Research was and still is involved in the controversial issue about innate talent or extensive practice as the determinants of excellent performance in a range of domains. This study aims to contribute by presenting an analysis of practice activities in a domain that appears to be particularly suitable--orchestral conducting. Most conductors…

Background: Although research on mathematics learning programs has taken off in recent years, little is known about how different person characteristics are related to practice behaviour with such programs. When implementing a mathematics learning program in the classroom, it might be important to know whether students with specific…

Two main mechanisms, articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing, are argued to be involved in the maintenance of verbal information in working memory (WM). Whereas converging research has suggested that rehearsal promotes the phonological representations of memoranda in working memory, little is known about the representations that…

When body movements are stored in memory in an organized manner, linked to a common retrieval cue like the effector with which to execute the movement, interference may arise as soon as one initiates the execution of a specific body movement in the presence of the retrieval cue because related motor programs also are activated. We investigated the…

Success in music depends on a number of crucial factors with musical talent figuring prominently in gifted research. However, in the Nuremberg Music-Ecological Approach presented in this paper a different view is taken. Instead of talents and factors, the concept of available resources in an individual's actiotope (Ziegler, 2005) is put in the…

This study examined how types of tasks influenced student activities/thinking and defined the role of Seatwork in mathematics lessons. It used 60 lessons from the TIMSS videotaped Study. These data indicated that practice was the most prevalent form of tasks in the U.S. In Germany, students completed mathematical calculations after a complex…

The fluency of basic arithmetical operations is a precondition for mathematical problem solving. However, the training of skills plays a minor role in contemporary mathematics instruction. The authors proposed individualization of practice as a means to improve its efficiency, so that the time spent with the training of skills is minimized. As a…

Phonological awareness is believed to play a major role in the auditory contribution to spelling skills. The previous paper reports low-level auditory deficits in five different subdomains in 33-70% of the dyslexics. The first study of this paper reports the results of an attempt to improve low-level auditory skills by systematic daily practice of…

Time is essential for teacher learning--time for teachers to sort out what they've learned, and time to practice new strategies. Schools must take a long-term view of professional learning and afford teachers the one thing essential to changing practice. They also must remember that after finding time, the second requirement is using it well.