Deliberate Practice and Proposed Limits on the Effects of Practice on the Acquisition of Expert Performance: Why the Original Definition Matters and Recommendations for Future Research
Anders Ericsson and Kyle Harwell revisit the 1993 study and argue that the 2014 meta-analysis of deliberate practice used a different definition, which they call structured practice. They set three criteria for reproducible performance and purposeful practice, exclude effect sizes that fail them and reanalyse the rest, finding that practice explains considerably more of the variance in performance. They also argue that a low share of explained variance does not necessarily point to large genetic effects, and recommend that future research measure the quality of practice, such as concentration, analysis and problem-solving, and not only its duration.
Anders Ericsson and Kyle Harwell revisit the 1993 study and argue that the 2014 meta-analysis of deliberate practice used a different definition, which they call structured practice. They set three criteria for reproducible performance and purposeful practice, exclude effect sizes that fail them and reanalyse the rest, finding that practice explains considerably more of the variance in performance. They also argue that a low share of explained variance does not necessarily point to large genetic effects, and recommend that future research measure the quality of practice, such as concentration, analysis and problem-solving, and not only its duration.
Written from the article text read 2026-10-26 at Frontiers in Psychology.
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Ericsson, K. A., & Harwell, K. W. (2019). Deliberate practice and proposed limits on the effects of practice on the acquisition of expert performance: Why the original definition matters and recommendations for future research. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 2396. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02396