Improving practice effectiveness - test

[gibocchia]

Hey guys! Do you want to measure how well you do it?

Try this experiment about practice effectiveness that is intended for musicians at all levels of expertise, musical genre and instrument.

Feel free to partecipate through the following link, let me know your opinions and share it with your friends!   

https://goldpsych.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_1QX9OfY588UjKEl

[keypeg]

Hey guys! Do you want to measure how well you do it?

Try this experiment about practice effectiveness that is intended for musicians at all levels of expertise, musical genre and instrument.

Feel free to participate through the following link, let me know your opinions and share it with your friends!   

I sincerely hope that you actually do want to discuss these things in this discussion forum, and don't just want to collect statistics for this project.

I did the survey.  It does not help me measure the effectiveness of my practising.  It does contain certain principles that go with effective practising, but also some generalities that are not always true.

I jotted down a few points:

"have high professional ambitions"
How do high professional ambitions have anything to do with effective practising?

I started lessons late, at almost 50, and I had my time wasted by a teacher who seemed to think that going deeply into technique on an instrument that is technically difficult, would be a turn-off.  Susan Boyle was pushing it in her mid-fifties, and she actually did have training since young - just not the looks and personality to push forward professionally.  I'm in my mid-sixties.  So no, I don't, and can't, have "professional ambitions".

A couple of related things:
"know how to fix your problems "
"know how to achieve what you want"
"know how to use body effectively"

If by any chance you think that "knowing" these things means you are practising effectively, and "not knowing" means you are not - then I would disagree. Knowing that you don't know is the first step in fixing things.  And then you find resources to help you.  Which side of the fence are you on in this?

"feedback being part of practice"
GOOD feedback by a competent person.  Otherwise feedback is harmful and counterproductive.

"read academic papers on practising"
Is there an assumption being made that such papers are of value? What about the person in the field, who teaches students, and observes students?  I have seen academic papers.  Many of them do surveys (such as this way), go by theories,and there is no one-on-one.

[gibocchia]

Many thanks for your feedbacks! I of course want to discuss it as it needs to work as well as possible and it definitely needs to be improved, otherwise it will be one of the thousands of magazine-style questionnaire already available .

It is not essential to score high on everything and the full interpretation of the scores will be available only after we analyze the data, that should happen very soon.

For example, high ambition is not essential to good practice, of course, but it can help I guess, especially at competitive levels (remember it is supposed to work for any level of expertise).
Regarding the knowing how to fix problems, I just have a consideration to make: we all know how to do that, just thinking about my very first piano lessons I remember that reading notations, moving weaker fingers, coordinate hands was at first very problematic but I, you, we all did it! So the question was more 'how often (it was on a frequency scale) are you able to positively react (like you said, find resources to successfully help you) to difficulties encountered during practice? I may change its wording.

And I totally agree about feedbacks only from competent teachers and that scientific papers cannot be directly use as practice devices: they of course will receive a marginal weighting and importance