Expertise
“The nature of expertise has been studied in two general ways. One way is to study truly exceptional people with the goal of under- standing how they perform in their domain of expertise. [...] A second research approach to expertise is to study experts in comparison to novices. This relative approach assumes that exper- tise is a level of proficiency that novices can achieve” (Chi, 2001)
“Hatano (1988) describes adaptive expertise as the meaningful and well-connected knowledge that can be applied to new tasks.”. For Alexander (2003) adaptive expertise “is a balance between innovation and efficiency where learners develop meaningful knowledge so they can adapt their skills in response to new situations” (Werner et al. 2013: 12)
Scales of expertise
According to Chi (2001) we could distinguish seven levels of expertise that have been adapted from Hoffmann (1998).
| Level | Description |
|---|---|
| Naive | One who is totally ignorant of a domain |
| Novice | Literally, someone who is new – a probationary member. There has been some minimal exposure to the domain. |
| Initiate | Literally, a novice who has been through an initiation ceremony and has begun introductory instruction. |
| Apprentice | Literally, one who is learning – a student undergoing a program of instruction
beyond the introductory level. Traditionally, the apprentice is immersed in the domain by living with and assisting someone at a higher level. The length of an apprenticeship depends on the domain, ranging from about one to 12 years in the Craft Guilds. |
| Journeyman | Literally, a person who can perform a day’s labor unsupervised, although working
under orders. An experienced and reliable worker, or one who has achieved a level of competence. Despite high levels of motivation, it is possible to remain at this proficiency level for life. |
| Expert | The distinguished or brilliant journeyman, highly regarded by peers, whose
judgments are uncommonly accurate and reliable, whose performance shows consummate skill and economy of effort, and who can deal effectively with certain types of rare or “tough” cases. Also, an expert is one who has special skills or knowledge derived from extensive experience with subdomains. |
| Master | Traditionally, a master is any journeyman or expert who is also qualified to teach
those at a lower level. Traditionally, a master is one of an elite group of experts whose judgments set the regulations, standards, or ideals. Also, a master can be that expert who is regarded by the other experts as being “the” expert, or the “real” expert, especially with regard to sub-domain knowledge. |
According to Chi (2006), “Proficiency level can be grossly assessed by measures such as academic qualifications (such as graduate students vs. undergraduates), seniority or years performing the task, or consensus among peers. It can also be assessed at a more fine-grained level, in terms of domain-specific knowledge or performance tests.”
The same author defined ways in which (relative) experts excel:
| Ways | Description |
|---|---|
| Generating the best | Experts find the best solution to a problem or the best design to solve a task. And they can do it faster. |
| Detection and recognition | Experts can detect patterns and features of "data" and also structures of problems and situation that novices cannot. |
| Qualitative analysis | Experts can analyse a problem qualitatively through the development of a problem representation that includes as well domain-specific as general constraints. |
| Monitoring | Experts have better self-monitoring skill, e.g. can detect both errors and the state of their comprehension. |
| Strategies | Expert are better in selecting appropriate strategies to solve a problem. In addition they can use case-based reasoning, i.e. a data-driven forward chaining approach as opposed to a hypothesis-driven backward chaining approach- |
| Opportunistic | Experts can make use of whatever resource is available |
| Cognitive effort | Experts can retrieve (domain) knowledge with minimal cognitive effort and use automatized procedures. In addition, they know when control is desirable. |
On the darker side, experts can also fall short in seven ways:
- Expertise is domain-limited, i.e. an expert behaves like a novice in a different domain
- Experts can be overly confident
- Expert can gloss over detail, i.e. stick to surface features. Novices can recall case relevant details better.
- Within a domain, experts rely on contextual clues, e.g. in order to perform a diagnosis a doctor needs patient's background information, as opposed to just the features that would define a case.
- Experts may lack flexibility, i.e. may not accept that a problem has a deep structure that is different from the one that is "accepted" in the domain
- Experts cannot help novices (predict, judge and advise)
- Experts may be biases and show functional fixedness, e.g. analyse a multi-dimensional problem only in terms of their domain.
Bibliography
- Alexander, P. 2003. The Development of Expertise: The Journey from Acclimation to Proficiency. Educational Researcher, 32, 10-14.
- Billett, S. (2001). Learning in the Workplace: Strategies for Effective Practice. Allen & Unwin, PO Box 8500, St Leonards, 1590 NSW, Australia.
- Chi, M. T. (2006). Two approaches to the study of experts’ characteristics. in The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance, 21-30. PDF Preprint
- Collins, H. M., & Evans, R. (2002). The Third Wave of Science Studies Studies of Expertise and Experience. Social studies of science, 32(2), 235-296.
- Ericsson, K. A., & Smith, J. (Eds.). (1991). Toward a general theory of expertise: Prospects and limits. in Ericsson, K. A., & Smith, J. (eds). Prospects and limits of the empirical study of expertise, Cambridge University Press.
- Ericsson, K. A., & Smith, J. (1991). Prospects and limits of the empirical study of expertise: An introduction. Toward a general theory of expertise: Prospects and limits, 344.
- Herling, R. W. (2000). Operational definitions of expertise and competence. Advances in developing human resources, 2(1), 8-21.
- Hoffman, R. R. (1998). How can expertise be defined?: Implications of research from cognitive psychology. In R. Williams, W. Faulkner, & J. Fleck (Eds.), Exploring expertise (pp. 81 – 100 ). New York: Macmillan.
- Hoffman, R. R., Trafton, G., & Roebber, P. (2005). Minding the weather: How expert forecasters think, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
- Holyoak, K. J. (1991). Symbolic connectionism: toward third-generation theories of expertise. Toward a general theory of expertise: Prospects and limits, 301.
- Schvaneveldt, R. W., Durso, F. T., Goldsmith, T. E., Breen, T. J., Cooke, N. M., Tucker, R. G., & De Maio, J. C. (1985). Measuring the structure of expertise. International journal of man-machine studies, 23(6), 699-728.
- Werner,Linda Charlie McDowell, Jill Denner (2013). A First Step in Learning Analytics: Pre-processing Low-Level Alice Logging Data of Middle School Students, JEDM - Journal of Educational Data Mining, Vol 5, No 2, HTML/PDF