|
EXPERTISE refers to the mechanisms
underlying the superior achievement of an expert, i.e. "one who has acquired special skill in or knowledge of a particular
subjects through professional training and practical experience" (Webster's dictionary, 1976, p. 800). The term expert is
used to describe highly experienced professionals such as medical doctors, accountants, teachers and scientists, but
has been expanded to include any individual who attained their superior performance by instruction and extended practice:
highly skilled performers in the arts, such as music, painting and writing, sports, such as swimming, running and golf and
games, such as bridge and chess.
More generally, the accumulated amount of deliberate practice is closely
related to the attained level of performance of many types of experts, such as musicians (Ericsson et al., 1993; Sloboda,
et al., 1996), chessplayers (Charness, Krampe & Mayr, 1996) and athletes (Starkes et al., 1996).
For appropriate challenging problems experts don't just automatically
extract patterns and retrieve their response directly from memory. Instead they select the relevant information and encode
it in special representations in working memory that allow planning, evaluation and reasoning about alternative courses of
action (Ericsson & Lehmann, 1996). Hence, the difference between experts and less skilled subjects is not merely a matter
of the amount and complexity of the accumulated knowledge; it also reflects qualitative differences in the organization of
knowledge and its representation (Chi, Glaser & Rees, 1982). Experts' knowledge
is encoded around key domain-related concepts and solution procedures that allow rapid and reliable retrieval whenever stored
information is relevant. Less skilled subjects' knowledge, in contrast, is encoded using everyday concepts that make the retrieval
of even their limited relevant knowledge difficult and unreliable. Furthermore, experts have acquired domain-specific memory
skills that allow them to rely on long-term memory (Long-Term Working Memory, Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995) to dramatically
expand the amount of information that can be kept accessible during planning and during reasoning about alternative courses
of action. The superior quality of the experts' mental representations allow them to adapt rapidly to changing circumstances
and anticipate future events in advance. The same acquired representations appear to be essential for experts' ability
to monitor and evaluate their own performance (Ericsson, 1996; Glaser, 1996) so they can keep improving their own performance
by designing their own training and assimilating new knowledge.
|
