Summary: The Oxford Handbook of Expertise explores how expertise is developed and applied in various fields. It highlights the importance of deliberate practice and cognitive factors in achieving expert performance. The book also discusses the role of expertise in real-world decision-making environments.
Highlights
The Oxford Handbook of Expertise had its origins in conversations within and between the self-organizing community of scholars engaged in the development of the field of Naturalistic Decision Making (View Highlight)
Aristotle’s writings on the habitual acquisition of virtues were an important impetus for the field as one virtue was excellence (View Highlight)
One of the landmark studies with respect to expertise was conducted by Bryan and Harter (1897), who studied the acquisition of telegraphic language in field operators. Their research suggested that some skills were acquired more rapidly than others (i.e., sending rate was acquired faster than receiving rate), and habits were hypothesized to be acquired hierarchically—i.e., letters, then words, then clauses, then sentences, etc.—suggesting an automation of some aspects of the task before others are acquired. This phasing of skill acquisition is, perhaps, most representative of this community of practice, and exemplified in the framework proposed by Paul Fitts (e.g., 1964). (View Highlight)
skill acquisition progresses through phases, from cognitively demanding to more direct (i.e., less verbally mediated) associations between stimulus and response that are typically accompanied with decreases in error rates and time to respond. (View Highlight)
Hubert Dreyfus extended traditional phase-based theories produced by the skill acquisition community by proposing particular stages of expertise development (see Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986) (View Highlight)
Learners were assumed to progress from performance that was verbal-, rule-, and problem-solving-based, to a form of thinking that was based on experience (View Highlight)
where experts recognize important and relevant aspects of the situation and know intuitively what to do without any need to engage in effortful and deliberative thinking or problem solving. (View Highlight)
Ericsson et al. (1993) claimed that engagement in these activities is related monotonically to the level of expertise attained, and that the greatest improvements in performance are likely to be associated with the largest weekly amounts of deliberate practice. Therefore, individuals who have accumulated the largest number of practice hours throughout their career and consistently and deliberately engaged in high levels of practice for sustainable periods are more likely to attain expertise. The general rule of thumb to attain expert status reiterated in this research is 10 years or 10,000 hours of deliberate practice (see also Hayes, 1985; Simon & Gilmartin, 1973). (View Highlight)
definition of expertise is one of *reliably superior performance on representative tasks—*a key tenet of the expert performance approach (e.g., Ericsson & Smith, 1991). (View Highlight)
suggest that expertise is about cognitive and/or psychomotor skill competence, where those skills are central to accomplishing performance goals. Burns (this volume) suggests the emphasis should be on the “expert’s deep knowledge and experience that brings about significantly different and more effective behaviors than novices.†(View Highlight)
suggest that expertise in scientific fields is more about “mastery of the knowledge and skills capable of bringing about new knowledge that meets or exceeds current standards.†(View Highlight)
suggesting that the ability to demonstrate and implement relevant knowledge and skills competently as well as confidently are what really matters. (View Highlight)
suggesting that expertise is defined by the ability to see the signal in the noise—the critical situational elements—and intuitively generate the appropriate, or at least an effective, course of action. (View Highlight)
suggesting that in times of uncertainty expertise is defined by the ability to mentally simulate those actions and see their success. (View Highlight)
allude to the expert’s ability to immediately recognize changes in the scenario and to flexibly apply knowledge and experience, even when the situation is novel. (View Highlight)
suggest that expertise is a matter of “sensitivity to environmental constraints and opportunities.†These adaptive and context-sensitive components of expertise are not new. (View Highlight)
described expertise as context-dependent choice amongst alternatives (View Highlight)
expert performance of real experts from that which is more representative of competent journeymen—“the ability to successfully perform job-relevant duties and solve common problems quickly, reliably, and accurately.†They suggest that, by definition, expertise conveys an “ability to successfully solve uncommon, unusually difficult, and/or strategic problems that others cannot.†(View Highlight)