ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights key ideas and discoveries about the nature of expertise. Studies of human experts show they match current situations to a wealth of knowledge garnered from years of experience. Experts not only possess deep knowledge, they are better than novices at retrieving chunks of the knowledge and applying it to current situations. Traditional definitions of expertise have centered more on the superior knowledge an expert possesses. However, recent ideas have stressed expert performance as the major criteria of expertise. Experts achieve superior results in their domain of discourse. Other researchers have identified problem-solving and task skills necessary for expertise. In fact, all are true. Expertise requires extensive knowledge, know-how, and the ability to analyze and apply these to achieve superior performance. Important is how knowledge should be represented and stored. One of the most robust methods is an associative collection of dynamic knowledge stores called templates. In the field of educational pedagogy, mastery of a subject matter is indicated when the student demonstrates the ability to recall, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate and create. Combining these skills along with domain knowledge, problem-solving, and task skills form the basis of the Model of Expertise described in Chapter 7.
