ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the implications of expert knowledge in educational reform in the Third World, with an emphasis on the moral imperatives of external aid and expert knowledge.
Expertise is usually associated with formal training (education), including achieving a fair amount of experience in a given fi eld. The notion of expert knowledge has been developed in cognitive psychology encompassing three different components: formal knowledge, practical knowledge, and self-regulating knowledge.2 Päivi Tynjälä synthesizes these areas in the following way:
Formal knowledge belongs to the category of what cognitive psychologists have called declarative knowledge. Such explicit and factual knowledge has played a mayor role in education, and as such it constitutes the core of professional competence. The second constituent of expertise, practical knowledge, often called procedural knowledge, manifests itself as skills or “knowing how” while formal knowledge may be described as universal and explicit, practical knowledge is, rather, personal and tacit, being thus intuition-like and diffi cult to be expressed explicitly. The third component, self-regulating knowledge, consists of meta-cognitive and refl ective skills that individuals use to monitor and evaluate their actions.3
