Expertise

What is Expertise?

Experts are individuals who have worked for a decade within a specific domain and have achieved high levels of competence, irrespective of their novel contributions. It is assumed that after a decade, one has mastered the skills and knowledge needed to perform at the domain's highest levels. Expertise involves the acquisition, storage, and utilization of two kinds of knowledge: declarative knowledge of the domain (facts, major ideas, principles, and formulae) and tacit knowledge of the field. Some characteristics of expert thinking are the ability to perceive and reproduce large meaningful patterns in the expert's domain; rapid performance of procedures; extensive, rich, well-organized, interconnected, and easily accessible knowledge structures; superior short-term and long-term memory; and rich repertoires of strategies for problem solving. Experts are inclined to use data-driven reasoning when solving well-defined problems. With ill-defined problems, experts change their strategy to hypothesis-driven reasoning. Experts tend to represent problems at a deeper, semantic level. They are likely to work forward from given information to implement strategies for finding unknowns, while monitoring their effectiveness. Experts spend a great deal of time analyzing problems qualitatively, tending to retrieve solution methods as part of their comprehension of the task. However, there is no inherent originality in expert performance. For Howard Gardner, expertise is mainly related to the achievement of the most important skills and mastery of the knowledge domain.

Expertise and Creativity

The strongest proponent of the position that creativity requires expertise is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Within his systemic perspective, anyone who wants to make a creative contribution must first learn the rules and the content of the domain, and fully internalize its knowledge and conventions before changing or advancing some aspect of it. This creative contribution must then pass through the gatekeepers of the field, experts whose “job” is to decide whether a new idea or product should be included in the domain. The cognitive functions of experts operate smoothly and efficiently, so they are assumed to have greater potential for creativity in their field and a greater likelihood to extend the domain. Research substantiates this view. Expertise is associated with innovation, and there is an interaction between an individual's knowledge of a domain and the ability to creatively solve problems.

Robert Sternberg has suggested that experts are more likely to arrive at creative solutions because of their ability to see deeply into problems. This process of insight corresponds to abilities within [Page 343]his triarchic conception of expertise. An expert's ability to selectively encode allows an individual to differentiate information that is highly relevant to solving a problem from extraneous detail. Selective combination permits an expert to combine information in ways that are useful for solving problems and can result in creative approaches based on novel combinations. An expert's ability to make selective comparisons facilitates the application of information acquired in one context to problems in another. In creating analogies between problems, an expert can arrive at creative solutions that might never occur to a novice. As Gardner has pointed out, however, tension exists between the concepts of creativity and expertise; one can be an expert without being creative.

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