Deliberate Practice and Acquisition of Expert Performance: A General Overview

K. Anders Ericsson, PhD

Traditionally, professional expertise has been judged by length of experience, reputation, and perceived mastery of knowledge and skill. Unfortunately, recent research demonstrates only a weak relationship between these indicators of expertise and actual, observed performance. In fact, observed performance does not necessarily correlate with greater professional experience. Expert performance can, however, be traced to active engagement in deliberate practice (DP), where training (often designed and arranged by their teachers and coaches) is focused on improving particular tasks. DP also involves the provision of immediate feedback, time for problem-solving and evaluation, and opportunities for repeated performance to refine behavior. In this article, we draw upon the principles of DP established in other domains, such as chess, music, typing, and sports to provide insight into developing expert performance in medicine.

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The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance

K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer

The theoretical framework presented in this article explains expert performance as the end result of individuals' prolonged efforts to improve performance while negotiating motivational and external constraints. In most domains of expertise, individuals begin in their childhood a regimen of effortful activities (deliberate practice) designed to optimize improvement. Individual differences, even among elite performers, are closely related to assessed amounts of deliberate practice. Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years. Analysis of expert performance provides unique evidence on the potential and limits of extreme environmental adaptation and learning.

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ATTENTIONAL FOCUS EFFECTS ON MOTOR PERFORMANCE AS A FUNCTION OF LEVEL OF EXPERTISE

Gabriele Wulf, Merrill Landers, John Mercer, and Thomas Töllner (2004)

A number of recent studies have shown that the performer’s focus of attention has an important influence on the performance and learning of motor skills (see Wulf & Prinz, 2001, for a review). Specifically, instructions or feedback that direct the performer’s attention to the effects that her or his movements have on the environment (external focus) have been demonstrated to lead to more effective learning than directing attention to the movements themselves (internal focus). Importantly, external focus benefits have not only been found relative to internal focus conditions, but also relative to control conditions (Landers et al., 2003; McNevin & Wulf, 2002; Wulf et al., 1998, Experiment 1; Wulf & McNevin, in press; Wulf, Weigelt, Poulter, & McNevin, 2003). That is, inducing an external focus resulted in performance advantages, while internal focus conditions and control conditions with no specific focus instructions produced similar and less effective performance or learning of motor skills.

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Capturing Naturally Occurring Superior Performance in the Laboratory:
Translational Research on Expert Performance

K. Anders Ericsson - Florida State University, Tallahassee
A. Mark Williams - Liverpool John Moores University

One of the central challenges to studying highly skilled performance in the laboratory is methodological.It is necessary to develop standardized methods that allow investigators to make experts repeatedly reproduce their superior performance in the laboratory. The recent increase in demand for translational research has raised related issues of how everyday phenomena, such as successful clinical treatments and expert achievement, can be reproduced in the laboratory and how laboratory studies of these phenomena can lead to successful interventions in everyday life. The expert-performance approach was developed as a framework for capturing, analyzing, and accounting for complex acquired skills and adaptations. Performance is initially captured and elicited in the laboratory using tasks representative of core activities in the domain. Process-tracing measures are employed to identify the mechanisms that mediate the reproducibly superior performance. Finally, the factors responsible for the development of the mediating
mechanisms are studied by a retrospective analysis of training activities, such as deliberate practice, as well as genetic prerequisites. The principles and mechanisms discovered need then be validated using more traditional longitudinal and experimental designs.

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Capturing the Naturally Occurring Superior Performance of Experts in the Laboratory
Toward a Science of Expert and Exceptional Performance

K. Anders Ericsson and Paul Ward
Department of Psychology, Florida State University, and 2Learning Systems Institute, Florida State University

ABSTRACT—Expertise researchers have traditionally shied away from studying the highest levels of achievement
in favor of studying basic cognitive processes, such as memory and categorization. In this article, we present adifferent approach that is focused on capturing superior (expert) performance on representative tasks that reveal the essential characteristics of expertise in a given domain. In domains where expert performance is measurable, acquisition is gradual and the highest levels are only attained after 10 years of intense preparation—even for the most ‘‘talented.’’ Analyses of reproducibly superior performance show that it is mediated by physiological adaptations and cognitive skills acquired as a result of the cumulative effects of special practice activities (deliberate practice). It appears that the genes necessary to attain such adaptations and expert skills can be activated in healthy children—the only clear exceptions to date being genes that control body size and height. Our knowledge of how experts acquire their superior skills provides insights into the potential for human adaptation and skill acquisition and has important implications for theories of the structure of general and expert cognition, as well as for training interventions in applied psychology and education.