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April 25, 2005
Expertise in context: Chapter 6 - Cognitive Conceptions of Expertise
This chapter presents answers to the question “what is it that makes an expert?” Nine views of expertise are presented.
- General-process: This view is based on superiority in general information processing. Experts use different processes from novices to solve a specific problem, or use the same processes but are faster.
- The quantity-of-knowledge: In a study that requires expert and novice chess players to remember chessboard configurations, the results show that differences between expert and novices are not in their ability to general information, but rather in their ability to encode and remember information. Since experts have more knowledge about chessboard configuration than novices do, they can remember and encode them easily than novices.
- The knowledge-organization: In a study of experts in physics, the results show that differences between experts and novices were not only in the amount of knowledge, but also in the way they organized knowledge that allows them to exploit the knowledge easier.
- Superior analytical ability in solving problem: Experts can use knowledge more effective and can infer things from information that novices cannot.
- Superior creative ability: Experts have creative insight that takes information that other people see in one way, but they see in another, and reach insightful solution that others cannot reach. These process includes: 1) filtering relevant and identify irrelevant information; 2) combining information in a way that is not obvious to other people, and 3) applying information acquired from another context to the problem at hand.
- Superior automatization: Experts have more information processed automatically. Automatization frees an expert’s cognitive resources so that he has more resources available for solving novel aspects of the problems.
- Superior practical ability: Experts know how the field operates, and how to navigate within it.
- Being labeled: A person is an expert because he is labeled, and treated as such.
- Synthetic view: Expertise is a prototype that comprises all aspects in other views, and others aspects not presented. Some aspects of an expert in one domain might be irreverent to an expert in other domains. People are experts in varying degrees depending on the extent to which they fulfill the criteria of expertise in their domains.
Posted by Sukanya at April 25, 2005 2:37 AM
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