ABSTRACT
Expertise research aimed at generating knowledge bases and cognitive task analyses have looked at the "diminishing return" as sample size increases. The bottom-line is that the field of Expertise Studies, as a scientific endeavor, is at risk of self-destructing unless researchers gets clear and consistent on these matters of terminology and proficiency scaling. In the study of expertise especially, statistical significance with regard to group averages is intrinsically insufficient: After all, one can obtain a statistically significant improvement in the average performance of a group because of the superior performance of a small number of outliers while a majority of the participants might actually perform worse than they had before the experimental intervention. As the field of Expertise Studies matured, it became clear that a significant opportunity and challenge was that of leveraging our scientific knowledge about the nature and development of expertise into methods for accelerating the achievement of high proficiency.
