0:26
This is how spellers rate the experience of reading.
It's effortful, pretty enjoyable,
but not as effortful as actually being quizzed by your mom or dad.
Your mom says, ursprache and you say, ursprache, U-R-S-P-R-A-C-H-E, ursprache.
That's being quizzed, your mom says, all right.
Or if you're John says, you're right, you win the spelling bee.
But then there's deliberate practice which is comparatively the highest effort and
the least enjoyable in the moment on average for these elite spellers.
Now interestingly if you look at the data, some of these kids are rookies,
they're in the National Spelling Bee for the first time.
Some of them like Carry are veterans, she won her 5th year which
is thousands of hours of practice accumulated over five years.
Not ten and not 10,000 hours but just several thousand hours.
But if I look at the data and I compare the rookies to those who have had
more spelling bee experience, the level of effort is the same.
They commonly say that working on their weaknesses and solitude, doing things that
they can't yet do is high effort, but their enjoyment ratings are different.
And I think it gets to maybe one of the points that you were bringing up which
is that the veterans don't experience the little practice as unpleasurable not
relatively speaking to the rookies, who are like, my God, this is awful but
it's important.
And I think there's something there there, but it's cross sectional data and
I don't know.
It may be that those of us who can learn to enjoy it are the ones who stick around.
It could also be that you acquire a taste for effort, that you learn to
love the burn somehow or you learn to interpret the burn as progress and
not failure or some judgement on yourself.
There's a lot there there but again all I want you to say to yourself when you leave
today is that wow the relationship you in flow into little practice has not yet
been worked out.
Then why we think this is what I believe.
2:37
Because that's your hypothesis.
That's with the [INAUDIBLE].
Yeah >> Have you seen the movie Spellbound?
>> Yes I have.
In fact that's why I did this study.
>> I know you did.
I was going to say it's such a good study of so many different, it's a documentary
about the spelling bee and it plays a Christopher Guest movie almost, but
it's a real that's a show but it was like a real documentary and it's amazing.
>> It's amazing.
And literally I watched that movie and then I called the National Spelling Bee
and I said can I study the spellers, and page with a former spelling bee
champion and still the President of the spelling, he said, sure.
That's how the study actually got started.
Yeah.
In that data on the spellers we counted up the number of hours from their logs of how
much time they spent being quizzed, how much time they spent doing
a little practice and then reading stuff for fun, so they could see new words.
And what we found is that really the most pronounced,
reliable prediction could be made from the hours of deliberate practice.
Especially when you control for everything else including other kinds of practice.
It's important I think to see that yeah being quizzed probably serves a function
but it might be by identifying the weaknesses like
I keep getting these kinds of words wrong.
I need to focus on that kind of word and then you go and deliberately practice it.
Be in quiz is actually super awesome for learning.
When you get to the end of this course and somebody else actually wants you to
get any kind of exam, quizzing yourself is really good for actually lots of reasons.
Among them, they identified witnesses that you don't know you've had.
One of the comments states that teenagers commit when they are studying, is that
they read their chapter again, and they highlight it, and then they read it again.
And actually what becomes familiar, they confuse for real understanding
because if you close the book, and you're like, don't look at the book.
Tell me, what were the two most important things to learn from the Civil War,
from the perspective of [INAUDIBLE] like, wait I just,
just saw, and then I need to look again.
And so that's being quizzed, but then they can go deliberately practice that weakness
that they didn't even know they had.
It's also important to do things that are fun, enjoy reading, so
yes reading time did not predict spelling in this competition, but
if you look at the mean scores of this kids.
My it was literally the same numerical score as how much they
enjoy eating food like ice cream.
Did it predict the, no but as a group this is a very high, they love words.
Why else would you sit around a dictionary for thousands of hours except for
you love words and word roots and so forth.
I want you to appreciate that what I was predicting here a variance in
your spelling performance based on either your ranking but
now that you understand that well okay that's only within this sample.
That doesn't there's a limitation on the external validity.
Among spellers in the National Spelling Bee who love words and
so enjoy reading and
forth, then reading doesn't maybe make a difference but outside of them.
When you go forth and you do your parts of psychology in the world,
just be mindful of the external validity.
In this group that makes sense but
I'm not saying for all humanity the gratitude exercise is going to work.
It may have certain preconditions.
And I think that's what we're finding it.
Claire Robertson-Kraft, Ph.D.Director, ImpactED
Angela Duckworth, Ph.D.Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology
