preview

Attaining Expertise Essay examples

Better Essays

Attaining Expertise
Daphney Walker
PSYCH/640
June 2, 2014
Holly Berry

Attaining Expertise In every industry experts are needed to teach others certain skills, give advice, and use strategies to solve problems. Individuals can attain expertise by focusing on a particular skill to improve. It is said that “experts are made and not born,” so expertise is not attained in one day, but takes practice and time and individuals also attain expertise at different rates performance levels. Experts develop cognitive processes that result in their high levels of performance, “Extensive practice can develop expertise in high level skill (Anderson, 2010). Acquired knowledge and skills are needed to attain expertise. This material will discuss …show more content…

Ericsson and Charness (1994, p. 525), postulated that, “Recent research has shown that expert performance is predominantly mediated by acquired complex skills and physiological adaptations.” Attaining expertise is achieved through the development of skills and comprises three stages which are the cognitive, associative, and the autonomous.
Cognitive Stage The cognitive development stage of attaining expertise is the first stage in which the individual develops what is call declarative encoding of the skill in which “a set of facts relevant to the skill is commit to memory” (Anderson, 2010). The learner will rehearse the facts as they perform the skills, for example, a child is learning to ride a bike he or she will rehearse the steps as the skill is perform. So the child will remember where the pedal is, learn how to hold to the handle, learn to balance, and learn to pedal and these steps become the set of problem-solving to ride the bike. Basically the child or learner is trying to figure out what needs to be done and the actions here are usually controlled in a conscious way. Learners also experiment with strategies in order to figure out the ones that work and the ones that does not. This knowledge that is acquired is in the declarative stage because the child’s performance cannot be called skilled. The child recalls facts about the skill of riding as he or she tries to ride the bike and pay attention in a step-by-step execution of the skill

Get Access