When is it crucial to know the differences between experts and novices?
At the hiring interview, some people pretend to be an expert with 10 years of experience. And later on, it proves that some have 1 year of experience that was repeated for 10 years. If you think long term, the moment of the interview is not even so important as it is the evolution that one person is capable of. People that are driven by great will and motivation can learn everything and can become an expert very soon.
There are many employees that were not given the chance to grow/develop themselves in the area where they are passionate. As a team leader, you should be able to identify those persons and support, stimulate, and motivate them.
How do you identify who scores for the expertise? Because any beginner could turn into an expert.
“In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” (Shunryu-Suzuki)
Studies and research have shown that experts share some common characteristics. I will present in detail, and don’t let yourself be fulled by the suit.
1. Differences in learning
The first major difference between experts and novices relays on how they learn.
The learning process is crucial because it determines how much of the information is remembered. The process of remembering is based on retrieval cues because memories are not saved instances of the received information. Memories are reconstructed anew each time a person recalls that information, or that event.
Humans have different types of long-term memory (semantic, episodic, procedural) and each of them stores a different type of information.
The semantic memories are what we know about the world. And what we “exchange for money” in the so-called “making a living”. The knowledge, I talk about in the next chapters, is stored in semantic memory.
1.1 Experts have well-organized knowledge
The first difference between experts and novices is how they learn and how they store the learned information. Experts have extensive knowledge which is well-organized into structures. Any new information is sorted based on whether it is irrelevant and put aside, or part of the larger structure and integrated at the corespondent location.
“High structure-builders learn new material better than low structure-builders. The later have difficulty setting aside irrelevant or competing information, and as a result they tend to hang on to too many concepts to be condensed into a workable model that can serve as a foundation for further learnining” (Brown, Roediger III, McDaniel – make it stick: The Science of Successful Learning)
Any learned information becomes usable only if the subject learns with understanding. So, learning with understanding is crucial for the development of expertise. When people learn with understanding they are able to link the new information with the knowledge they have, into the knowledge structure that he is creating.
Also problem-solving will be done by first understanding the problem and not by applying formulas belonging to the subject matter. An expert will always seek to understand the problem not to find a matching solving scheme. The conceptual understanding helps the experts to see the meaning that the novice can not see.
An experiment that supports the theory
The following experiment reveals how experts organize knowledge around ideas while novices organize knowledge by appearances or similarities.
Problems related to mechanics were listed on cards. Experts and novices were asked to sort them out based on the approach they would use to solve the problems. While a novice’s pile consisted of problems containing only inclined planes. The expert’s pile contained problems that can be solved by the conservation of energy.
Responding to the surface characteristics of problems is not very useful, since two problems that share the same inclined plane may actually be solved by different approaches. While the novice’s schema was primarily the features of the surface, the expert’ schema linked the concept of the inclined plane with the laws of physics. (Experiment described fully in How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition (2000) )
1.2. Experts’ knowledge is “conditialized”
“There’s virtually no limit to how much learning we can remember as long as we relate it to what we already know. In fact, because new learning depends on prior learning, the more we learn, the more possible connections we create for further learning.“(Brown, Roediger III, McDaniel – make it stick: The Science of Successful Learning)
Experts’ knowledge is not present in the form of some isolated ideas or theories or formulas related to the domain. But is a “conditialized” (term used in the language of cognitive scientists) set of circumstances that belong to a context, like fundamentals about the domain. They use those conditialized theories to guide their thinking into further details.
In a research a group of experts and one of the novices were asked to solve a physics problem. The novices started with the formulas or equations that pertain to that specific problem. While the experts enunciated the principles that apply to the problem together with the rationale (why does that principle apply and even more while solving the problem), the experts draw diagrams that were intended to help them understand the problem and find better solutions.
2. Experts differ from novices in recalling
Recalling means nothing else than remembering. Each of the four memory types that we have, has its own way of recalling information. We are still in the case of semantic memory, where the recall is done more tedious and on request.
In general, the recall process is determined by how memory was consolidated, context, the recent use of the information, and the number and the vividness of cues that were linked to the knowledge.
Endel Tulving stated that remembering is always a product of both:
1. the information stored
2. and the cues in the environment that might remind you of the information
Even weak traces can be accessible with strong cues.
2.1. Fast retrieval of information
Because the experts have such a vast amount of knowledge and only some parts of it are relevant for a specific problem, the next challenge would be how long does it take to identify and retrieve it. We are entitled to think that searching through a vast amount of information takes more time than searching through just a few ( this is why ladies need much more time to find something to dress 😉 ).
Actually, this does not apply to experts’ information retrieval. As a consequence of the 2 above properties: well-organized and conditionalized knowledge (strong cues), experts are able to retrieve on request only the relevant aspects of their knowledge. With no effort or even better, in a kind of automated way.
Fluency retrieval of information has a big benefit, it requires lower conscious attention since the retrieval is done automatically. It is like driving a car and eating a sandwich. The person that drives for the first or second time is not able to do this. And if it does, it needs a lot of conscious attention. This means that the fluent retrieval of information is exercised by practice and experience, it is not an overnight process.
2.2. Capability of recognizing patterns or features or properties
Experts develop the capability of recognizing patterns or features or properties of the information, that novices overlook. Because the amount of information that people can hold in short-term memory is limited, a way to enhance it is to chunk information into familiar patterns. These patterns actually trigger the knowledge that is relevant to the problem they confront themselves with.
Research was conducted to prove that chess masters do think through all their possible moves and then through their opponent’s countermoves before making one move. The conclusion was that they do not think through the moves but due to the great number of hours they have spent playing chess, they recognize meaningful patterns of configuration. This leads to some specific set of moves out of which they chose the superior one to the move a novice would choose. It is estimated that world-class chess world masters require from 50.000 to 100.000 hours of practice, to reach that level of expertise.
The factors mentioned above:
-clusters of well-structured knowledge,
-linked and organized knowledge to and around its specific contexts,
allow a faster parsing and retrieval of information when the context is recognized. They retrieve the information so fast and easily as you retrieve the clothes out of the drawers. When you dress in the morning and you are being late, you do not open all the drawers of your wardrobe, in order to find the socks. And although all the drawers look the same, and I bet you didn’t label them, you go directly to the right one. The same way works with searching the information in the expert’s brain.
3. Teaching others
Most experts do not have the ability to teach others what they know.
“I am deeply convinced that one cannot properly teach without possessing, implicitly or explicitly, a mental model of what is going on in the minds of the learners” (Stanislas Dehaene – How we learn)
The expert’s brain changes within the learning process. The neuron’s wiring will change and the change is definitive. Their model representation of the knowledge is so complex and from that point is hard to get back at your novice vision/perception. This is the reason why experts do not realize that novices cannot see what they themselves see. For them their perception is self-apparent. The better you know something, the more difficult it becomes to teach it (Eric Mazur).
A second problem with having an expert in the role of the trainer is the curse of knowledge. This is a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, who is communicating with other individuals, assumes that the other individuals have the background knowledge to understand. The curse of knowledge in training/teaching tendency to underestimate how long it will take another person to learn something new or perform a task that the teacher/trainer has already mastered.
“Teachers often suffer this illusion – the calculus instructor who finds calculus so easy that she can no longer place herself in the shoes of the student who is just starting out and struggling with the subject” (Brown, Roediger III, McDaniel – make it stick: The Science of Successful Learning)
There is another issue with the lack of teaching. Since the expert has difficulties in explaining/teaching what he knows, it is hard to identify, based on a discussion (like an interview), if the person is an expert or not. For that, you have to put him to work.
4. The Concept of Adaptive Expertise
There are differences even between experts.
The researchers have discovered that there are 2 types of expertise. One that is routine-based and one that is flexible and adaptable to external demands:
“merely skilled” or “artisans” vs. “highly competent” or “virtuosos” ( How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition (2000) ).
The artisan takes the problem that his client wants to automate and searches for the best solution for solving it. But he accepts the limitations of the solution as stated by the client. The virtuoso sees these limitations stated by his customer as a starting point for new learning opportunities.
With this example in mind, one question might arise.
Is the expert the person that has all the knowledge and the answers to all questions?
The researchers proved that an expert is one that regularly evaluates his expertise. And can identify his level of knowledge as well as the lack or the missing information in his “knowledge system” or weaknesses. As a consequence, he spends his life in continuous learning. This process is called metacognition, this is a complex process that comprises the knowledge of knowing how to learn and the ability to reflect upon his own performance in order to improve it where it is needed.
