In different kinds of professional domains, such as medicine, education, science, the process of maturing from novice to expert is ongoing. Ideally, the novice can attain
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the ultimate goal of becoming an expert by passing through stages. Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986) proposed a five-stage model of skill acquisition from novice to expert (novice, advanced beginners, competent, proficient, and expert) where expertise is characterized by “knowing how” rather than “knowing that” and expert knowledge is embedded in action. The expert have a clear understanding on not only what to do but also how to do to achieve the goal of the action and is more capable of focus on goals.
According to Scribner (1985), the expert has learned to distinguish different situations from the experience beforehand and has the ability to interact with those contexts. With amount of experience in various contexts, experts see things from the same point of view but make different skillful decisions. Tactically, they can divide the group of situations into many subgroups and to deal with them specifically. Experts deal with problems based on their prior experience, and they do not view these problems as brand new challenges; instead they know how to revise problems to fit in the solutions they already have. From the accumulation of existing experience, experts can immediately and automatically call upon specific solutions from the long-term memory, which is a conscious processing (Bohr, 2001). Cognitive psychologists also hypothesize that though experts and novices deal with the same problem, they can see it with different perspectives (Alexander & Judy, 1988; Chi, Glaser & Rees, 1982). Unlike novices, experts can infer more often from the coming information and cluster sets of information into meaningful patterns and abstractions (Chi, Feltovich, & Glaser, 1981;
Feltovich, Prietula, & Ericsson, 2006). According to Benner (1982), experts can also subconsciously show what they have already learned or known in their actions, and this knowledge has become an innate knowledge, which is existed in their brain. They also can adjust themselves quickly to conform to the new situation without too much consideration.
From this body of relevant literature, experts can be described as schema-driven
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rather than data-driven; they use the prior knowledge to adjust themselves to fit in different situations. Moreover, the schema of experts seem to include more procedural knowledge and more knowledge about how to apply the main principles underlying a given problem (Chi, Glaser, & Rees, 1982).
Experts also can be able to categorize the presented problem and know how to give an appropriate solution in proper ways, whereas novices easily focus on a problem’s surface features. Because experts have a higher-order processing mode to cluster each event (Chi, Glaser, & Rees, 1982), they can monitor the problems and know how to reflect on them. Experts pay attention to contextual details and cues from the task, while simultaneously being able to monitor and gather information from the problem they face. In contrast, novices cannot achieve this kind of atomization and more easily only focus on the surface aspects of a problem (Hobus, Schmidt, Boshuizen,
& Patel, 1987). Berliner (1994) also proposed that the difference between novices and experts is that the latter learn new things in a highly motivated way and can reflect on the experience. Therefore, from these findings, main characteristics for expertise can be said to be intuition, experience, automatic performance, and a deliberative processing mode.
To some extent, while the process from the novice to expert is continually on-going, it is can still be seen as a continuum with two poles. On the one hand, beginners have fewer relevant experiences on the specific domain than experts, and they are taught in terms of objective attributes which can be recognized without situational experience. Novices consciously thus need to follow the rules to take action and are guided by principles to connect their judgment to an appropriate action (Benner, 1982), and they may be overly eager to come up with a solution even though they may not be able to see what the whole picture of the task is. On the other hand, experts tend to gather, analyze, and evaluate information to formulate out a better way to understand
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the problem (Ross, Shafer, & Klein, 2006; Voss, Tyler, & Yengo, 1983). At the same time, the experts know how to monitor and self-monitor themselves and have a greater control on their performance, and they have a greater sense to detect errors and adjust their behaviors according to the context. This ability comes from not only their cognitive capacity but also their mental models, and this capacity makes them more able to make interpretative and evaluative comments. From the task experience, novices can gradually develop expert-like behaviors if they can access and process an extensive and well-structured knowledge base. In this way, novices under the right conditions can have the ability to proficiently deal with complicated tasks (Chi, 2006). Many researches have showed that differences of cognitive structures and information processing methods between novices and experts lead to the different qualities of task outcomes (Govaerts, Schuwirth, Van der Vleuten, & Muijtjens, 2010).
From the above discussion, it is clear that compared to a novice’s knowledge, that of an expert is more complex, and not only more extensive but also more integrated.
With accumulated experiences from real situations, trainees are able to recognize more complexities and various cues at one time, and they can have more opportunities to interpret cues in the context (Swanson, 1981). Therefore, the ongoing developmental process from novice to expert depends on learning from experience.
In terms of teacher experiences, the main difference between novice teachers and expert teachers is that the former have little or no teaching experience (Tsui, 2003), and typically they are considered either student-teachers or teachers in their first year of teaching. However, the definition of experts can take other factors into consideration, such as years of teaching experience, reputation, classroom observation, and recommendation by school administrators. Also, Farrell (2013) also identified five characteristics of experts, that is, “knowledge of learners and learning, engage in critical reflection, access past experiences, informed lesson planning, and active student
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involvement.”
The relationship between experience and expertise is not necessarily a direct correlation, because these two qualities are intrinsically different. Building on Bereiter and Scardamalia’s theory of expertise shows that experience is often mistaken as expertise (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993). Tsui pointed out that only when practitioners learn from experience with a constant reflection on their performance can the accumulation of experience will translate into the expertise (Tsui, 2003). Experience and expertise are related, but it is not necessary that these prior experience will lead to expertise (Weigle, 1998).
In the assessment of writing, the literature has shown that raters play a crucial role in grading. In this study, only the rater characteristics of expertise versus novice is focused on. According to Cummins (1990), expertise refers to “raters whose rating performance is consistently good.” In Wolfe, Kao, and Ranney’s (1998) study, they also classified raters into three levels that based on how highly rater’s ratings corresponded with others, that is, competent, intermediate, or proficient. Based on their clarification, proficient raters are similar in their expertise, and they can judge the writing based on the general comments on the whole text. They also have the ability to consider all criteria equally and use more rubric-related languages to justify their ratings (Wolfe, Kao, & Ranney, 1998).
In a standardized and reliable measurement, candidates and test items are like on two sides of a continuum, and raters lie in a critical position who can turn performances into outcomes. However, rater judgments include raters’ subjective point of views, thus rater judgments of the same writers often vary. Many factors might cause differences in raters’ grading, rater severity, rater characteristics, and rater consistency. The essence of rating is still a complicated cognitive process which might lead to variance in performance ratings. In this study, one of rater’s characteristics is chosen to be the
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research goal, expert and novice. Based on Cummins (1990), expertise also has the ability to consider all criteria equally and use more rubric-related languages to justify their ratings. To what extent do the characteristics of raters, in terms of their experience, affect scores on the translation items? This research question could be answered by using MFRM.