Imagine an expert in your field. For instance, a colleague. How would you describe him or her? How did he or she become an expert? In this lecture, we will firstly describe characteristics of experts. Secondly, we will explain how expertise develops. Finally, we will look at ways to stimulate expert performance. Let's start with experts characteristics. After all it's well known that the experts have certain characteristics. They have skills and knowledge in a specific domain, in which they differ from novices and less experienced people. For instance, experts in sports often win games, or expert teachers know how to stimulate their students in classroom. Experts health professionals, can give the best care to their patients. When we go back in time, the topic of expertise had been researched for more than a century. In search for the origins of expertise, strongly based between nature and nurture radicals arose. Sir Francis Galton was one of the first scientists to study expertise in 1875, and he focused on experts innate abilities such as health and background. Midway to 20th century, more attention was paid to equal chances for all in education and support for the nurture camp grew. Nowadays, it's for that the expertise based on an interaction of innate talents and a stimulating environment. In 1946, Adriaan de Groot, provoked a breakthrough in resource and expertise. He compared chess plays of chess experts or grandmasters, with master level players or amateurs. The grandmasters outperformed the chess players of master level by patterns and judgments. That means that they immediately recognize the central issues and problems at hand, as well as their solutions. Later studies revealed that this phenomenon only occurred with real chess positions in authentic chess situation. Not with chess pieces randomly placed on the board. This type of research is repeated in other settings. For instance, among teachers recognizing meaningful classroom situations. What can we learn from these studies? Well, we can learn that expertise depends on the recognition of meaningful patterns in authentic situations and also that experts have a superior memory for this. Through this research, we know that expertise requires in depth knowledge in a certain domain. That experts reflect on and attach meaning to situations that occur and also, we learn that the attachment of meaning to situations results in that development of pattern specific mental constructs. What are these mental constructs? They can form the chunks to see our approach to situations. A chunk combines pieces of data into larger meaningful constructs. For instance, apples, pears and strawberries can be chunked as fruit. These chunks overcome people's constraints of working memory. They provide efficiency as it helps to discriminate between relevant and irrelevant information in domain specific situations. Expert knowledge relies heavily on such mental constructs. Altogether, they form large interconnected schemes of domain related knowledge. For instance, expert taxi drivers are known to have well-organized, large schemes in wind, representing maps of cities and places. They use this knowledge to quickly envision the tours and make decisions when on route. Every new experience expense or just the existing mental constructs and schemes. We've just looked at the characteristics of expertise. Now we'll move on to how you develop expertise. In this respect, it's important to make a distinction between routine expertise and adaptive expertise. Routine expertise focuses on solving routine problems that are based on heuristics with well-known outcomes. For instance, making your daily breakfast, computing calculations, or riding your bicycle. The main goal of routine expertise is efficiency and it can be developed by repetition. In contrast, adaptive expertise focuses on solving new complex problems in new situations. For instance, inventing a serving new menus in the restaurant, developing new formulas, or riding your bicycle in extreme weather in an unknown place. The main goal of adaptive expertise to solve new problems, to innovate and to design. Adaptive expertise implies that people restructure and refine their knowledge and procedures, for efficient application to their workday environment. It's based on a touching meaning to task and situations. It builds some perceptions and beliefs on self-regulation and metacognition. Therefore, it's essential that professionals use adaptive expertise with practical knowledge. Practical knowledge is part of the knowledge that experts have gained through their work experience. It's strongly person related and contexts related. It's largely tacit and implicit of nature and it builds on self knowledge and values and beliefs. Through that, it guides professional's actions in specific situations. Examples of practical nodes are, for instance, knowing how to manage certain courses or special students as a teacher or adapting to elderly in hospitals or nurse. Or for example, combining ingredients in an oriental dish. How to develop adaptive expertise. We can say that it takes years and demands more than extensive experiences in a particular domain only, as it's the case which routine expertise. Instead, it requires that people are deliberately engaged in the acquisition of expertise. Ericsson and colleagues, call this deliberate practice. Deliberate practice caused a lot of effort and it's often not joyful. It encloses four components. First, to develop expert performance, one needs to break down the domain at hand into a specific task, with specific goals that can be trained and master sequentially. Second, practice must evolve repetition of the same or similar tasks, as subsequently immediately feedback of the task at hand must be provided. The combination of repetition and the use of immediate feedback requires cognitive effort. This effort exist of reflection and profound tension when conducting the task. Both reflection and attention are essential in order to understand what could be improved and how it could be improved. Finally, a supervisor monitors progress and adjusts feedback to improve performance. Research has shown how important deliberate practice is in expertise development. According to Hambrick and colleagues in general, around one third of variants in professionals performance can be explained by means of deliberate practice. When delivered practice is not fully carried out, arrested development or stagnation development will occur, even for talented people. In conclusion, we can list the following requirements for becoming an expert in a domain. Experts require in-depth knowledge in a certain domain. Experts attach meaning to situations and develop mental constructs and schemes that can help to discriminate between and also recognize relevant and irrelevant information in new domain-specific situations. Experts seek for feedback and reflect on meaningful situations that occur, in order to learn from it. In the next reading, we will learn how Knowledge and especially tacit knowledge can be shared and how new knowledge can be acquired.
