Toward a General Theory of Expertise many of the world's foremost scientists review the state-of-the-art knowledge about expertise in different domains, with the goal of identifying characteristics of expert performance that are generalizable across many different areas of expertise. These essays provide a comprehensive summary of general methods for studying expertise and of current knowledge about expertise in chess, physics, medicine, sports and performance arts, music, writing, and decision making. Most important, the essays reveal the existence of many general characteristics of expertise.

Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance written by K. Anders Ericsson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-06-26 with total page 31 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book was the first handbook where the world's foremost 'experts on expertise' reviewed our scientific knowledge on expertise and expert performance and how experts may differ from non-experts in terms of their development, training, reasoning, knowledge, social support, and innate talent. Methods are described for the study of experts' knowledge and their performance of representative tasks from their domain of expertise. The development of expertise is also studied by retrospective interviews and the daily lives of experts are studied with diaries. In 15 major domains of expertise, the leading researchers summarize our knowledge on the structure and acquisition of expert skill and knowledge and discuss future prospects. General issues that cut across most domains are reviewed in chapters on various aspects of expertise such as general and practical intelligence, differences in brain activity, self-regulated learning, deliberate practice, aging, knowledge management, and creativity.