Deconstructing and understanding the meaning of real expertise is probably one of the more striking gaps in our current educational practices. For long time we have based our understanding and teaching of expertise by focusing mainly on the delivery of content knowledge and some basic applications of that knowledge in sometimes artificial and unrealistic situations. Understanding what differentiates an expert from let’s say an advanced novice, is important to assess our current educational practices. So what makes an expert an expert and how an expert becomes one?
Knowledge organisation and retrieval, Patterns of Information and metacognition
One of the main differences noticed between experts and advanced novices is the way of how they process information connected to specific problems. For instance, master chess players when presented with specific board configurations can associate those configurations to meaningful chess configurations and in this way can link those configurations to strategies and how successful the strategies can be in the game. On the other hand, advanced novices analyse the board more in terms of possible specific movements and possible responses to movements. In the same way, advanced physicist analyse solutions to problems in terms of big principles (e.g. conservation of energy) while advanced novices tends to analyse more in terms of the formulae and familiar procedures they can apply to the problems (National Research Council, 2000).
Experts ability to recognise these patterns that novices tend to miss, comes from an accumulation of experience that has helped them to develop not only a deeper understanding of ideas but also an optimal organisation of knowledge that allows them to easily identify and retrieve the necessary knowledge to target specific problems. This organisation of knowledge and the ability to retrieve it, are other two of the main characteristics that distinguishes and expert from an advanced novice. Continuing with the example of the physics students, students tend to organise the knowledge around the context where they learnt about it. For example a student can apply correctly the required knowledge in the context of a unit where they are studying that concept, but it can struggle to solve problems that require the same knowledge when found outside the context of the unit. On the other hand, the expert can recognise the defining characteristics of a problem independently of where the problem is found, and once the defining characteristics are identified an expert can retrieve the necessary knowledge to solve it (National Research Council, 2000; Schwartz D et al., 2016).
A final key characteristic of experts is metacognition, that is their ability to identify when their current level expertise cannot help them to solve specific problems and the ability to develop strategies to develop the new required expertise. In other words, an expert can identify when a problem is beyond their current expertise and can develop strategies to learn the necessary skills to solve the problem (National Research Council, 2000; Schwartz D et al., 2016). On the other hand, novices can struggle to identify when a problem is beyond their current state of knowledge, and from here can fail to develop strategies to solve the problem or they can arrive to wrong answers without noticing the gap in their knowledge.
In addition to the expert characteristics mentioned above, there are many more that maybe cannot be classified as one of the above and that could be exclusive to a specific knowledge field. However, I hope that from this discussion, it is now clear how important is to identify the characteristics that make an expert in a specific field, many of which are not explicit or evident to the experts themselves. The questions are now, how does an expert becomes an expert? Are we teaching the above skills and if not can we teach them?
References:
- Anderss Ericcson, K. (2006). The influence of experience and deliberate practice on the development of superior expert performance. Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, Ch. 38, (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
- Ambrose S., Bridges M., DiPietro M., Lovett M., Norman M. (2010). How Learning Works 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching. Jossey-Bass A Wiley Imprint.
- National Research Council, 2000. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/9853.
- The University of British Columbia (2020). Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative. Viewed 16 November 2021. https://cwsei.ubc.ca/
- Schwartz D., Tsang J., Blair K. (2016). The ABC’s of How We Learn 26 Scientifically Proven Approaches, How they work and When to Use Them. W.W Norton & Company, New York, London.