ABSTRACT
Highly competent performance is intrinsically fascinating, regardless of whether we witness it in memory experts, quiz kids, Olympic players, medical diagnosticians, chess masters, or mathematicians and biophysicists. In the past 15 years or so, describing competence and the processes that underlie it has become a significant endeavour in the study of human cognition. The tactic in these studies has been to explore the well-established performances that proficient people display, which have developed over time, and the components and properties of knowledge and skill that characterize highly competent performance. The results of this work define objectives for human attainment— goals for learning that can inform teaching practices at all levels. Expertise is proficiency taken to its highest level, and understanding of the experts’ hard-won knowledge and skill can be used to foster the novices’ progress and, perhaps, to expand the proficiencies of experts themselves.
