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April 28, 2005
"The Elements of Expertise" by Steven K. S. Tan
The article explores the characteristics of an expert and attempts to explain how a person earns the label expert. An expert possessing qualities and attributes that account for their performances seem to be a combination of innate characteristics and those that grow from practice and experience. Experts are consistently superior in performance on a specific task. It is also of note that experts, specifically chess masters, don't think ahead further than novices. They might even pick fewer, leaving only superior moves to choose from.
Experts have a significantly larger knowledge base that is both hierarchical and complex. This complexity allows them to retrieve information faster than non-experts. Through this larger knowledge base experts also able to perform many tasks subconsciously and automatically. Although experts are slower in the early stages of problem solving, they are still able to solve problems faster than non-experts.
Other interesting facts from this article include:
- Experts rely on underlying principles and metaphors
- Experts engage in "forward" reasoning
- Knowledge is stored in stategically significant ways
- Experts are better at analyzing their mistakes
This article seems to fall under the cognitive science aspect of our research. There aren't any specific experiments run, but there is some talk about forward reasoning in experts versus backward reasoning being used in non-experts that we should look into further perhaps for our experiment analysis.
Posted by Matthew at April 28, 2005 11:15 AM
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