Transitions and Trajectories for Studies of Expertise

International Conference of the Learning Sciences, 2008

This poster session showcases ten examples of expertise development in everyday domains of personal relevance and consequence to learners. The collection of cases highlighted in the posters stem from ethnographic research studies investigating learning from socio-cultural-historical perspectives. In each poster, authors describe their ethnographic project, explicate a case of expertise development, and detail the specific learning processes, practices, and pathways associated with that expertise development. Implications for understanding personally relevant and consequential learning for the design of effective learning environments in K-12 STEM classrooms and beyond will be discussed. Discussion will also include plans for the design and implementation of a data repository, which will house a broad set of learning cases, such as those detailed in this poster session, with the goals of supporting collaborative theoretical synthesizing related to diverse learning-related phenomena and helping researchers and educators understand the details of learning as it socially occurs in meaningful ways.

Computers & Education, 1999

In a wide and diverse range of contexts, from academic disciplines through to games and sports, analyses of what it takes to be judged an expert have established a number of common claims. In this paper, we identify and discuss the theoretical signi®cance of this research in relation to a formal, computational theory of expertise (EPAM). The main thrust of our paper is the argument that the theory both helps to identify and explain theoretical limitations on some in¯uential approaches to computer-based tutoring, and oers a means of overcoming some of these. We argue that, without knowledge-based' models of the learning process, attempts to develop eective, computer-based tutoring systems have achieved limited progress towards the goal of helping learners to construct links between their procedural knowledge and conceptual understanding. Current knowledge-based approaches to learner modelling need to be developed in two main directions to reach this goal. First, they will have to integrate a theoretically sound account of the relation between perception and memory (such as that developed within the EPAM approach) in order to build upon what has already been achieved to date in relating processes of learning, memory and problem solving. Second they need an extended theory of declarative (or conceptual) knowledge and its relation to procedural skills. We illustrate how the EPAM model of expertise can be exploited towards these ends, and draw out a number of implications for the design and current limitations of computer-based tutoring systems.

2002 Annual Conference Proceedings

This article introduces expertise-based training (XBT) as an instructional design theory that draws on the theories, findings, and methods of expertise research in order to create instructional strategies that can hasten the develop-ment of advanced learners into experts. The central tenants of XBT are: 1) Key cognitive sub-skills that underlie expert performance can be revealed through expert-novice research, 2) Instructional activities can be designed, often by repurposing expertise-novice research tasks, to systematically train key cognitive sub-skills, and 3) Targeted training of key cognitive sub-skills can hasten learners along their individual paths to expertise. XBT targets apparently "intuitive" aspects of expert decision-making, such as pattern rec-ognition and situation awareness, with drills based on the detection, categori-zation, and prediction tasks used in expert-novice research. XBT contrasts with, and thus compliments, holistic instructional methods such ...

2011

2019

The book offers condensed summaries of twenty-three major models of skill acquisition and expertise development presented by leading researchers during the last half a century of classic and new research. This book presents new researchers in learning, training, cognitive sciences or education disciplines with a big picture starting point for their literature review journey. The book presents an easy to understand taxonomy of twenty-three models which can give new researchers a good bird’s eye view of existing models and theories, based on which they can decide which direction to dig further. The reviews in this book are complemented with over 200 authentic sources which a researcher read for detailed and deeper dive and set the direction for further exploration. This book would also act as an essential reference for training & learning professionals and instructional designers to design research-based training curriculum to develop skills of their staff.

Learning Environments Research, 2015

Development of professional expertise is the process of continually transforming the repertoire of knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary to solve domainspecific problems which begins in late secondary education and continues during higher education and throughout professional life. One educational goal is to train students to think more like experts and approach the mastery of a subject as an expert would. Helping students to develop professional expertise and evaluating whether classrooms are conducive to the development of expertise is difficult and time-consuming. At present, there is no instrument that measures all the core classroom factors that influence specifically the development of professional expertise. This paper describes the development and validation of an instrument that measures the extent to which educators create a Supportive Learning Environment for Expertise Development, the SLEED-Q. A sample of 586 secondary school students (14-18 years-old) was used for validation. Both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were carried out. Examination of the fit indices indicated that the model seemed to fit the data well, with the goodness-of-fit coefficients being in recommended ranges. The SLEED-Q, consisting of seven factors with 30 items, the SLEED-Q has potential as an instrument for examining how conducive learning environments are to development of professional expertise in secondary school settings. The implications of the results and potential paths for future research are considered.

Athletic Training Education Journal

Context: Paradoxes exist in athletic training education. Practicing athletic trainers must be able to demonstrate competency in the knowledge, skills, and abilities that span the scope of practice. To supervise students preparing to be athletic trainers, preceptors must be credentialed to practice and meet continuing education requirements across the scope of practice. However, to teach students in the classroom/lab settings, athletic training faculty must be ''qualified through professional preparation and experienced in their respective academic areas as determined by the institution,'' ''be recognized by the institution as having instructional responsibilities,'' and must ''incorporate the most current athletic training knowledge, skills, and abilities as they pertain to their respective teaching areas.'' These requirements then help to prompt the question of how to transition athletic training educators from competent professionals who are clinical generalist to experts in both the content and clinical skills they are required to teach. Objective: To describe the differences between expert and novice teachers, as well as the impact of content expertise on athletic training student learning. Suggestions for improving content expertise and teaching expertise also will be discussed. Background: Distinct differences exist in not only the methods used but also the learning outcomes of novice versus expert faculty. Faculty who have both content and clinical expertise in the areas that they teach are able to maximize student learning by making connections within and across content areas, as well as understand and adapt to their learners. Lacking this foundational background, novice teachers spend much of their limited planning time learning required content or trying to create appropriate ways to teach that content. While students are able to recognize differences between expert and novice teachers and learn despite the effectiveness of the teacher, learning is better and at greater depths when the teachers are more expert.

Recent critiques of professionally oriented curricula and teaching pay particular attention to the disconnection between the formal knowledge and analytical techniques conveyed in programs and the messy, ill-structured nature of practice. At the same time the developing field of research into professional expertise suggests that the development of expertise requires bringing together different forms of knowledge and the integration of formal and non-formal learning with the development of cognitive flexibility. Such complex learning outcomes are unlikely to be achieved through a 'knowledge transmission' approach to curriculum design. I argue that in many ways current higher education practices create barriers to developing ways of knowing which can underpin the formation of expertise. Using an example from a practice-focused distance learning course, I explore the role of distance learning in enabling a dialogue between formal learning and informal practice learning and the use of 'practice dialogues' among course participants to enable integration of learning experiences. Finally, I argue that we need to find ways in higher education of enabling students to engage in relevant communities of expertise, rather than drawing them principally into a community of academic discourse which is not well aligned with practice.

The road to excellence: …, 1996

Performance Improvement Quarterly, 2016

The studies pertaining to expertise development are diverse and broad (Bjork, 1994; Einstein & McDaniel, 2005; Schneider, Healy, & Bourne, 2002), yet empirical research that bridges expertise development into instructional design theories is still in its very formative stages (Ertmer et al., 2008; Fadde, 2009). This article is intended to identify the instructional principles that are effective in accelerating the performance of journeymen, considering the significant impact of the journeyman stage and the need for hastening performance in that stage. With the introduction to the major scholarly works and principles that have led to the elaboration of training methods, strategies, and materials, this review of literature proposes a learning model that has four components: (1) development plan, (2) action, (3) reflection-on-action, and (4) remedies.

A longitudinal study of students' developing understanding of decimal notation has been conducted by testing over 3000 students in Grades 4 to 10 up to 7 times. A pencil-and-paper test based on a carefully designed set of decimal comparison items enabled students' responses to be classified into 11 codes and tracked over time. The paper reports on how students' ideas changed across the grades, which ways of thinking were most prevalent, the most persistent and which were most likely to lead to expertise. Interestingly the answers were different for primary and secondary students. Estimates are also given of the proportion of students affected by particular ways of thinking during schooling. The conclusion shows how a careful mapping can be useful and draws out features of the learning environment that affect learning.

Rural environment. Education. Personality. (REEP) : proceedings of the 11th International scientific conference, 2018

Scientific approach, selection of a method or several methods corresponding to the research aim and their suitability to or compliance with the decisions to be taken regarding the solution of problem, as well as respecting the principles of research ethics is a guarantee of the research significance and successful solution of problems under research. The expert method is widely applied not only in social sciences and psychology, but also in education science. It is considered to be one of the most appropriate for collecting, analyzing and evaluating of information, as well as for forecasting, when it is necessary to take responsible decisions in relation to innovations in education, including pedagogical process. The method by means of which obtained results are based on the opinions and assessments of competent experts is called an expertise, an expert's opinion or the method of expert assessment. The aim of the research: to substantiate theoretically the expertise as a research method in education science. The article is the presentation of theoretical research results obtained as a result of scientific literature analysis and evaluation, as well as scientific research reflection of authors in the field of research methodology.

To Improve the Academy

Social Epistemology, 2017

Disciplinary boundaries become increasingly unclear when grappling with "wicked problems, " which present a complex set of policy, cultural, technological, and scientific dimensions. "T-shaped" professionals, i.e. individuals with a depth and breadth of expertise, are being called upon to play a critical role in complex problem-solving. This paper unpacks the notion of the "T-shaped expert" and seeks to situate it within the broader academic literature on expertise, integration, and developmental learning. A component of this project includes an exploratory study, which is aimed at evaluating the emergent attributes of T-shaped expertise in two different educational programs completed between January and May in 2015. The two programs build disciplinary knowledge in science, technology engineering, and mathematics fields at the core (vertical dimension), while expanding the students' awareness and comprehension of other expertise (horizontal dimension). The courses introduced science and engineering students to case study topics focusing around complex human-technological-ecological systems in a nanotechnology and society course; and the governance of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in a science, technology, and society course. We analyze pre-and post-test data from this pilot project before presenting findings that pertain to student learning, as well as variants in the methodology and reflect on the utility (and limitations) of the selected methodology for evaluating expertise as it evolves over time. The paper closes with a discussion of a theory of acquisition with implications for delineating early attributes and characteristics of T-shaped expertise.