Institutional Scholarship :: Browsing by Subject "Specialists -- Psychology"

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An assessment and comparison of the cognitive structures of experts and novices: An explanation of expert-novice differences
(1996) Salomon, Amanda R.; Perloe, Sidney
This study investigated expert-novice differences in cognitive structure. Levels of complexity, unity, and organization were measured from performances on tasks modified from Zajonc (1960). Subjects, who were expert in one domain and novice in another, completed tasks in the domains of American history, European history, American current events, and international current events. The sorting task required subjects to create a hierarchical outline using 30 domain terms. The interrelationship task required subjects to indicate the dependency of the terms on one another. We predicted that experts would have more complex, unified, and organized structures. Results tended to support the predictions for the expert-novice differences in complexity and organization. This finding suggests that there are expert-novice differences in cognitive structure, but that this procedure or other potential problems prevented clear expert-novice differences from emerging. Suggestions for further procedural improvements and research are suggested.