expertise

| competence | expertise | 

2005-11-01

Ericsson, 2003, p. 106: ... three general characteristics of distinguishing expert performance: the ability to select superior actions, the ability to generate rapid reactions, and the ability to control movement production.

Ericsson, 2003, p. 107: ... expert performers have acquired refined mental representations to maintain access to relevant information and to support flexible reasoning about an encountered task of situation. In most domains better performers are able to rapidly encode and store relevant information for representative tasks in memory so that they can efficiently manipulate the information mentally.

Ericsson, 2003, p. 109: ... experts acquire mental representations that allow them to internally monitor and compare their concurrent performance with their desired goal, such as the intended musical sound or desired motor action, and thereby continue to improve their control over their performance.

Ericsson, 2003, p. 116: The acquisition of expert performance extends over years and even decades, but improvement of performance is not an automatic consequence of additional experience. Merely performing the same activities repeatedly on a regular daily schedule will not lead to further change once a physiological and cognitive adaptation to the current demands has been achieved. The principal challenge for attaining expert performance is that further improvements require continuously increased challenges that raise the performance beyond its current level. The engagement in these selected activities designed to improve one's current performance is referred to as deliberate practice. Given that these practice activities are designed to be outside the aspiring expert's current performance, these activities create mistakes and failures in spite of the performer's full concentration and effort - at least when practice on a new training task is initiated.