About this Research Topic

Background

The last decade witnessed a plethora of literature about talent identification and talent development. Most of the research is descriptive. In addition, an enormous quantity of publications attempted to define normative guidelines, but mostly with relatively little empirical evidence to support them. We believe it is time to overview the field, critically appraise the situation of research, and map the topics, trends, and gaps.

The large part of recent research has focused on talent identification and the factors that reveal talents. In contrast, relatively less research has addressed the question how young talents develop in a long-term process towards becoming senior high-performers. This is an evolving field and research is still in a primarily explorative stage. A variety of different study designs and methodological approaches have been employed to explore different factors and outcomes of talent development, yielding heterogeneous findings.

We will focus on the multi-year process of talent development from childhood through to early adulthood. Our aim is to compose an overview of existing research and to structure the most relevant subjects. Authors are encouraged to preferably cover the entire cycle of talent development from childhood through early adulthood. We will also ask authors to explicitly consider age and performance levels of athletes involved in reviewed studies. This is important because findings, interpretations and conclusions may vary across age and performance levels (e.g. junior vs. senior performance, world-class vs. just above average performance).

Thus, the scope of this Research Topic is the critical evaluation of the contemporary visions about talent development. Our Research Topic is coherent in that it is (a) purposefully designed to reflect the state of empirical research on central tenets of popular theoretical models of talent development; (b) focusing on young talents’ development over time; (c) during youth age, i.e. childhood and adolescence; and (d) from multi-disciplinary perspectives, where, while multi-disciplinary, the focus is in each case the same, young athletes’ development over time.

We encourage the submission of Original Research or Review papers on the following topics:
- International evolvement of talent development systems
- Theoretical models of (phases of) talent development
- Relationship between childhood/adolescent performance and long-term senior performance
- The macro-structure of the developmental participation history in talent development
- The micro-structure of practice in talent development
- Skill acquisition in talent development
- Role of biological maturation in talent development
- Controlling of the training process: physiological and psychometric methods
- Controlling of the training process: coach-athlete interaction
- Athletes’ development in talent development programs
- Role of athlete services in talent development
- Organized talent transfer programs
- Coordination between school and sport – efficacy of elite sport schools
- Multidimensional outcomes of talent development (health-related, psycho-logical, social, …)
- Paralympic talent development
- Talent development in female athletes
- Methodological approaches, designs and gaps in research into talent development.

This Research Topic was sponsored by RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau, Germany.

Keywords: talent, development, multidisciplinary, youth, sport

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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