Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T01:43:54.318Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core

33 - Expertise in History

from PART V.C - GAMES AND OTHER TYPES OF EXPERTISE

By
James F. Voss  and
Jennifer Wiley
Edited by
K. Anders Ericsson ,
Neil Charness ,
Paul J. Feltovich  and
Robert R. Hoffman
James F. Voss
Affiliation:
Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh
Jennifer Wiley
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois
K. Anders Ericsson
Affiliation:
Florida State University
Neil Charness
Affiliation:
Florida State University
Paul J. Feltovich
Affiliation:
University of West Florida
Robert R. Hoffman
Affiliation:
University of West Florida
Get access

Summary

Overviews of Expertise and of History

Expertise

Expertise, studied in a variety of domains, has referred to highly skilled performance in an activity such as violin playing or playing chess. Expertise has referred also to a person's knowledge and/or ability to perform representational tasks of a particular domain. The term also may be based on a reputation established by publications and/or lectures, or on a “certification” such as a PhD. In the present context, an expert in history is assumed to have a general and a specialized knowledge of history as well as facility in the skills of historical research and writing.

Although the study of expertise began in the late nineteenth century, the primary impetus occurred in the late twentieth century with the work on chess by de Groot (1965) and Chase and Simon (1973a, 1973b). This research, comparing expert, middle-range, and novice performance, demonstrated the importance of recognizing functionally related “chunks” of chess pieces. Similarly, physics experts were superior to novices in their conceptual understanding of physics problems, which in turn led to their better problem solving (Chi, Feltovich, & Glaser, 1981; Larkin, McDermott, Simon, & Simon, 1980).

The nature of expertise in any domain involves an interaction of a person's knowledge (both domain-specific and general) and skills, and the characteristics of the domain that constrain performance. Some domains, because of their conceptual evolution, permit the use of mathematics, formal logic, or well-controlled experimentation.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance , pp. 569 - 584
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aristotle, (1954). The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle. (Roberts, W. R. & Bywater, I., Eds. & Trans.). New York: Modern Library.Google Scholar
Barton, K. (2001). A socio-cultural perspective on children's understanding of historical change: Comparative findings from Northern Ireland and the United States. American Educational Research Journal, 38(4), 881–913.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Breslauer, G. W. (1996). Counterfactual reasoning in western studies of Soviet Politics and Foreign Relations. In Tetlock, P. & Belkin, A. (Eds.), Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics (pp. 71–94). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Carretero, M., Jacott, L., & Lopez-Manjon, A. (2002). Learning history through textbooks: Are Mexican and Spanish students taught the same story? Learning and Instruction, 12, 651–665.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chase, W. G., & Simon, H. A. (1973a). Perception in chess. Cognitive Psychology, 4, 55–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chase, W. G., & Simon, H. A. (1973b). The mind's eye in chess. In Chase, W. G. (Ed.), Visual Information Processing (pp. 216–281). London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Chi, M. T. H., Feltovich, P. J., & Glaser, R (1981). Categorization and representation of physics problems by experts and novices. Cognitive Science, 5, 121–152.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cronon, W. (1992). A place for stories: Nature, history, and narrative. Journal of American History, 78, 1347–1376.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Groot, A. D. (1965). Thought and Choice in Chess. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Dray, W. (1957). Laws and Explanation in History. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Ericsson, K. A., & Lehmann, A. C. (1996). Expert and exceptional performance: evidence of maximal adaptation to task constraints. Annual Review of Psychology, 47, 273–305.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Epstein, T. (1998). Deconstructing differences in African American and European American adolescents' perspectives on United States history. Curriculum Inquiry, 28, 397–423.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Getzels, J. W. (1979). Problem finding: A theoretical note. Cognitive Science, 3, 167–172.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hempel, C. (1942). The function of general laws in history. The Journal of Philosophy, 39, 35–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herodotus, (1987). The History. (D. Grene, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holsti, O., & Rosenau, J. N. (1977). The meaning of Vietnam: Belief systems of American leaders. International Journal, 32, 452–474.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kintsch, W. (1988). The role of knowledge in discourse comprehension: A construction–integration model. Psychological Review, 95, 163–182.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Larkin, J. H., McDermott, J., Simon, D., & Simon, H. (1980). Expert and novice performance in solving physics problems. Science, 208, 140–156.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Leinhardt, G., Stainton, C., & Virji, S. M. (1994). A sense of history. Educational Psychologist, 29, 79–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leinhardt, G., Stainton, C., Virji, S. M., & Odoroff, E. (1994). Learning to reason in history: Mindlessness to mindfulness. In Carretero, M. & Voss, J. F. (Eds.), Cognitive and Instructional Processes in History and the Social Sciences (pp. 131–158). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Leinhardt, G., & Young, K. (1996). Two texts, three readers: Distance and expertise in reading history. Cognition and Instruction, 14(4), 441–486.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lemon, M. C. (2003). Philosophy of History. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Levine, L. W. (1989). The unpredictable past: Reflection on recent American historiography. The American Historical Review, 94(1), 671–679.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lowenthal, D. (2000). Dilemmas and delights of learning history. In Stearns, P. N., Seixas, P., & Wineburg, S. (Eds.), Knowing, Teaching & Learning History (pp. 63–82). New York and London: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Mackie, J. L. (1965). Causes and conditions. American Philosophical Quarterly, 2, 245–264.Google Scholar
McGuire, M. (1990). The rhetoric of narrative: A hermeneutic critical theory. In Britton, B. K. & Pellegrini, A. D. (Eds.), Narrative Thought and Narrative Language. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Mink, L. O. (1987). Historical Understanding. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Newell, A. (1980). One final word. In Tuma, D. T. & Reif, F. (Eds.), Problem Solving and Education: Issues in Teaching and Research (pp. 175–189). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Google Scholar
Perelman, C., & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1969). The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. (John Wilkinson & Purcell Weaver, Trans.) Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.Google Scholar
Ringer, F. K. (1989). Causal analysis in historical reasoning. History and Theory, 28, 154–172.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rouet, J-F, Favart, M., Britt, A., & Perfetti, C. A. (1997). Studying and using multiple documents in history: Effects of discipline expertise. Cognition and Instruction, 15, 85–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schooler, T. Y. E., Kennet, J., Wiley, J., & Voss, J. F. (1996). On the processing of political editorials. In Kreuz, R. J. & MacNealy, M. S. (Eds.), Empirical Approaches to Literature and Aesthetics (pp. 445–459). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Schum, D. A. (1993). Argument structuring and evidence evaluation. In Hastie, R. (Ed.), Inside the Juror (pp. 175–191). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stearns, P. N. (1998). Goals in history teaching. In Voss, J. F. & Carretero, M. (Eds.), Learning and Reasoning in History (pp. 281–293). London: Woburn Press.Google Scholar
Tetlock, P. E., & Belkin, A. (Eds.). (1996). Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Tetlock, P. E. (1999). Theory-driven reasoning about possible pasts and probable futures: Are we prisoners of our preconceptions? American Journal of Political Science, 43, 335–366.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thucydides, (1954). History of the Peloponnesian War. New York: Penguin.Google Scholar
Toulmin, S. E. (1958). The Uses of Argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tulviste, P., & Wertsch, J. V. (1994). Official and unofficial histories: The case of Estonia. Journal of Narrative and Life History, 4, 311–329.Google Scholar
Tweney, R. D. (1991). Informal reasoning in science. In Voss, J. F., Perkins, D. N., & Segel, J. A. (Eds.), Informal Reasoning and Education (pp. 3–16). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Voss, J. F., Carretero, M., Kennet, J., & Silfies, L. N. (1994). The collapse of the Soviet Union: A case study in causal reasoning. In Carretero, M. & Voss, J. F. (Eds.), Cognitive and Instructional Processes in History and the Social Sciences (pp. 403–429). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Voss, J. F., Greene, T. R., Post, T. A., & Penner, B.C. (1983). Problem-solving skill in the social sciences. In Bower, G. H. (Ed.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 17 (pp. 165–213). New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Voss, J. F. & Post, T. A. (1988) On the solving of ill-structured problems. In Chi, M. T. H., Glaser, R., & Farr, M. I. (Eds.), The Nature of Expertise (pp. 261–285). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Voss, J. F., Wiley, J., & Carretero, M. (1995). Acquiring intellectual skills. Annual Review of Psychology, 46, 155–181.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Voss, J. F., Wiley, J., & Sandak, R. (1999). On the use of narrative as argument. In Goldman, S. R., Graesser, A. C., & Broek, P. (Eds.), Narrative Comprehension, Causality, and Coherence: Essays in Honor of Tom Trabasso (pp. 235–252). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Wertsch, J. V., & Rozin, M. (1998). The Russian Revolution: Official and unofficial accounts. In Voss, J. F. & Carretero, M. (Eds.), Learning and Reasoning in History (pp. 39–60). London: Woburn Press.Google Scholar
White, H. (1987). The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Wineburg, S. (1991). Historical problem solving: A study of the cognitive processes used in the evaluation of documentary and pictorial evidence. Journal of Educational Psychology, 83, 73–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wineburg, S. (1994). The cognitive representation of historical texts. In Leinhardt, G., Beck, I., & Stainton, C. (Eds.), Teaching and Learning in History (pp. 85–135). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Wineburg, S. (1998). Reading Abraham Lincoln: An expert/expert study in the interpretation of historical texts. Cognitive Science, 22, 319–346.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×