Expertise Development for Next-Generation Digital Learners

Expertise Studies Overview

Developing expertise takes a substantial amount of time. Ericsson (2009) stated it could take up to 10 years of experience and deliberate practice to declare having expertise. However, schools as well as non-profit and for-profit organizations have always been interested in advancing training methods that help learners/trainers learn faster and more efficiently. To this end, researchers and practitioners have begun developing methods to help non-experts perform like experts by developing theories and models to identify what to teach. Some of the tools and methods that are widely recognized in the field include Macrocognition (Patterson & Miller, 2012; Schraagen et al., 2000), Human-Centered Computing (Hoffman & Militello, 2012), Naturalistic Decision Making (Zsambok & Klein, 2014), Cognitive Systems Engineering (Hollnagel & Woods, 2005), Cognitive Task Analysis (Clark & Estes, 1996; Crandall, Klein, & Hoffman, 2006; Feltovich et al., 1997; Hollnagel, 2003; Jenkins, 2009; Lukas & Albert, 1993), and the field of Expertise Studies in general (Ericsson, 2009; Ericsson et al., 2006; Hoffman, 2007). In order to synthesis these efforts, Hoffman et al. (2013) proposed a concept called Accelerated Expertise, that suggested ways by which to accelerate the learning process to make a non-expert appear to be an expert.