Normative and Substantive Expertise in Multiple Hypotheses Evaluation

We distinguish two criteria for evaluating the judgments of trained professionals. One criterion is conformance with a theoretical model and the other is conformance with known external criteria. Further, we label judgments that depart from a theoretical model as errors and those that depart from known external criteria as mistakes. Following this distinction, we hypothesize that auditors′ multiple hypotheses judgments will be characterized by errors but not mistakes. This hypothesis was tested by asking professional auditors to evaluate multiple hypotheses. The results confirm our expectations. Auditors′ judgments reflected ecological base rate information, and they appropriately ignored nondiagnostic evidence. Moreover, auditors did not exhibit a perseverance bias and 84% of them identified the correct hypothesis. The absence of mistakes reflect substantive expertise. Conversely, auditors′ probabilities were not additive, and, when a hypothesis was eliminated, they did not adjust beliefs for the remaining hypotheses. These errors reflect a lack of normative expertise. A second study employed inexperienced subjects to establish whether the strong substantive performance of the professional auditors was attributed to their expertise or was an artifact of the task. The results from the second study were strongly supportive of the substantive expertise explanation. Taken together, these results suggest that substantive expertise can help contain mistakes but it is not sufficient to mitigate errors. Further, lack of normative expertise can lead to errors but these errors do not translate into mistakes. The paper concludes that the distinction between normative and substantive expertise on one hand and errors and mistakes on the other is crucial to understanding when basic findings will generalize to professional settings.     

Two Texts,Three Readers: Distance and Expertise in Reading History

Historians are extraordinary, rather than typical, readers who routinely engage in the self-conscious, directed reading and rereading of historical documents, moving iteratively between documents and their own historical theories about an issue. This study was designed to compare the reading practices of historians reading highly familiar privileged texts with those reading familial but unfamiliar texts, and to determine when and how historians use general historical knowledge versus topic-specific expertise. Two expert historians were asked to select a document critical to their current work and then to read and interpret their own document (close) and a colleague's selection (far). A third historian read the two unfamiliar texts as a control. Our expectations were confirmed: (a) Historians have general document-reading knowledge that includes schemas for identification and interpretation, (b) historians' general knowledge dynamically interacts with their topic-specific expertise, (c) historians read familiar and unfamiliar documents differently, and (d) historians read intertextually. We found evidence that identification is supported by action systems for classification, corroboration, sourcing, and contextualization and that interpretations is supported by action systems for a textual and a historical read. We also saw that historians have strategies for reading a document as text, as artifact, and as member of a set of related texts. Although historians, like all readers, construct textbase and situation models as they read, the manner in which they do so reveals the nature and extent of their expertise. Our task analysis provides an exemplar to contemplate: evidence of how historians actually know and do what we hope students may come to know and do. We conclude with recommendations for how history teachers may engage students in two particularly promising activities: reading across multiple related documents to construct a coherent historical account and the deep analytic reading of a single critical or privileged document.     

什么是和平研究--学科发展史

西方学术机构中的和平研究 对西方大学来说,和平研究作为一门学科是比较新的,大致开始出现于20世纪60年代.在第二次世界大战后的20年内,学术机构对和平问题很少研究.当时,英国和美国的政治状况比较稳定,由两个传统政党的精英人物控制;两国政府以及几乎所有的对立党派都坚定地推行一种大力发展军力、以核武器为后盾、针对苏联的战略.     

The Expertise Question Revisited: Horizontal and Vertical Expertise

This article deals with the developments taking place in the field of family therapy from the expertise perspective, and as an expert practice. This development is looked at as a dialectical movement between two types of expertise, namely vertical and horizontal expertise. This spatial metaphor is put forward as a complementary alternative to the prevailing modern/postmodern debate. A brief account of the development of the study of science and of expertise is provided. The author suggests that the richness of current family therapeutic thinking owes something to both these different modes of expertise, the division not being as exclusive as some postmodernist authors suggest.     

Beyond the Mean: A Flexible Framework for Studying Causal Effects Using Linear Models

Psychometrika - Graph-based causal models are a flexible tool for causal inference from observational data. In this paper, we develop a comprehensive framework to define, identify, and estimate a...     

Transmuted Expertise: How Technical Non-Experts Can Assess Experts and Expertise

To become an expert in a technical domain means acquiring the tacit knowledge pertaining to the relevant domain of expertise, at least, according to the programme known as “Studies of Expertise and Experience” (SEE). We know only one way to acquire tacit knowledge and that is through some form of sustained social contact with the group that has it. Those who do not have such contact cannot acquire the expertise needed to make technical judgments. They can, however, use social expertise to judge between experts or expert claims. Where social expertise is used to make technical judgments we refer to it as “transmuted expertise”. The various kinds of transmuted expertise are described and analysed.     

Different Words for the Same Concept: Learning Collaboratively From Multiple Documents

This study investigated how varying the lexical encodings of technical terms in multiple texts influences learners' dyadic processing of scientific-related information. Fifty-seven pairs of college students read journalistic texts on depression. Each partner in a dyad received one text; for half of the dyads the partner's text contained different lexical encodings of the same concepts; for the other half the lexical encodings and texts were identical. They then read a case report on first signs of depression. Communicating via a chat room, each dyad had to write a causal diagnosis and suggest a treatment. Results showed that dyads in the different-encoding condition explicitly elaborated the meaning of technical terms more often, produced more differentiated answers, and acquired more knowledge. It is concluded that deliberately switching different words for the same underlying content, and engaging students in discussion of that content, influences learners' discourse and promotes scientific/conceptual understanding.     

Erratum to: Beyond the Mean: A Flexible Framework for Studying Causal Effects Using Linear Models

Psychometrika - The original version of the article contains the below listed errors.     

The Changing Self: Using Personal Documents to Study Lives

ABSTRACT In this paper we describe a technique for coding expressions of preoccupation with aspects of the adult self in personal documents and retrospective autobiographical writings In particular we explore the value of this approach by analyzing themes of identity, intimacy, and generativity expressed in Vera Brittain's diary and correspondence, written during her adolescence in World War I, and in her retrospective autobiographical account of that period in her life Analyses aim to use Erikson's theory of personality development to describe her psychological experience at the time and to compare that account with the later one     

记忆中专长效应的理论发展述评

1 引言专家借助专门领域的知识或技能,能快速而有效地记忆该领域的信息,这就是记忆中专长效应(expertise effeets inmemory recall)。对记忆中专长效应的科学研究,最早可追溯到二十世纪初。三位俄罗斯教授(Djakow,Rudik,petrovsky,1925)曾在实验室中研究了8位超一流国际象棋棋手的记忆能力,并得出结论,大师的非凡记忆能力并非在任何材料上都得到体现。这一研究与其它早期探究专家记忆的研究一起,促使研究者开始探讨记忆中专长效应的内在机制或思维     

Effects of Handwriting and Examiner's Expertise on Assessment of Essays

Abstract

The study was an investigation of the effects of density and personal space on simple and complex task performance and on feelings of crowding on 60 female Hindu students in India. A 2 × 2 design was used. Density was manipulated by varying the number of subjects in a fixed room space (social density), and the stop-distance technique was used to measure personal space. Results revealed that complex task performance was adversely affected by a high-density condition and by the personal space of the subjects, leading to a significant interaction effect of the two variables, but no significant main or interaction effect was found for the simple task performance. The subjects with “far” personal space under the high-density condition evaluated the environment of the experimental room as most crowded, more than any other subject did.     

The Effects of Expertise on the Hindsight Bias

We present data from three experiments examining the effects of objective and subjective expertise on the hindsight bias. In Experiment 1, participants read an essay about baseball or dogs and then answered questions about the baseball essay to the best of their ability, as if they had not read the essay, or to the best of their ability, although they read about dogs. Participants also completed a quiz about baseball rules and terminology, which was an objective measure of expertise. Results demonstrated that as participants' baseball expertise increased, their inability to act as if they never read the essay also increased; expertise exacerbated the hindsight bias. To test the effects of subjective expertise on hindsight bias and investigate factors underlying the relationship, participants in Experiment 2 ranked five topics in order of expertise and gave feeling‐of‐knowing (FOK) ratings for questions from these topics. Foresight participants then saw each question again and answered the questions; hindsight participants saw the questions and answers and gave the probability they would have known the answers had they not been provided. Hindsight bias increased with subjective expertise as did average FOK ratings. In Experiment 3, we experimentally manipulated perceived expertise but found that neither average FOK ratings nor hindsight bias was affected by experimentally induced expertise. Taken together, the results demonstrate that expertise exacerbates both objective and subjective hindsight bias but that an FOK, which likely exists only when expertise is naturally acquired, is necessary to engender the detrimental effect of expertise on the hindsight bias. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Training Melanoma Detection in Photographs Using the Perceptual Expertise Training Approach

Although a deadly form of skin cancer, melanoma is treatable if detected early. However, current rule‐based training practices in melanoma detection are not effective. We assessed an innovative technique to train melanoma detection using the perceptual expertise principles. Participants in the training group were trained to categorize melanoma and benign lesions to 95% accuracy. Participants in the control group received no training. Prior to testing all participants reviewed the ABCDE rules. Training was evaluated by the pre and post tests using the Melanoma Detection Test where participants categorized images of melanoma and benign lesions. As compared to the control group, the training group showed significant improvement in melanoma detection and became less liberal (i.e., bias toward categorizing a lesion as melanoma), and both improvements maintained a week after the training. These findings indicate that perceptual expertise training is a promising approach to train melanoma detection.Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On Certainty on the Foundations of History as a Discipline

Wittgenstein had little to say directly on philosophy of history. But some pertinent remarks in On Certainty have received little attention, apart from in Elizabeth Anscombe's short article on Hume and Julius Caesar. That article acknowledges its debt to On Certainty, which responses to Anscombe have failed to recognise. Wittgenstein focuses in On Certainty on apparently empirical propositions that seem to be certainties, but in fact form a rule-like framework for judging. I have called these Moorean propositions, and the present article develops the suggestion that history as a discipline rests on them. The result is a qualification of empiricism in philosophy of history.

     

Studying the Dynamics of Problem Behavior Across Multiple Time Scales: Prospects and Challenges

As a commentary on the Special Issue, this paper discusses recent advances in the study of change across several time scales. It points out the importance of specifying time scales and putative patterns of change when characterizing problem behavior over developmental time scales. Methods for studying risk and protective mechanisms through observation of social interaction are also discussed as a way to study influences that operate in real time. Methods for studying episode-level interaction patterns that result from such real-time influences are also discussed, along with ways to integrate these with longitudinal assessments to study the effects of social interaction on problem behavior across developmental time scales.     

Working Memory Capacity and Learning Underlying Conceptual Relationships Across Multiple Documents

A common usage of textual repositories of information is to seek out and gather important information for a specific learning goal. However, not all material is organized in a single location, and users are often forced to visit multiple pages or sources to develop understanding. In these situations, are different learners more or less sensitive to drawing the underlying connections between multiple documents, which are relevant for the eventual learning goals? This study examines the performance of undergraduates who vary in working memory capacity as they were asked to learn about plants from a Wiki‐like website. Participants were pretested on their knowledge of both biology and the plant kingdom. Results indicate that learning underlying conceptual structure is indeed predicted by working memory, but not prior knowledge. This suggests that individual characteristics should be considered when designing learning technologies in the future. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

数学应用题中语言成分模型的构建—— 多元随机效应项目反应理论模型的运用

数学应用题中的语言成分可能对被试问题解决过程产生复杂影响。通常, 这种影响对所有被试并非完全一致, 而是具体数学题目特征与特定被试的认知特性之间交互作用的结果。本研究采用多元随机效应项目反应理论模型的建模方法, 分析了数学应用题中语言成分对问题解决过程的影响。该方法的优势在于它不仅分析了语言成分对数学问题解决过程的平均效应, 同时给出了相应的随机效应, 揭示了相应成分对不同个体问题解决过程的具体影响程度。结果表明, 较难的项目倾向于单词更多, 命题密度更高, 要求对图/表信息进行编码和转译, 或者根据问题表述生成数学公式。项目命题密度影响效应存在着显著的个别差异。项目命题密度对能力较低的被试的影响高于对能力较高的被试的影响。     

POWER STRATEGIES IN INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS The Effects of Expertise and Gender

The present study was designed to examine the effects of both power and gender in the use of influence strategies. Women and men responded to three scenarios in which they interacted with an imagined partner in situations with different levels of interpersonal power: more power than their partner (expert), less power (novice), and the same amount of power (equivalent). Partners were either same sex or other sex. Participants used more direct strategies when they were experts and more indirect strategies when they were novices, and women and men were very similar in the strategies they selected. Overall, power differences had a more profound effect than gender in predicting the choice of influence strategies. What are often construed as gender differences in social influence probably are perceived power differences. As such, gender differences in behavior must be understood within a context of status and power.     

Navigators and Captains: Expertise in Clinical Ethics Consultation

The debate about what constitutes the discipline of ethics and who qualifies as an ethics consultant is linked unavoidably to a debate that is potentiated by the reality of a rapidly changing and high-stakes health care consultation marketplace. Who we are and what we can offer to the moral gesture that is medicine is shaped by our fundamental understanding of the place of expert knowledge in the transformation of social reality. The struggle for self-definition is particularly freighted since clinical ethics consultation aspires to be more than academic contemplation. Two recent books (Ethics Consultation by John La Puma and David Schiedermayer and The Health Care Ethics Consultant: A Practical Guide, edited by Francoise Baylis) exemplify the two most popular but most widely divergent positions on these issues. We argue that while useful, neither book addresses fully the particular and distinct role of the professional ethicist.