The Development of Expertise : The Journey From Acclimation to Proficiency

Without question, the educational research community has garnered much from past decades of expert/novice theory and research. Framed largely by artificial intelligence and information-processing theory, those traditional research programs initially took shape in the 1970s and 1980s around the problem-solving performance of experts. The primary goal was to determine the characteristics and actions of experts so that these features could be programmed in “intelligent” machines or trained in nonexperts (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999; Chi, Glaser, & Farr, 1988). Despite this impressive list of contributions, it has proven difficult to translate the findings of past generations of expert/ novice research into educational practice (Ericsson & Smith, 1991; Hatano & Oura, 2003). One reason for this translation problem is that traditional programs of expertise research were not undertaken with schools or students in mind (Alexander, 2003). Another translation problem traces to the complex, multifaceted, and dynamic nature of formal schooling and the difficulty of traditional expertise approaches to relate to that unique, sociocultural context (Sternberg, 2003). For these reasons, models and theories drawn directly from school experiences, rather than superimposed on them, seem required to bridge the chasm between current understandings of expertise and educational practice. The Model of Domain Learning (MDL) is one such model (Alexander, 1997). The MDL portrays the nature of developing expertise in academic domains rather than extracting that nature from particular tasks drawn from nonacademic realms of problem solving. The MDL was derived from extensive research in strategic processing, knowledge acquisition, and motivation as well as expertise (e.g., Pintrich, Marx, & Boyle, 1993; Pressley, Goodchild, Fleet, Zajchowski, & Evans, 1989). Further, the specific dimensions and relations of the MDL discussed here have been substantiated by more than a decade of empirical research. The Development of Expertise: The Journey From Acclimation to Proficiency