Sunday, December 2, 2007

The Seven Failings of Expertise

According to the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance there are seven failings of expertise. As an educator I am extrememly interested in these. Every year in our country over 100,000 people die in hospitals because of the mistakes of experts. I would like to know what medical schools are doing about this? What can be done? Are experts even aware of these failings.

Here they are:
Seven Ways Experts are Limited

1. Domain Limited
2. Over Confidence
3. Glossing Over
4. Context Dependence within a Domain
1. Medical Experts see specialty in treatments and diagnosis
2. Baseball experts were screwed up by plate in a word series because of "home" plate.
5. Inflexible
6. Inaccurate Prediction, Judgement and Advice
1. Experts have difficulty in predicting the abilities of novices.
7. Bias and Functional Fixedness