Adaptive Expertise defined as a linear
combination of factual and conceptual knowledge and transfer
Investigators on knowledge
transfer have almost unanimously concluded that students seldom effectively
apply short-term training at school to problem-solving situations outside
school. Experts, who have had years of problem-solving experience in a given
domain, may not be different–they can solve familiar types of problems quickly
and accurately but fail to go beyond procedural efficiency.
Work
in Progress - Adaptive Expertise: Beyond Apply Academic Knowledge
We want
our learners to have flexible knowledge that allows them to invent ways to
solve familiar problems and innovative skills to identify new problems. We
suggest that the more desirable definition of expertise relates to students “adaptiveness” to identifying and solving novel problem.
How
Experts Differ from Novices
An important question for
educators is whether some ways of organizing knowledge are better at helping
people remain flexible and adaptive to new situations than others.
The Competitive Edge: Creating
a Human Capital Advantage for Kentucky
As the nature of teaching and learning and knowledge acquisition are being transformed by fast-paced research and technology, certain skills become ever more critical. It has become increasingly less important to memorize “facts” and more important to learn to think and perform in a team-based environment–to solve problems, demonstrate adaptive expertise, think critically, communicate effectively, be flexible and adaptable, and perhaps most important, to learn how to learn.
Assessing Adaptive Expertise in
Undergraduate Biomechanics
Research on learning and cognition suggests that student achievement can be significantly enhanced by the integration of four types of learning environments: (a) learner-centeredness; (b) knowledge-centeredness; (c) assessment-centeredness; and (d) community-centeredness. This model of learning and instruction has come to be known as the HPL framework. Research has shown that when these four environments are combined with flexibly adaptive instructional design, student achievement may be enhanced even further.
"[Expertise] doesn't just affect how we categorize information.... Expertise actually affects what we notice in the first place." The problem this causes for teaching is that as we gain expertise ourselves so much of it is taken in as tacit knowledge that we forget what is was like to be a novice. We forget what it was like to think and see as a novice thinks and sees, so we can't figure out how to build the bridge that brings learners across that gap.
Thoughts on Adaptive
Expertise - John Bransford
In the real world of work, a person
does not solve case studies. The individual mentally constructs cases from the
problems he or she encounters in the workplace.
The goal of problem-based
learning is to help learners construct their own cases by giving them real problems
to solve that require the same problem solving skills and content that they
will need in the real world. Presenting a problem to a student as it actually
occurs in the workplace permits the full range of problem-solving processes to
be practiced and developed. In solving a problem, the learner relies on his or
her prior knowledge to formulate tentative hypotheses. The student selects the
resources to use and inquires, experiments, and reasons critically to uncover
the nature, cause, extent, and ramifications of the problem. Through this
process the learner discovers what he or she needs to learn in order to solve
the problem and build a case.
Giving a learner a case study
with the information that a previous problem solver has constructed around the
problem deprives the learner of the opportunity to develop his own
problem-solving skills. In fact, research studies find little difference in learning
outcomes between the use of case studies and traditional classroom lecture
(Williams, 1992 p. 389).