Surpassing OurselvesCarl BereiterMarlene ScardamaliaPrefaceIt happens - PDF document

Surpassing OurselvesCarl BereiterMarlene ScardamaliaPrefaceIt happens often in the physical and biological sciences, seldom in the behavioralsciences, that a line of research pursued for its theoretical interest intersects witha growing societal concern. Research on expertise is such a case. It started withmedical diagnosis, instrument repair, sports of all kinds-virtually every skill thatfeeds society's rampant needs for high performance.The main thing this research shows is that expertise requires enormous amountsof knowledge-far more than anyone, even the experts, had supposed. We shouldnot minimize the importance of this finding. It radically changes the whole scaleof problems related to expert knowledge and skill. But its practical upshot is thecontact with society's interest. Virtually all the research compares experts withmany years' experience to novices with very little. But as a society, we are notconcerned with novices. Eventually they will quit being novices, without ourhaving to do anything about it. The important question is what they will become.Will they become experts in their lines of work or will they swell the ranks ofincompetent or mediocre functionaries? As scientists, engineers, or managers,how will they compare with their counterparts in other countries that seem to bethey have creativity and breadth of vision? Will they be able to grasp, and make headway against, the large problems that face us? These are social concernsneed to know what separates expertise from mediocrity and what is needed-besides training and experience- to foster continuing growth in competence.Those are the kinds of issues we hope at least to illuminate in this book.There is a whole other set of social concerns about expertise that get summed upexperts can solve it, you have just made the problem unsolvable.' Some readersunderstanding expertise. Statements like those just quotedseem really to be referring to specialists, not experts; and treating expertise as if itwere synonymous with specialization reveals a misunderstanding that can onlyfosters and what stunts its development, and how it functions in people's livesand work.We came to the study of expertise from an unusual direction, through the studyof writing. Writing, as it happens, violates the conventional wisdom aboutperformance were fifth-graders who, given a simple topic, would start writing in seconds and would produce copy as fast as their little fingers could move thepencil.What can be observed in expert writers is something rarely observable in typicalexpert-novice comparisons. One observes the growing age of expertise. Weassume that every expert, in whatever field, has a growing edge. Doctors oftenremark that the great majority of cases they see are unchallenging. Routinediagnostic and treatment procedures suffice. But then there are the five or tenpercent of cases that are challenging. Those cases test the growing edge of theand is likely to drift into the category of the 15 percent of doctors whom theThere is a growing edge to everyone's knowledge. But the poorer writers westudied approach the task in ways that minimize opportunities for growth,whereas the better writers maximize them. The result is a multiplier effect, wherethe more expert keep gaining in expertise while the less expert make littleprogress. Aided by research of our students, we went on to look at learners inother academic areas, and in music and medicine. The same results appeared.things in ways that result in their learning still more. Doesn't this suggestsomething about how they got to be experts in the first place, and why so manyan understanding of expertise.We wish the research base for this inquiry were stronger. Despite intenseresearch on expertise during the past decade, hardly any of it contrasts expertswith experienced nonexperts or examines the growth of expertise over time-andthese are the kinds of research most relevant to issues about the growing edge.book unconvinced. The more likely problem, and one we have run into when we Apple Computer, the Charles R. Bronfman Foundation, IBM, the James S. Studies in Education, which, through its block reserach grant from the Ontariopresent work: Jud Burtis, Carol Chan, Pam'la Ghent, Margaret Ogilvie, EvelynNg, and Naomi Tal.edited by Micheline Chi, Robert Glaser, and Marshall Farr (1988), and