Research in Science Education: The Expert-Novice Continuum

INTRODUCTION Jose teaches a capstone course for geoscience majors, and has recently become head of his department's curriculum committee. As Jose prepares for the first meeting of the curriculum committee and considers the structure of his capstone course, he is thinking about what his department should expect their undergraduate students to know or be able to do by the time they graduate. Some of his students will go on to geology related jobs, particularly in the environmental industry, and others will be attending graduate school in MS or PhD programs. In addition to acquiring a core of factual knowledge about the geosciences, he would also like his students to gain an accurate understanding of important geologic processes, to be able to think critically about spatial data, and to learn to integrate processes and data into a holistic model of the Earth and Earth processes. In short, his goal is to have students learn to think like a geoscientist" - to move their thinking and skills along the continuum from geology student (novice) to geoscience professional (expert). What does Jose mean by this, and now can he achieve this goal? WHAT IS "EXPERTISE"? An expert might be defined as someone who has spent many hours training or solving problems in a domain such as geology, dance, linguistics, or auto repair. Experts are often viewed as more expressive when describing problems and solutions, and might be regarded by others as more capable at solving those problems (e.g., Ericsson and Lehman, 1996). Many of our educational goals, from kindergarten to college, revolve around training students to become more like experts; in other words, to move novice thinking and abilities along the continuum towards expertise. The amount of movement towards expertise will vary with the educational goals. For example, a single semester course in physical geology might serve to introduce students to geoscience thinking and problem solving, whereas an undergraduate program in geology would enable students to acquire knowledge and skills appropriate for employment or additional study in this field. The cognitive sciences have a rich research tradition that has examined expertise across a variety of fields, compared the characteristics of experts and novices, and considered how expertise is acquired. Research from the fields of chess, physics, math, education, history, and others has revealed key differences between experts and novices. Abstract thinking skills, problem-solving strategies, storage and recall of a wide array of information, and ability to work flexibly within a knowledge domain all exemplify what it means to be an expert. In sum, experts nave acquired a body of knowledge that affects what they notice, how they remember and recall information, and how they reason and solve problems (Bransford et al. 2000; Table 1). The cognitive strategies used by novices and experts provide clues about origins of differences in problem-solving ability and mental models (Table 1). Cross-age studies of grade 6 through experts indicate that organization of knowledge (de Jong and Ferguson-Hessler, 1986), interpretation abilities (Means and Voss, 1985), and ability to think abstractly (Wilson, 1998; Lewis and Linn, 1994) increase with age. The appearance of alternative conceptions in novices has also been linked to inexpert problem-solving strategies (Heyworth, 1999). Novices (students) use naive, intuitive approaches (Larkin, 1983) or unconscious, fragmented ideas (p-prims, diSessa, 1983) to solve problems, whereas experts build more detailed mental models that rest upon non-intuitive components, such as learned laws (Larkin, 1983). Facility with conceptual models in a particular domain is another hallmark of expertise. Conceptual models (e.g., Plate Tectonics) are internal representations of the world developed and used by expert groups to explain phenomena. Conceptual models are highly stable, and the accommodation or new theories and world-views by the scientific community can take a significant amount of time and effort; a classic example is the amount of time it took for Plate Tectonics to become a viable and accepted theory. …