I'm curious how this would work out if they had studied amateurs taking up a new craft from scratch instead of jumping into their established lives. Have a large group take some sort of test to measure starting ability then give them the journals and a set amount of time to learn.
When time is up (say a few months to year?) have them come back and review the progress objectively along with their scheduled journals to find patterns between relative progression and time utilization.
My completely subjective opinion is that in a strongly controlled study you'd never get such black & white results. There are people who have a better natural ability to learn certain tasks than others. While I played an instrument in school I was never phenomenal but I exceeded many kids who practiced several hours a week to my maybe combined time of an hour weekly.
Gaming is similar: get a group of friends to all pick up a new game and play it for an eve, judge who got better by the end and there will always be stand-outs. Some people will have adapted abilities and skills from other games/tasks to advance; others may pick a important subset of the overall skills and hone that for the time to develop a depth of knowledge while possibly lacking a breadth but the skill gap almost always develops and you can't contribute that to time invested so much as natural ability to adapt.
When time is up (say a few months to year?) have them come back and review the progress objectively along with their scheduled journals to find patterns between relative progression and time utilization.
My completely subjective opinion is that in a strongly controlled study you'd never get such black & white results. There are people who have a better natural ability to learn certain tasks than others. While I played an instrument in school I was never phenomenal but I exceeded many kids who practiced several hours a week to my maybe combined time of an hour weekly.
Gaming is similar: get a group of friends to all pick up a new game and play it for an eve, judge who got better by the end and there will always be stand-outs. Some people will have adapted abilities and skills from other games/tasks to advance; others may pick a important subset of the overall skills and hone that for the time to develop a depth of knowledge while possibly lacking a breadth but the skill gap almost always develops and you can't contribute that to time invested so much as natural ability to adapt.