EXPERTISE

Reporter: Michel O. Espinosa

*Content Source: Education Psychology, 5th Edition by John Santrock
Psy-Elec 5
Educational Psychology
 01 Introduction
Getting to know what Expertise is by definition.

Topics 02 Expertise and Learning

In this section, we will consider various ways that you can help
your students learn and remember these skills that experts use so
effortlessly.

03 Acquiring Expertise
What determines whether or not someone becomes an expert?
Can motivation and practice get someone to expert status? Or
does expertise also require a great deal of talent?

04 Expertise and Teaching

Being an expert in a particular domain—such as physics, history,
or math—does not mean that the expert is good at helping others
learn it (Bransford & others, 2006). Indeed, “expertise can
sometimes hurt teaching because many experts forget what is
easy and what is difficult for students” (National Research
Council, 1999, p. 32).
An expert is the opposite of a novice
(someone who is just beginning to
learn a content area). Experts
demonstrate especially impressive
memory in their areas of expertise.
One reason that children remember
less than adults is that they are far
less expert in most areas.

– John Santrock
 Don’t limit
yourself.
Discover new
areas of
expertise.

- Sunday Adelaja

1 Detecting Features and

Meaningful Patterns of
Organization
2 Organization and Depth
of Knowledge
3 Fluent Retrieval
EXPERTISE
Adaptive Expertise
& LEARNING 4

5 Strategies
Detecting Features and
Meaningful Patterns of
Organization
 Experts are better at noticing
important features of
problems and contexts that
novices may ignore (Blair &
Somerville, 2009; Bransford &
others, 2006).

 Experts also have superior

recall of information in their
area of expertise. The
Your Picture Here process of chunking is one
way they accomplish this
superior recall.

 Lacking a hierarchical, highly

organized structure for the
domain, novices cannot use
this chunking strategy”
(National Research Council,
1999, p. 21). For example, “Chess masters perceive chunks of meaningful
information, which affects their memory of what they see. . . .
Lacking a hierarchical, highly organized structure for the domain,
novices cannot use this chunking strategy” (National Research
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Council, 1999, p. 21).
Organization and Depth of
Knowledge
 Experts’ knowledge is
organized around important
ideas or concepts more than
novices’ knowledge is
(National Research Council,
1999). This provides experts
with a much deeper
understanding of knowledge
than novices have (Bransford
& others, 2006).
Your Picture Here
 Experts in a particular area
usually have far more
elaborate networks of
information about that area
than novices do (see Figure The implications for teaching are that too often a curriculum is
8.13). The information they designed in a way that makes it difficult for students to organize
represent in memory has knowledge in meaningful ways. This especially occurs when there
more nodes, more is only superficial coverage of facts before moving on to the next
interconnections, and better
hierarchical organization.
topic. In this context, students have little time to explore the topic in
depth in order to get a sense of what the important, organizing
ideas are. This type of shallow presentation can occur in any
subject area but is common in history and science texts that
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emphasize facts (National Research Council, 1999).
Fluent Retrieval

 The effort involved in retrieval

of relevant information can
Place Your Picture Here vary greatly. Experts in a
certain type of information
can retrieve it almost
effortlessly, or fluently,
whereas novices must
expend a great deal of effort
in retrieving the same
information (Posner &
Your Picture Here Rothbart, 2007).

 The advantage of fluent

retrieval is that it places
fewer demands on
conscious attention. Since
the amount of information a
student can attend to at one
time is limited, ease of
processing information in
some aspects of a task frees
up capacity to attend to other
aspects of a task
Consider expert and novice readers. Expert readers can quickly scan
the words of a sentence and paragraph, which allows them to devote
attention to understanding what they are reading. However, novice
readers’ ability to decode words is not yet fluent, so they have to
allocate considerable attention and time to this task, which restricts the
time they can give to understanding a passage. An important aspect of
teaching is to help students develop the fluency they need to
competently perform cognitive
Portfolio tasks (Beck & others, 1991).
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Adaptive Expertise

 An important aspect of expertise “is

whether some ways of organizing
knowledge are better” than others
for helping people to be “flexible and
adaptive to new situations” (National
Research Council, 1999, p. 33).

 Adaptive experts are able to

approach new situations flexibly
rather than always responding in a
Your Picture Here rigid, fixed routine (Gambrell, Malloy,
& Anders-Mazzoni, 2007).

 In sum, adaptive expertise is a

critical aspect of being an
outstanding teacher. Teachers who
are knowledgeable and adept at
adapting different methods,
practices, and strategies to meet the
needs of different students are most
likely to guide students to higher
levels of learning and achievement
(Gambrell, Malloy, & Anders-
Mazzoni, 2007).
An important theme in the book Preparing Teachers for a Changing
World (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005, p. 3) is to “help teachers
become ‘adaptive experts’ who are prepared for eff ective lifelong
learning that allows them to continually add to their knowledge and
skills.” In other words, teachers characterized by adaptive expertise are
fl exible and open to rethinking important ideas and practices to
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improve their students’ learning (Hammerness & others, 2005).
Strategies
 In Alexander’s (2003) view, students
don’t come to the classroom equipped
with the strategies they need to move
beyond the acclimation stage. Teachers
must help students learn effective
strategies and practice them in relevant
situations before students can
experience their value. Students also
need to be encouraged to change and
combine strategies to solve the problem
Your Picture Here at hand.

1. Spreading Out and Consolidating

Learning
2. Asking Themselves Questions
3. Taking Good Notes
4. Using a Study System
- Preview
- Question
- Read
- Reflect
- Recite
- Review
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 Don’t limit
yourself.
Discover new
areas of
expertise.

- Sunday Adelaja

1 Practice and Motivation

ACQUIRING
2 Talent

EXPERTISE
 What determines whether or not
someone becomes an expert? Can
motivation and practice get someone
to expert status? Or does expertise
also require a great deal of talent
(Sternberg & Ben-Zeev, 2001)?
Practice and Motivation

 One perspective is that a

particular kind of practice—
deliberate practice —is
required to become an expert
(Rosenzweig & Bennett,
2009). Deliberate practice is
at an appropriate level of diffi
culty for the individual,
provides corrective feedback,
and allows opportunities for
Your Picture Here repetition (Ericsson, Krampe,
& Tesch-Romer, 2009).

In one study of violinists at a music academy, the extent to which

children engaged in deliberate practice distinguished novices from
experts (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Romer, 1993). Th e top
violinists averaged 7,500 hours of deliberate practice by age 18,
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the good Presentation
violinists only 5,300 hours.
Talent

 A number of psychologists
who study expertise stress
that it requires not only
deliberate practice and
motivation but also talent
(Hunt, 2006; Sternberg,
2009).

 A number of abilities—music
and athletic, for example—
Your Picture Here seem to have a heritable
component (Plomin & others,
2009).

For example, is it likely that Mozart could have become such an

outstanding musical composer just because he practiced long
hours? Is it likely that LeBron James became such a fantastic
basketball player just because he was motivated to do so? Many
talented individuals have attempted
Portfolio to become as great as Mozart
Presentation
or James but have given up trying after only mediocre
 Don’t limit
yourself.
Discover new
areas of
expertise.

- Sunday Adelaja

1 Pedagogical Content
Knowledge

EXPERTISE
2 Technology, Expertise
and Teaching

& TEACHING
 Being an expert in a particular
domain—such as physics, history, or
math—does not mean that the expert
is good at helping others learn it
(Bransford & others, 2006). Indeed,
“expertise can sometimes hurt
teaching because many experts
forget what is easy and what is diffi
cult for students” (National Research
Council, 1999, p. 32).
Pedagogical Content
Knowledge
 Some educators have
distinguished between the
content knowledge required
for expertise and the
pedagogical content
knowledge necessary to
effectively teach it.
Pedagogical content
knowledge includes ideas
about common difficulties that
Your Picture Here students have as they try to
learn a content area, typical
paths students must take to
understand the area, and
strategies for overcoming the
difficulties they experience.

Some educational psychologists argue that in the absence of

expert pedagogical awareness of their own students, inexpert
teachers simply rely on textbook publishers’ materials, which, of
course, contain no information about the particular pedagogical
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needs of students Presentation
in the teacher’s classroom (Brophy, 2004).
Technology, Expertise and
Teaching
 Richard Mayer (2008, 2009)
has presented a number of
ideas and conducted
research on ways to
incorporate expertise and
technology in the classroom.
In his cognitive theory of
multimedia learning, Mayer
(2009) highlights the
following:
Your Picture Here
● There are two separate
channels (auditory and visual)
for processing information,
which is sometimes referred to
as dual-coding theory.
● Each channel has a
limited (finite) capacity, similar to
the concept of cognitive load.
● Learning is an active
process of filtering, selecting,
organizing, and integrating
information based on prior
knowledge.
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THANK YOU
Happy studying!