Introduction

This chapter presents a brief historical account of educators' views about the nature of expertise and the roles experts have played in educational models to improve human performance. We provide a listing of historically relevant educators and a descriptive summary of the various learning theories and mechanisms advocated as fundamental components of high skill development. We also describe some of the methods used through history by which expertise and expert performance have been assessed from an educational standpoint.

In categorizing the historical record to undertake this task, it is apparent that the absence of definitions of, and the lack of differentiation between, terms such as experts, expertise, and expert performers, particularly in early and medieval contexts, presents a challenge to historical synthesis. In many historical writings, for example, terms such as “masters,” “teachers,” and “professors” are commonly used to denote highly skilled individuals, and any referent to “expertise” is often general in nature. The empirical descriptions provided by systematic investigation into the mechanisms underlying expertise and expert performance did not begin to appear in the historical account until the late nineteenth century, when operationalized definitions for performance phenomena were first developed and tested by the pioneering psychologists of that era.

The lack of empirical specificity in the earlier record does not preclude, however, the review and synthesis of either the role experts have played in past educational efforts or the historically prescribed techniques for the development of highly skilled performance.