How Experts Differ from Novices

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How Experts Differ from Novices

• Melissa Eubank

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How Experts Differ form Novices

• When it comes to problem solving, experts have
  gained a lot of knowledge that affects what they
  notice.
• This knowledge also affects how they organize,
  represent, and interpret information.

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How Experts Differ from Novices

• 6 Principles of Expertise
• Meaningful Patterns of information
• Organization of Knowledge
• Context and Access to Knowledge
• Fluent Retrieval
• Experts and Teaching
• Adaptive Expertise

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Meaningful Patterns of Information

• Experts notice features and meaningful patterns
  of information that are not noticed by novices.
• Experience is Key
• Chunking
• Examples
• Chess
• Electronics Technicians
• Physicists
• Teachers

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Meaningful Patterns of Information

• Experience
• Experts have seen the problem before, therefore
  they can see patterns of meaningful information.
• The problem is not really a problem.
• Because they can see the patterns of meaningful
  information experts problem solving starts at a
  higher level.

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Meaningful Patterns of Information

• Chunking
• Put together information into familiar patterns.
• Chunking enhances short term memory.
• Example
• 01110001110100101

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Meaningful Patterns of Information

• Chess Masters vs. Lesser ranked chess players.
• Chess masters were able to out play their
  opponents because if the knowledge they acquired
  from hours upon hours of playing chess.
• Chess masters experiences lead to recognition of
  meaningful chess configurations (using chunking)
  which leads to the realization of the best
  strategy with the most superior moves to win
  based on these configurations.
• Chess masters can chunk together chess pieces in
  a configuration.

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Meaningful Patterns of Information

• Electronics Technicians.
• Expert electronics technicians were able to
  reproduce large portions of complex circuit
  diagrams after only a few SECONDS of viewing.
• Chunked several individual circuit elements that
  performed the function of an amplifier.
• Novices could not do this.
• Being a novice in this area I hardly understand
  the words!!

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Meaningful Patterns of Information

• Physicists
• Mathematical Experts
• Recognize problems of river currents and problems
  of headwinds and tailwinds in airplanes to all
  involve relative velocities.
• They chunked all of these into relative velocity
  problems. Only an expert physicist would be able
  to do that with expert mathematical skills would
  be able to do that.

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Meaningful Patterns of Information

• Teachers
• Expert and Novice teachers were shown a
  videotaped classroom lesson and asked to talk
  about what they were seeing.
• Expert teachers noticed
• Note-taking strategies of students.
• Students loosing interest in the lesson.
• That the students seem to be accelerated
  learners.
• Novice teachers
• Couldnt tell what students were doing.
• Couldnt understand what was going on.
• Said Its a lot to watch.

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Organization of Knowledge

• Experts have acquired a great deal of content
  knowledge that is organized in ways that reflect
  a deep understanding of their subject matter.
• Big Ideas guide expert thinking.
• Experts understand the problem vs. novices who
  just want to solve the problem.
• Examples
• Physics
• Mathematics
• Adults and Children

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Organization of Knowledge

• Big Ideas
• Experts knowledge is organized around core
  concepts that guide their thinking about their
  domains.
• Novices are more likely to approach problems by
  searching for the correct formulas. Their
  knowledge is simply a list of facts and formulas
  that are relevant to the domain.

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Organization of Knowledge

• Understanding the problem.
• Experts want to understand what the problem means
  rather than just plug in numbers in a formula to
  get an answer.
• By understanding the problem experts can then
  explain why they used the tactics they did to
  solve the problem.

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Organization of Knowledge

• Physics
• Experts
• Use the core concept if Newtons 2nd Law. The
  sum of the external forces equals the mass
  multiplied by the acceleration. FMa.
• Draw Free Body Diagrams in order to see all the
  external forces and get a generic formula for
  solving the problem.
• When looking at different problems experts group
  these problems based on the major principle that
  could be applied to solve.
• Novices
• Immediately plug in numbers into formulas.
• Memorize, recall and manipulate to get answers
  they need.
• Grouped problems together based on if the
  pictures looked similar.

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Organization of Knowledge

• Mathematics
• Experts want to understand the problem and not
  just plug in numbers like novices.
• Experts and Novices were asked to solve an
  algebra word problem that is logically
  impossible.
• Experts wanting to understand the problem quickly
  realized that it was logically impossible
• Novices used the numbers in the problem to plug
  into equations that they would use to solve it,
  getting an unrealistic answer.

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Organization of Knowledge

• Adults (Experts) vs. Children (Novices)
• Adults and children were asked
• There are 26 sheep and 10 goats on a ship. How
  old is the captain?
• Adults had enough expertise to realize that you
  do not have enough information to solve this
  problem.
• Children attempted to answer this question with a
  number by adding, subtracting, etc. They did not
  try to understand the problem.

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Context and Access to Knowledge

• Experts knowledge cannot be reduced to isolated
  facts or propositions but, instead, reflects
  contexts of applicability that is, the knowledge
  is conditionalized on a set of circumstances.
• Retrieving relevant knowledge
• Conditionalized
• Examples
• Textbooks
• Word Problems
• Tests

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Context and Access to Knowledge

• Retrieving relevant knowledge.
• Experts know A LOT. But when they need to solve
  a certain problem they dont need all of the
  information they know.
• Experts do not search through all the knowledge
  they know. This would be overwhelming. Experts
  selectively retrieve the relevant information
  they need.
• Experts are GOOD at retrieving the relevant
  knowledge they need to solve a problem.

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Context and Access to Knowledge

• Conditionalized Knowledge
• Conditionalized- Knowledge includes a
  specification of the contexts in which it is
  useful.
• In other words, experts know when their
  knowledge is useful.
• Knowledge must be conditionalized in order to be
  retrieved when it is needed.
• Have to know when your knowledge is useful in
  order to retrieve that knowledge when it is
  needed to solve a problem.

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Context and Access to Knowledge

• Textbooks
• DO NOT help students to conditionalize their
  knowledge. They teach laws of mathematics but
  not when these laws are useful for problem
  solving.
• Students have to learn when their knowledge is
  useful all on their own.
• Present facts and formulas, but not the
  conditions in which these facts and formulas are
  useful.

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Context and Access to Knowledge

• Word Problems
• Word problems that use the appropriate facts and
  formulas help students to know when, where and
  why to use the knowledge they are learning.
• Example Addition and Subtraction.
• If you have 2 apples and your friend Julie gives
  you 7 more but then Charlie eats 3 of your
  apples. How many apples do you have?
• Children might know how to add and subtract
  numbers but the word problem will help them to
  know when their knowledge is useful.

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Context and Access to Knowledge

• Tests
• Many ask for only facts and not when, where or
  why to use those facts.
• Some tests have questions that are in order of
  how students learned them from the book.
• Therefore students think that they have
  conditionalized their knowledge but they have
  really memorized in order of the book when to use
  which formulas and not learned when the formulas
  are actually useful.
• If these same students were to take another test
  with questions presented randomly with no hint as
  to where the formulas were in the book they would
  not do as well.

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Context and Access to Knowledge

• What knowledge do you have that you know exactly
  when it is useful?
• For example I know how to take derivatives and
  velocity is the derivative of position. So if I
  am presented a velocity vs. time graph all I have
  to do to find the position at a given time is to
  find the area under the curve.

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Fluent Retrieval

• Experts are able to flexibly retrieve important
  aspects of their knowledge with little
  attentional effort.
• Effortful
• Relatively effortless to automatic
• Leads to progression
• Example
• Driving a car
• Reading

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Fluent Retrieval

• Effortful
• Novices
• Places demands on the learners attention.
• Attention is being expended on remembering
  instead of learning.
• If a student is trying to learn algebra and they
  are not an expert in addition, then they will be
  giving attention to the addition instead of
  learning algebra.

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Fluent Retrieval

• Effortless to Automatic
• Experts
• Fluency places fewer demands on their conscious
  attention.
• Allows more capacity of attention on another
  task.
• Like the example before, now, if the student can
  retrieve information on how to add effortlessly
  or automatically they can focus more on learning
  how to solve algebraic equations.
• Doesnt mean that experts solve problems faster
  than novices. Sometimes they can take longer
  because they are attempting to deeply understand
  the problem.

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Fluent Retrieval

• Driving a car.
• At first everyone starts out as Novices and they
  have to consciously think about all of the moves
  that are associated with driving.
• Checking mirrors.
• Checking speed.
• Radius of turn.
• How hard to apply brakes and gas.
• Which peddles are the brakes and gas.
• Turning on your blinker when turning.
• After experience however all of this becomes
  automatic unconscious thought.
• People can drive while carrying on a
  conversation.
• Sometimes I drive from one destination to another
  and dont even remember how they got there.

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Fluent Retrieval

• Progression
• Fluent retrieval is very important so that
  solutions can be easily retrieved from memory and
  you can continuously progress onto higher
  learning.

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Fluent Retrieval

• Reading
• When someone starts out learning to read they
  have to sound out the words, usually syllable by
  syllable. It is really hard to focus your
  attention on the actual material you are reading
  when you have to focus on the words.
• After experience, reading becomes automatic
  unconscious thought and the reader focuses on
  what they are actually reading.

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Fluent Retrieval

• What knowledge do you find
• Effortful?
• Effortless?
• Automatic?

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Experts and Teaching

• Though experts know their disciplines
  thoroughly, this does not guarantee that they are
  able to teach others.
• Expertise in a particular domain
• Expert teachers
• Examples
• Hamlet
• My 9th grade Biology Teacher

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Experts and Teaching

• Expertise in a particular domain.
• Does not guarantee that they will be good at
  helping other people learn.
• Can sometimes hurt teaching because experts can
  forget what is easy and difficult for students to
  learn. To them it all seems easy.
• If they dont have pedagogical content knowledge
  then they are more likely to rely on their
  textbook for how to teach their students.
• The textbook doesnt know anything about their
  particular classroom.
• Class could have different prior knowledge and
  not on the same level that the book expects.

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Experts and Teaching

• Expert Teachers
• Know the difficulties that students are likely to
  face when learning.
• Good at knowing what existing knowledge their
  students have so that they can make new
  information meaningful.
• Also good at assessing their students progress.
• Have pedagogical content knowledge not just their
  content knowledge.
• Underlies effective teaching.

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Experts and Teaching

• Hamlet
• Teacher 1
• Couldnt get into the mind set of his students.
• Made them memorize long-passages, do in-depth
  analyses of soliloquies and write a paper on the
  importance of language in Hamlet. (This sounds
  really boring to me!)
• Knew all about Hamlet, but not how to teach it to
  his students.
• Teacher 2
• Knew how to get into his students heads.
• Knew all about Hamlet too, but also how to teach
  students.
• Asked them questions about life situations that
  pertained to Hamlet before even talking about the
  play.
• Asked about how the students would feel about
  their parents splitting due to a new man in moms
  life and that man might be responsible for dads
  death. Then to think about what would cause them
  to go mad and commit murder.
• This got the students attention and then they
  were interested in Hamlet.

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Experts and Teaching

• Ms. Yin
• Brilliant in the field of Biology
• Horrible teacher

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Adaptive Expertise

• Experts have varying levels of flexibility in
  their approach to new situations.
• Artisans
• Virtuosos
• Metacognition
• Answer-filled Experts
• Accomplished Novices
• Examples
• Japanese sushi experts
• Information systems designers

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Adaptive Expertise

• Artisans
• merely skilled
• Relatively routinized

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Adaptive Expertise

• Virtuosos
• highly competent
• One that is flexible and more adaptable.
• Learn throughout their lifetime.
• Not only use what they have learned but are
  metacognitive and continuously question their
  current levels of expertise and attempt to move
  beyond them.
• But which learning experiences lead develop
  virtuosos.
• Still challenges people.

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Adaptive Expertise

• Metacognition
• The ability to monitor ones current level of
  understanding and decide when it is not adequate.
• When there are limits of ones current
  knowledge, you must take the right steps to
  remedy the situation. Learn more.

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Adaptive Expertise

• Answer filled experts
• A common assumption is that and expert is someone
  who knows all the answers.
• This puts restraint on new learning because
  experts worry about looking incompetent when they
  might need help in certain areas.
• They want to be called Accomplished Novices.

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Adaptive Expertise

• Accomplished Novices
• Skilled in many areas and proud of their
  accomplishments, but they realize that they do
  not know everything. They do not know everything
  especially when compared to all that is
  potentially knowable.
• Experts being called accomplished novices helps
  people feel free to continue to learn.

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Adaptive ExpertiseJapanese sushi experts

• Artisan
• Excels in following a fixed recipe.

• Virtuoso
• Can prepare sushi creatively.

• Both can make great sushi but how they are
  prepared is different.

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Adaptive ExpertiseInformation systems designers

• Work with clients who know what they want.
• Artisans
• Skilled
• Use their existing expertise to do familiar tasks
  more efficiantly.
• Tend to accept the problem and its limits as
  stated by their clients.
• Virtuosos
• Creative
• View assignments as opportunities to explore and
  expand their current level of expertise.
• Consider the clients statement of the problem a
  point for further exploration.

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Experts vs. Novices

• The six principles of expertise need to be
  considered simultaneously, as parts of an overall
  system.

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Experts vs. Novices

• A28 degrees
• Find all other angles.
• Principles of expertise?
• Are you an expert?

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Experts vs. Novices

• A 20-kg mass is attached to a spring with
  stiffness 200 N/m. The damping constant for the
  system is 140 N-sec/m. If the mass is pulled 25
  cm to the right of equilibrium and given an
  initial leftward velocity of 1 m/sec, when will
  it first return to its equilibrium position?
• What expertise do you need to solve this?
• If you have that expertise, what principles of
  expertise are applied?
• Are you an expert or a novice?

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Experts vs. Novices

• Acceleration of 3-kg mass problem (on hand out).
• What expertise?
• What principles of expertise?
• Expert or Novice?

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Experts vs. Novices

• A board was sawed into two pieces. One piece was
  two-thirds as long as the whole board and was
  exceeded in length by the second piece by four
  feet. How long was the board before it was cut?
• Principles of Expertise?

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Experts vs. Novices

• Puzzle
• 5 years ago Kate was 5 times as old as her Son. 5
  years hence her age will be 8 less than three
  times the corresponding age of her Son. Find
  their ages.
• What expertise?
• Principles of expertise?
• Expert?

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Experts vs. Novices

• First draw a table like this one below
  5 YRS AGO PRESENT
  5 YRS LATER
• KATE 5x
  5x 5 5x
  10
• SON x
  x 5
  x 10Now we know that 5 years from now Kate's
  age will be 8 less than three times the
  corresponding age of her Son. So, if we add 8 to
  Kate's age , 5 years from now, and make her Son's
  age 3 times more we will find out 'x' and PROBLEM
  SOLVED. Therefore5x 10 8 3(x 10)5x
  18 3x 305x - 3x 30 - 182x 12x 12 /
  2x 6Now Kate's Present age is 5x 55(6)
  5 30 5 35 YEARS
• Now her Son's Present age is x 5 6 5 11
  YEARS