What is an expert? Essay -- essays research papers

Currently the most prevalent is that an expert is a person who has some skill or knowledge in some domain that is matched by only a few other people. These people are thus extraordinary in some way. Anders Ericsson, probably the best known of the researchers on expertise defines expertise as Relatively stable outstanding performance.Experts are often labeled as such. People called exceptional, superior, gifted, talented, specialist, expert, etc. tend to belong to the set of experts. There is no doubt that there are large differences in the quality of performance of different people on different tasks or in different domains. We can think of this difference as a scale of expertise. Novices are those who do not perform very well, and we can move through different levels of expertise until we find some individuals that we might say are skilled or knowledgeable beyond that of almost everyone else in the world, or world class. What is the nature of this dimension? What are the categories within which this level of expertise motif applies? Becoming an expert in any domain requires experience and effort. Don Norman introduced the notion that an someone requires 10,000 hours of experience and practice for reasonably complex domains to have the possibility of being an expert. Most people seem to agree with that assessment. In order for someone to become an expert in physics, music, chess, psychology, mathematics, baseball, etc. takes many hours, even years, of hard work and practice. ***Keith Ericsson in viewing the development of expertise argued that the most important factor, perhaps even necessary and sufficient for developing expertise is deliberative practice. Deliberative practice has four properties: (1) it is at an appropriate level of difficulty, (2) the participant receives informative feedback, (3) the participant has many opportunities for repetition, and (4) the participant has th opportunity to correct for errors (from Ericsson (1996; found in Sternberg & Ben-Zeev (2001). If we focus on the process of becoming an expert rather than the claim that only a few become expert, we may come to a position I first heard from Micki Chi. Children are universal novices. They have not developed very many of the component skills needed for any domain. Decalage is the order of the day; many of the skills needed are relatively domain specific. The topics in t... ...wa workshops; Miss America candidates from Texas; Prodigies of all sorts. Winton Marsalis view on becoming an expert: commitment, listening, training, practice, confidence, independence. Component skills and knowledges. Must borrow many of them, learn to apply them in the right places, and integrate them to the new task. Some knowledge and skill must be learned from scratch. Many skills need to be developed more highly. It is possible that all of the component skills can be decomposed into simple enough parts that they are known a priori; however, expertise still requires integrating and restructuring them into usable schemata. What is the state of novice performance? Inchoate states, random trial and error, frustration, backward chaining, small units, surface form, separate nonintegrated components, bottom-up Expert performance--focused, much forward chaining, top-down, coherent and integrated, abstract organization, large units, proceduralization, integrated sequences, skillful, selective. Ericsson, K. A. (1996). The road to excellence. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum Sternberg, R. J. & Ben-Zeev, T. (2001) Complex Cognition: The psychology of human thought. New York: Oxford.