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...
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...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.
In the second chapter of his book “Outliers: The Story of Success,” Malcolm Gladwell introduces what he believes to be a key ingredient in the recipe for success: practice. The number of hours he says one must practice to obtain expert-level proficiency in a particular skill is ten thousand hours. He goes on to list several examples of successful individuals and makes the correlation between the amount of hours they practiced their skill and when they achieved expert-level proficiency (almost always around ten thousand hours of practice). While the magic number appears to be the main focus of the chapter when it comes to success, Gladwell seems to put more emphasis on the advantage and opportunities each individual experienced. However, I believe the determining factor that distinguished their successful careers was their drive, passion and dedication to put in the hours necessary to turn those unique opportunities into success.
The average for this person is 3.59 which mean their skills are adequate but could be stronger. During the process specific areas were noted as the strongest skills and the weakest skills. The strongest skill was 4.42 for cultural communication. The weakest skill was external
Myers, G. D., (2010).Psychology (9th ed.). In T. Kuehn & P. Twickler (Eds.), The Biology of Mind. (p.64). New York, NY: Worth Publishers.
given level of work. While many professions hone in on specific areas of expertise, social
I develop multiple skills and abilities from various experiences, especially leadership and communication skills. When I took the accounting information system class, I was the leader of the group project, which was to lead and assign group
Today’s essential skills for both teachers and learners are metacognitive and process oriented and including critical thinking and problem solving, collaboration and leadership, agility and adaptability, initiative and entrepreneurialism, effective communication, accessing and analyzing information, curiosity and imagination Wagner (2008). Today’s educators must be masters of learning, not necessarily masters of content, and today’s learners must have the skills to adapt to any new situation.
Specialization is the excellence and development of a specific set of skiils in a certain subject of work.
Technical skills are the formal name for the knowledge to perform the task at hand. One acquires technical skills by training in formal school systems or in the work environment. Experience is probably one of the most important factors in growing your technical skill in a subject. The importance of technical skills in the workplace is undeniable. Without the knowledge of the subject at hand, there is virtually no way possible to be a well-rounded person. Without technical skills you are not likely to be able to even do the job at hand.
knowing the skills that will have to be acquired and the levels of performance that will be
Mastery level is assessed to determine which components of the task analysis a person can perform independently (Cooper).
Keil, F. C. and Wilson, R. A. (1999) The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: The MIT Press
Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligence focuses more on how numerical expressions of human intelligence are not a full and accurate depiction of people’s abilities (McFarlane, 2011). He includes and describes eight intelligences that are based on skills and abilities that are valued within different cultures. The eight intelligences include visual-spatial (e.g. sailor navigating with no navigational systems), verbal-linguistic (e.g. poets, writers, orators, and communicators), bodily-kinesthetic (e.g. dancers, athletes, surgeons, craftspeople), logical-mathematical (e.g. mathematicians and logicians), interpersonal(e.g. salespeople, teachers, clinicians, politicians, and religious leaders), musical (e.g. musicians and
Sternberg, R. J. (1999). Cognitive psychology (2nd ed.). Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers
Expert Power - This kind of power comes from an expert knowledge of the task that needs to be accomplished, this kind of power can be extremely strong.
The case of such skills incorporate capability or experts in specific fields like math, accounts, finance, financial matters, knowledge, science, measurements.