Experts & Expertise

From "How People Learn" by the National Research Council (2000).

Definition: People who have developed expertise in particular areas are, by definition, able to think effectively about problems in those areas. Understanding expertise is important because it provides insights into the nature of thinking and problem solving. Research shows that it is not simply general abilities, such as memory or intelligence, nor the use of general strategies that differentiate experts from novices. Instead, experts have acquired extensive knowledge that affects what they notice and how they organize, represent, and interpret information in their environment. This, in turn, affects their abilities to remember, reason, and solve problems.

Key principles of experts’ knowledge and their potential implications for learning and instruction:

1. Experts notice features and meaningful patterns of information that are not noticed by novices.

2. Experts have acquired a great deal of content knowledge that is organized in ways that reflect a deep understanding of their subject matter.

3. Experts’ knowledge cannot be reduced to sets of isolated facts or propositions but, instead, reflects contexts of applicability: that is, the knowledge is “conditionalized” on a set of circumstances.

4. Experts are able to flexibly retrieve important aspects of their knowledge with little attentional effort.

5. Though experts know their disciplines thoroughly, this does not guarantee that they are able to teach others.

6. Experts have varying levels of flexibility in their approach to new situations.

The idea that experts recognize features and patterns that are not noticed by novices is potentially important for improving instruction. When viewing instructional texts, slides, and videotapes, for example, the information noticed by novices can be quite different from what is noticed by experts (e.g., Sabers et al., 1991; Bransford et al., 1988). One dimension of acquiring greater competence appears to be the increased ability to segment the perceptual field (learning how to see). Research on expertise suggests the importance of providing students with learning experiences that specifically enhance their abilities to recognize meaningful patterns of information (e.g., Simon, 1980; Bransford et al., 1989).

Additional insights from the The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance (Ericsson, Charness, Hoffman, & Feltovich, 2006):

• Extensive experience of activities in a domain is necessary to reach very high levels of performance.
• Researchers of expert performance have found that there are many types of experience and that these different types have qualitatively and quantitatively different effects on the continued acquisition and maintenance of an individual’s performance (Ericsson, 1996, 2002; Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer, 1993 ). This framework proposes that some types of experience, such as merely executing proficiently during routine work, may not lead to further improvement, and that further improvements depend on deliberate efforts to change particular aspects of performance.
• Improvements of performance for mature adults are rapid only in the beginning of training and that subsequent increases diminish, until “Maximal performance becomes a rigidly determinate quantity”
• Expert performers counteract automaticity by developing increasingly complex mental representations to attain higher levels of control of their performance and will therefore remain within the “cognitive” and “associative” phases. Some experts will at some point in their career give up their commitment to seeking excellence and thus terminate regular engagement in deliberate practice to further improve performance, which results in premature automation of their performance. (Adapted from “The scientific study of expert levels of performance: General implications for optimal learning and creativity” by K. A. Ericsson in High Ability Studies, 9, p. 90. Copyright 1998 by European Council for High Ability.)
• A key differentiator between those who reach automaticity (emerging from novice practice) and those who become expert performers is deliberate practice. Some research of expertise on complex skills suggests that as much as 10 years of 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is necessary for expert level performance

References:

National Research Council. (2000). How experts differ from novices. In J. Bransford, A. Brown & R. Cocking (Eds.), How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington DC: National Academies Press.

Ericsson, K. A., Charness, N., Hoffman, R., & Feltovich, P. (Eds.). (2006). The Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance. New York: Cambridge University Press.