1. Definitions of expertise PDF

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Definitions of expertise
Why study expertise?
Essay writing: Some advice

Fernand Gobet...

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1.Definitions of Expertise Expertise has a dual meaning: Definition of the Oxford Talking Dictionary (1998):  Expert opinion or knowledge; know-how, skill or expertness in something. There are two essential aspects: 1. Knowledge or opinion – knowing that 2. Skill – knowing how Expertise as Experience:  Amount of time an individual has spent in a domain  This is a weak definition:  Experience does not correlate much with expertise  E.g. amateur tennis players Ericsson et al. (1993): deliberate practice offers a better measure (than experience) Expertise Defined by Diplomas:  E.g. use of PhDs, professional certificates  Very simple to do, very common way of defining expertise  Based on socio-cultural criteria e.g. knowing a certain person, making it easier to get into a prestigious school  Often do not test “real-life” skills, but declarative knowledge e.g. medicine, psychology  Could argue that in many domains, the skills are procedural and therefore whatever is in your declarative knowledge may not correlate highly with procedural knowledge Therefore, this method may not be useful in the absence of full transcripts Ecological Measures:  Measures that are part of the culture domain o Business – amount of wealth o Science – number of citations o Writing – number of books sold  Useful measures  Socio-cultural biases are possible e.g. current fashion, random factors, quality of publisher (if a writer) IDEAL: objective quantitative measure of expert performance within a domain e.g. sports and the time it takes to run 100m  This is rare outside sports Rank ordering systems  Belt system in karate orders individuals as a function of expertise  a black belt who is out of practice will still be a black belt  FIFA’s ranking of national football teams  ATP ranking in tennis  if you haven’t played any matches in a month, ranking decreases Elo rating – Elo (1965):

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Mostly used in chess, but also in table tennis Takes into account: 1. outcome of a game (win, loss, draw) 2. skill level of the opponent  updated every competitive game  precise and up to date measure of expertise  explains why so much research has been done on chess  can correlate with intelligence and practice  based on solid mathematical foundations – probability Expertise as Replicable Performance in the Laboratory: Ericsson and Smith (1991):  Chess masters must find good moves in chess problems consistently  Medical doctors should find the correct diagnosis consistently  Same with sport  Allows you to manipulate things such as difficulty, order of tasks and risks an expert takes  A visible requirement, if you can achieve this, you know an expert is a true expert  Reasonable definition of expertise and much research has been done here  Exceptions are:  Developing a new ground-breaking theory in physics  Creating a new style in art  Very few tests of creativity correlate with actual creativity Creativity:  Not possible to bring an expert into a lab and expect them to create a big, new theory  However, you could conduct an experiment where researchers who are more creative can come up with more creative solutions for specific problems – not much research on this though  Could bring the researcher into a real lab ad observe people. In some cases researchers were lucky enough to observe a big discovery – very few examples of this. This is probably the best way to observe an expert and is better than bringing an expert into your own lab to observe Expertise is acquired: Bereiter and Scardamalia (1993): “…with effort and intentionally” Eysenck (1995): “…without effort and implicitly, through talent”  There is no clear cut pattern to this answer  Could argue that the way you acquire expertise has nothing to do with the definition of expertise and is therefore not relevant Expertise as a fluid behaviour:  Behaviour is automatic and requires little conscious control  valid with many types of expertise  there are counter examples explaining the opposite

Bereiter and Scardamalia (1993): “the expert addresses problems whereas the experienced non-expert carries out practiced routines” Ericsson et al. (1993): “routine actions hinder the development of expertise” Even in very difficult problems, even an experts’ behaviour does not remain fluid and mistakes can still be made e.g. with simple problems, experts work forwards to reach a solution in a very natural way compared to hard problems where they sometimes work backwards Expertise as a social label: 

Given by; society, a group of people, sometimes irrespectively of real competences  Politics is an example: Donald Trump was declared the largest expert in politics currently in the USA, but you could argue he has no real competences in politics – it is just a label  In Astrology, some see astrologists as experts and make much money and many believe in it, but others argue that they have no expertise at all and predicting the future in such a way is just not possible  In the stock market, you can purchase the services of those considered experts, research actually shows these experts do no better than non experts Stein (1997): “expertise can only be used within a specific context”  E.g. is Picasso was placed in a different time, he would not be recognized as an expert  However, if you were Husain Bolt, it doesn’t matter where you run you would still be the quickest (unless in the future), therefore you must be careful where you apply Stein’s idea The definition used for this module: 

An expert is somebody who obtains results that are vastly superior to those obtained by the majority of the population  can be applied recursively – we can define an expert and then apply the definition again o A “super-expert” is somebody whose performance is vastly superior to the majority of experts  Can be applied to the “common” domains of expertise o Language, walking, breathing e.g. diver, yoga  can be used with know how and know that...