Sample records for task-organize scientific expertise

  1. How does the World Trade Organization know? The mobilization and staging of scientific expertise in the GMO trade dispute.

    PubMed

    Bonneuil, Christophe; Levidow, Les

    2012-02-01

    The World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement procedure is a key arena for establishing global legal norms for what counts as relevant knowledge. As a high-profile case, the WTO trade dispute on GMOs mobilized scientific expertise in somewhat novel ways. Early on, the Panel put the dispute under the Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Agreement through a new legal ontology; it classified transgenes as potential pests and limited all environmental issues to the 'plant and animal health' category. The selection of scientific experts sought a multi-party consensus through a fast adversarial process, reflecting a specific legal epistemology. For the SPS framing, focusing on the defendant's regulatory procedures, the Panel staged scientific expertise in specific ways that set up how experts were questioned, the answers they would give, their specific role in the legal arena, and the way their statements would complement the Panel's findings. In these ways, the dispute settlement procedure co-produced legal and scientific expertise within the Panel's SPS framework. Moreover, the Panel operated a procedural turn in WTO jurisprudence by representing its findings as a purely legal-administrative judgement on whether the EC's regulatory procedures violated the SPS Agreement, while keeping implicit its own judgements on substantive risk issues. As this case illustrates, the WTO settlement procedure mobilizes scientific expertise for sophisticated, multiple aims: it recruits a source of credibility from the scientific arena, thus reinforcing the standard narrative of 'science-based trade discipline', while also constructing new scientific expertise for the main task--namely, challenging trade restrictions for being unduly cautious.

  2. The Relationship between Levels of Expertise, Task Difficulty, Perceived Self-Efficacy, and Mental Effort Investment in Task Performance

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Ho, Hsin-Ning

    2010-01-01

    This study examined the impact of different levels of task difficulty and expertise on self-efficacy judgments. In addition, the study examines how self-efficacy judgments affect the amount of mental effort investment and task performance under different levels of task difficulty and expertise. Results from this study are used to build a…

  3. Development of the biology card sorting task to measure conceptual expertise in biology.

    PubMed

    Smith, Julia I; Combs, Elijah D; Nagami, Paul H; Alto, Valerie M; Goh, Henry G; Gourdet, Muryam A A; Hough, Christina M; Nickell, Ashley E; Peer, Adrian G; Coley, John D; Tanner, Kimberly D

    2013-01-01

    There are widespread aspirations to focus undergraduate biology education on teaching students to think conceptually like biologists; however, there is a dearth of assessment tools designed to measure progress from novice to expert biological conceptual thinking. We present the development of a novel assessment tool, the Biology Card Sorting Task, designed to probe how individuals organize their conceptual knowledge of biology. While modeled on tasks from cognitive psychology, this task is unique in its design to test two hypothesized conceptual frameworks for the organization of biological knowledge: 1) a surface feature organization focused on organism type and 2) a deep feature organization focused on fundamental biological concepts. In this initial investigation of the Biology Card Sorting Task, each of six analytical measures showed statistically significant differences when used to compare the card sorting results of putative biological experts (biology faculty) and novices (non-biology major undergraduates). Consistently, biology faculty appeared to sort based on hypothesized deep features, while non-biology majors appeared to sort based on either surface features or nonhypothesized organizational frameworks. Results suggest that this novel task is robust in distinguishing populations of biology experts and biology novices and may be an adaptable tool for tracking emerging biology conceptual expertise.

  4. Development of the Biology Card Sorting Task to Measure Conceptual Expertise in Biology

    PubMed Central

    Smith, Julia I.; Combs, Elijah D.; Nagami, Paul H.; Alto, Valerie M.; Goh, Henry G.; Gourdet, Muryam A. A.; Hough, Christina M.; Nickell, Ashley E.; Peer, Adrian G.; Coley, John D.; Tanner, Kimberly D.

    2013-01-01

    There are widespread aspirations to focus undergraduate biology education on teaching students to think conceptually like biologists; however, there is a dearth of assessment tools designed to measure progress from novice to expert biological conceptual thinking. We present the development of a novel assessment tool, the Biology Card Sorting Task, designed to probe how individuals organize their conceptual knowledge of biology. While modeled on tasks from cognitive psychology, this task is unique in its design to test two hypothesized conceptual frameworks for the organization of biological knowledge: 1) a surface feature organization focused on organism type and 2) a deep feature organization focused on fundamental biological concepts. In this initial investigation of the Biology Card Sorting Task, each of six analytical measures showed statistically significant differences when used to compare the card sorting results of putative biological experts (biology faculty) and novices (non–biology major undergraduates). Consistently, biology faculty appeared to sort based on hypothesized deep features, while non–biology majors appeared to sort based on either surface features or nonhypothesized organizational frameworks. Results suggest that this novel task is robust in distinguishing populations of biology experts and biology novices and may be an adaptable tool for tracking emerging biology conceptual expertise. PMID:24297290

  5. Motor expertise and performance in spatial tasks: A meta-analysis.

    PubMed

    Voyer, Daniel; Jansen, Petra

    2017-08-01

    The present study aimed to provide a summary of findings relevant to the influence of motor expertise on performance in spatial tasks and to examine potential moderators of this effect. Studies of relevance were those in which individuals involved in activities presumed to require motor expertise were compared to non-experts in such activities. A final set of 62 effect sizes from 33 samples was included in a multilevel meta-analysis. The results showed an overall advantage in favor of motor experts in spatial tasks (d=0.38). However, the magnitude of that effect was moderated by expert type (athlete, open skills/ball sports, runner/cyclist, gymnast/dancers, musicians), stimulus type (2D, blocks, bodies, others), test category (mental rotation, spatial perception, spatial visualization), specific test (Mental Rotations Test, generic mental rotation, disembedding, rod-and-frame test, other), and publication status. These findings are discussed in the context of embodied cognition and the potential role of activities requiring motor expertise in promoting good spatial performance. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  6. Tactical expertise assessment in youth football using representative tasks.

    PubMed

    Serra-Olivares, Jaime; Clemente, Filipe Manuel; González-Víllora, Sixto

    2016-01-01

    Specific football drills improve the development of technical/tactical and physical variables in players. Based on this principle, in recent years it has been possible to observe in daily training a growing volume of small-sided and conditioned games. These games are smaller and modified forms of formal games that augment players' perception of specific tactics. Despite this approach, the assessment of players' knowledge and tactical execution has not been well documented, due mainly to the difficulty in measuring tactical behavior. For that reason, this study aims to provide a narrative review about the tactical assessment of football training by using representative tasks to measure the tactical expertise of youth football players during small-sided and conditioned games. This study gives an overview of the ecological approach to training and the principles used for representative task design, providing relevant contribution and direction for future research into the assessment of tactical expertise in youth football.

  7. Expertise, Task Complexity, and Artificial Intelligence: A Conceptual Framework.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Buckland, Michael K.; Florian, Doris

    1991-01-01

    Examines the relationship between users' expertise, task complexity of information system use, and artificial intelligence to provide the basis for a conceptual framework for considering the role that artificial intelligence might play in information systems. Cognitive and conceptual models are discussed, and cost effectiveness is considered. (27…

  8. A Problem-Sorting Task Detects Changes in Undergraduate Biological Expertise over a Single Semester

    PubMed Central

    Hoskinson, Anne-Marie; Maher, Jessica Middlemis; Bekkering, Cody; Ebert-May, Diane

    2017-01-01

    Calls for undergraduate biology reform share similar goals: to produce people who can organize, use, connect, and communicate about biological knowledge. Achieving these goals requires students to gain disciplinary expertise. Experts organize, access, and apply disciplinary knowledge differently than novices, and expertise is measurable. By asking introductory biology students to sort biological problems, we investigated whether they changed how they organized and linked biological ideas over one semester of introductory biology. We administered the Biology Card Sorting Task to 751 students enrolled in their first or second introductory biology course focusing on either cellular–molecular or organismal–population topics, under structured or unstructured sorting conditions. Students used a combination of superficial, deep, and yet-uncharacterized ways of organizing and connecting biological knowledge. In some cases, this translated to more expert-like ways of organizing knowledge over a single semester, best predicted by whether students were enrolled in their first or second semester of biology and by the sorting condition completed. In addition to illuminating differences between novices and experts, our results show that card sorting is a robust way of detecting changes in novices’ biological expertise—even in heterogeneous populations of novice biology students over the time span of a single semester. PMID:28408406

  9. A Problem-Sorting Task Detects Changes in Undergraduate Biological Expertise over a Single Semester.

    PubMed

    Hoskinson, Anne-Marie; Maher, Jessica Middlemis; Bekkering, Cody; Ebert-May, Diane

    2017-01-01

    Calls for undergraduate biology reform share similar goals: to produce people who can organize, use, connect, and communicate about biological knowledge. Achieving these goals requires students to gain disciplinary expertise. Experts organize, access, and apply disciplinary knowledge differently than novices, and expertise is measurable. By asking introductory biology students to sort biological problems, we investigated whether they changed how they organized and linked biological ideas over one semester of introductory biology. We administered the Biology Card Sorting Task to 751 students enrolled in their first or second introductory biology course focusing on either cellular-molecular or organismal-population topics, under structured or unstructured sorting conditions. Students used a combination of superficial, deep, and yet-uncharacterized ways of organizing and connecting biological knowledge. In some cases, this translated to more expert-like ways of organizing knowledge over a single semester, best predicted by whether students were enrolled in their first or second semester of biology and by the sorting condition completed. In addition to illuminating differences between novices and experts, our results show that card sorting is a robust way of detecting changes in novices' biological expertise-even in heterogeneous populations of novice biology students over the time span of a single semester. © 2017 A.-M. Hoskinson et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2017 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).

  10. MICROSCOPE mission: drag-free and attitude control system expertise activities toward the scientific team

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Delavault, Stéphanie; Prieur, Pascal; Liénart, Thomas; Robert, Alain; Guidotti, Pierre-Yves

    2018-04-01

    Microscope is a CNES-ESA-ONERA-CNRS-OCA-DLR-ZARM mission dedicated to the test of the Equivalence Principle with an improved accuracy of 10-15. The 300 kg drag-free microsatellite was launched on April 25th 2016 into a 710 km dawndusk sun-synchronous orbit for a 2-year mission. To comply with stringent requirements, the drag-free and attitude control system (DFACS) involves the scientific accelerometer as main sensor and a set of 8 cold gas proportional thrusters. Once in mission mode, within the CNES drag-free expertise center (CECT) the DFACS team provides several services to the system and to the scientific mission center: cold gas monitoring and management, `Attitude' ancillary data, DFACS expertise ancillary data. For this purpose, expertise tools have been implemented in the CECT, using the flexibility and efficiency of Matlab™ utilities. This paper presents the role of the CECT within the mission and details the expertise activities of the DFACS team illustrated with some typical in flight results.

  11. Dynamical signatures of isometric force control as a function of age, expertise, and task constraints.

    PubMed

    Vieluf, Solveig; Sleimen-Malkoun, Rita; Voelcker-Rehage, Claudia; Jirsa, Viktor; Reuter, Eva-Maria; Godde, Ben; Temprado, Jean-Jacques; Huys, Raoul

    2017-07-01

    From the conceptual and methodological framework of the dynamical systems approach, force control results from complex interactions of various subsystems yielding observable behavioral fluctuations, which comprise both deterministic (predictable) and stochastic (noise-like) dynamical components. Here, we investigated these components contributing to the observed variability in force control in groups of participants differing in age and expertise level. To this aim, young (18-25 yr) as well as late middle-aged (55-65 yr) novices and experts (precision mechanics) performed a force maintenance and a force modulation task. Results showed that whereas the amplitude of force variability did not differ across groups in the maintenance tasks, in the modulation task it was higher for late middle-aged novices than for experts and higher for both these groups than for young participants. Within both tasks and for all groups, stochastic fluctuations were lowest where the deterministic influence was smallest. However, although all groups showed similar dynamics underlying force control in the maintenance task, a group effect was found for deterministic and stochastic fluctuations in the modulation task. The latter findings imply that both components were involved in the observed group differences in the variability of force fluctuations in the modulation task. These findings suggest that between groups the general characteristics of the dynamics do not differ in either task and that force control is more affected by age than by expertise. However, expertise seems to counteract some of the age effects. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Stochastic and deterministic dynamical components contribute to force production. Dynamical signatures differ between force maintenance and cyclic force modulation tasks but hardly between age and expertise groups. Differences in both stochastic and deterministic components are associated with group differences in behavioral variability, and observed behavioral

  12. Changes in Visual/Spatial and Analytic Strategy Use in Organic Chemistry with the Development of Expertise

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Vlacholia, Maria; Vosniadou, Stella; Roussos, Petros; Salta, Katerina; Kazi, Smaragda; Sigalas, Michael; Tzougraki, Chryssa

    2017-01-01

    We present two studies that investigated the adoption of visual/spatial and analytic strategies by individuals at different levels of expertise in the area of organic chemistry, using the Visual Analytic Chemistry Task (VACT). The VACT allows the direct detection of analytic strategy use without drawing inferences about underlying mental…

  13. Relative Expertise in an Everyday Reasoning Task: Epistemic Understanding, Problem Representation, and Reasoning Competence

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Weinstock, Michael

    2009-01-01

    Experts in cognitive domains differ from non-experts in how they represent problems and knowledge, and in their epistemic understandings of tasks in their domain of expertise. This study investigates whether task-specific epistemic understanding also underlies the representation of knowledge on an everyday reasoning task on which the competent…

  14. Perceiving and acting upon spaces in a VR rugby task: expertise effects in affordance detection and task achievement.

    PubMed

    Correia, Vanda; Araújo, Duarte; Cummins, Alan; Craig, Cathy M

    2012-06-01

    This study used a virtual, simulated 3 vs. 3 rugby task to investigate whether gaps opening in particular running channels promote different actions by the ball carrier player and whether an effect of rugby expertise is verified. We manipulated emergent gaps in three different locations: Gap 1 in the participant's own running channel, Gap 2 in the first receiver's running channel, and Gap 3 in the second receiver's running channel. Recreational, intermediate, professional, and nonrugby players performed the task. They could (i) run with the ball, (ii) make a short pass, or (iii) make a long pass. All actions were digitally recorded. Results revealed that the emergence of gaps in the defensive line with respect to the participant's own position significantly influenced action selection. Namely, "run" was most often the action performed in Gap 1, "short pass" in Gap 2, and "long pass" in Gap 3 trials. Furthermore, a strong positive relationship between expertise and task achievement was found.

  15. Understanding the Validity of Data: A Knowledge-Based Network Underlying Research Expertise in Scientific Disciplines

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Roberts, Ros

    2016-01-01

    This article considers what might be taught to meet a widely held curriculum aim of students being able to understand research in a discipline. Expertise, which may appear as a "chain of practice," is widely held to be underpinned by networks of understanding. Scientific research expertise is considered from this perspective. Within…

  16. A Problem-Sorting Task Detects Changes in Undergraduate Biological Expertise over a Single Semester

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Hoskinson, Anne-Marie; Maher, Jessica Middlemis; Bekkering, Cody; Ebert-May, Diane

    2017-01-01

    Calls for undergraduate biology reform share similar goals: to produce people who can organize, use, connect, and communicate about biological knowledge. Achieving these goals requires students to gain disciplinary expertise. Experts organize, access, and apply disciplinary knowledge differently than novices, and expertise is measurable. By asking…

  17. Expertise with unfamiliar objects is flexible to changes in task but not changes in class

    PubMed Central

    Tangen, Jason M.

    2017-01-01

    Perceptual expertise is notoriously specific and bound by familiarity; generalizing to novel or unfamiliar images, objects, identities, and categories often comes at some cost to performance. In forensic and security settings, however, examiners are faced with the task of discriminating unfamiliar images of unfamiliar objects within their general domain of expertise (e.g., fingerprints, faces, or firearms). The job of a fingerprint expert, for instance, is to decide whether two unfamiliar fingerprint images were left by the same unfamiliar finger (e.g., Smith’s left thumb), or two different unfamiliar fingers (e.g., Smith and Jones’s left thumb). Little is known about the limits of this kind of perceptual expertise. Here, we examine fingerprint experts’ and novices’ ability to distinguish fingerprints compared to inverted faces in two different tasks. Inverted face images serve as an ideal comparison because they vary naturally between and within identities, as do fingerprints, and people tend to be less accurate or more novice-like at distinguishing faces when they are presented in an inverted or unfamiliar orientation. In Experiment 1, fingerprint experts outperformed novices in locating categorical fingerprint outliers (i.e., a loop pattern in an array of whorls), but not inverted face outliers (i.e., an inverted male face in an array of inverted female faces). In Experiment 2, fingerprint experts were more accurate than novices at discriminating matching and mismatching fingerprints that were presented very briefly, but not so for inverted faces. Our data show that perceptual expertise with fingerprints can be flexible to changing task demands, but there can also be abrupt limits: fingerprint expertise did not generalize to an unfamiliar class of stimuli. We interpret these findings as evidence that perceptual expertise with unfamiliar objects is highly constrained by one’s experience. PMID:28574998

  18. Writing Expertise and Second-Language Proficiency.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Cumming, Alister

    1989-01-01

    Assessment of the English writing proficiency of 23 native French speaking students on 3 composition tasks found variance in the qualities of written texts and problem-solving behaviors. Writing expertise was found to affect discourse organization and content, writing complexity, heuristic strategies, and control strategies, while second-language…

  19. Science, expertise, and democracy.

    PubMed

    Weinberg, Justin; Elliott, Kevin C

    2012-06-01

    The combination of government's significant involvement in science, science's significant effects on the public, and public ignorance (of both politics and science) raise important challenges for reconciling scientific expertise with democratic governance. Nevertheless, there have recently been a variety of encouraging efforts to make scientific activity more responsive to social values and to develop citizens' capacity to engage in more effective democratic governance of science. This essay introduces a special issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, "Science, Expertise, and Democracy," consisting of five papers that developed from the inaugural Three Rivers Philosophy conference held at the University of South Carolina in April 2011. The pieces range from a general analysis of the in-principle compatibility of scientific expertise and democracy to much more concrete studies of the intersection between scientific practices and democratic values in areas such as weight-of-evidence analysis, climate science, and studies of locally undesirable land uses.

  20. Examining Expertise Using Interviews and Verbal Protocols

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    van de Wiel, Margje W. J.

    2017-01-01

    To understand expertise and expertise development, interactions between knowledge, cognitive processing and task characteristics must be examined in people at different levels of training, experience, and performance. Interviewing is widely used in the initial exploration of domain expertise. Work and cognitive task analysis chart the knowledge,…

  1. Example-based learning: effects of model expertise in relation to student expertise.

    PubMed

    Boekhout, Paul; van Gog, Tamara; van de Wiel, Margje W J; Gerards-Last, Dorien; Geraets, Jacques

    2010-12-01

    Worked examples are very effective for novice learners. They typically present a written-out ideal (didactical) solution for learners to study. This study used worked examples of patient history taking in physiotherapy that presented a non-didactical solution (i.e., based on actual performance). The effects of model expertise (i.e., worked example based on advanced, third-year student model or expert physiotherapist model) in relation to students' expertise (i.e., first- or second-year) were investigated. One hundred and thirty-four physiotherapy students (61 first-year and 73 second-year). Design was 2 × 2 factorial with factors 'Student Expertise' (first-year vs. second-year) and 'Model Expertise' (expert vs. advanced student). Within expertise levels, students were randomly assigned to the Expert Example or the Advanced Student Example condition. All students studied two examples (content depending on their assigned condition) and then completed a retention and test task. They rated their invested mental effort after each example and test task. Second-year students invested less mental effort in studying the examples, and in performing the retention and transfer tasks than first-year students. They also performed better on the retention test, but not on the transfer test. In contrast to our hypothesis, there was no interaction between student expertise and model expertise: all students who had studied the Expert examples performed better on the transfer test than students who had studied Advanced Student Examples. This study suggests that when worked examples are based on actual performance, rather than an ideal procedure, expert models are to be preferred over advanced student models.

  2. Knowledge Organization and the Acquisition of Procedural Expertise.

    DTIC Science & Technology

    1987-10-01

    NO NO ACCESSION NO 11i TITLE (InCludf S#cufltY Cissjf)CAtl~on) KOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION AND THE ACQUISITION OF PROCEDURAL EXPERTISE 12 PERSONAL AUTI󈧬R...explanatory material strongly influences the knowledge representation of the learner which, in turn, exerts a powerful influence over the degree to which

  3. The Use of Cognitive Task Analysis to Capture Expertise for Tracheal Extubation Training in Anesthesiology

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Embrey, Karen K.

    2012-01-01

    Cognitive task analysis (CTA) is a knowledge elicitation technique employed for acquiring expertise from domain specialists to support the effective instruction of novices. CTA guided instruction has proven effective in improving surgical skills training for medical students and surgical residents. The standard, current method of teaching clinical…

  4. Anticipatory Governance: Bioethical Expertise for Human/Animal Chimeras

    PubMed Central

    Harvey, Alison; Salter, Brian

    2012-01-01

    The governance demands generated by the use of human/animal chimeras in scientific research offer both a challenge and an opportunity for the development of new forms of anticipatory governance through the novel application of bioethical expertise. Anticipatory governance can be seen to have three stages of development whereby bioethical experts move from a reactive to a proactive stance at the edge of what is scientifically possible. In the process, the ethicists move upstream in their engagement with the science of human-to-animal chimeras. To what extent is the anticipatory coestablishment of the principles and operational rules of governance at this early stage in the development of the human-to-animal research field likely to result in a framework for bioethical decision making that is in support of science? The process of anticipatory governance is characterised by the entwining of the scientific and the philosophical so that judgements against science are also found to be philosophically unfounded, and conversely, those activities that are permissible are deemed so on both scientific and ethical grounds. Through what is presented as an organic process, the emerging bioethical framework for human-to-animal chimera research becomes a legitimating framework within which ‘good’ science can safely progress. Science gives bioethical expertise access to new governance territory; bioethical expertise gives science access to political acceptability. PMID:23576848

  5. Experience Does Not Equal Expertise in Recognizing Infrequent Incoming Gunfire: Neural Markers for Experience and Task Expertise at Peak Behavioral Performance

    PubMed Central

    Sherwin, Jason Samuel; Gaston, Jeremy Rodney

    2015-01-01

    For a soldier, decisions to use force can happen rapidly and sometimes lead to undesired consequences. In many of these situations, there is a rapid assessment by the shooter that recognizes a threat and responds to it with return fire. But the neural processes underlying these rapid decisions are largely unknown, especially amongst those with extensive weapons experience and expertise. In this paper, we investigate differences in weapons experts and non-experts during an incoming gunfire detection task. Specifically, we analyzed the electroencephalography (EEG) of eleven expert marksmen/soldiers and eleven non-experts while they listened to an audio scene consisting of a sequence of incoming and non-incoming gunfire events. Subjects were tasked with identifying each event as quickly as possible and committing their choice via a motor response. Contrary to our hypothesis, experts did not have significantly better behavioral performance or faster response time than novices. Rather, novices indicated trends of better behavioral performance than experts. These group differences were more dramatic in the EEG correlates of incoming gunfire detection. Using machine learning, we found condition-discriminating EEG activity among novices showing greater magnitude and covering longer periods than those found in experts. We also compared group-level source reconstruction on the maximum discriminating neural correlates and found that each group uses different neural structures to perform the task. From condition-discriminating EEG and source localization, we found that experts perceive more categorical overlap between incoming and non-incoming gunfire. Consequently, the experts did not perform as well behaviorally as the novices. We explain these unexpected group differences as a consequence of experience with gunfire not being equivalent to expertise in recognizing incoming gunfire. PMID:25658335

  6. Variability in functional brain networks predicts expertise during action observation.

    PubMed

    Amoruso, Lucía; Ibáñez, Agustín; Fonseca, Bruno; Gadea, Sebastián; Sedeño, Lucas; Sigman, Mariano; García, Adolfo M; Fraiman, Ricardo; Fraiman, Daniel

    2017-02-01

    Observing an action performed by another individual activates, in the observer, similar circuits as those involved in the actual execution of that action. This activation is modulated by prior experience; indeed, sustained training in a particular motor domain leads to structural and functional changes in critical brain areas. Here, we capitalized on a novel graph-theory approach to electroencephalographic data (Fraiman et al., 2016) to test whether variability in functional brain networks implicated in Tango observation can discriminate between groups differing in their level of expertise. We found that experts and beginners significantly differed in the functional organization of task-relevant networks. Specifically, networks in expert Tango dancers exhibited less variability and a more robust functional architecture. Notably, these expertise-dependent effects were captured within networks derived from electrophysiological brain activity recorded in a very short time window (2s). In brief, variability in the organization of task-related networks seems to be a highly sensitive indicator of long-lasting training effects. This finding opens new methodological and theoretical windows to explore the impact of domain-specific expertise on brain plasticity, while highlighting variability as a fruitful measure in neuroimaging research. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  7. Robust expertise effects in right FFA

    PubMed Central

    McGugin, Rankin Williams; Newton, Allen T; Gore, John C; Gauthier, Isabel

    2015-01-01

    The fusiform face area (FFA) is one of several areas in occipito-temporal cortex whose activity is correlated with perceptual expertise for objects. Here, we investigate the robustness of expertise effects in FFA and other areas to a strong task manipulation that increases both perceptual and attentional demands. With high-resolution fMRI at 7Telsa, we measured responses to images of cars, faces and a category globally visually similar to cars (sofas) in 26 subjects who varied in expertise with cars, in (a) a low load 1-back task with a single object category and (b) a high load task in which objects from two categories rapidly alternated and attention was required to both categories. The low load condition revealed several areas more active as a function of expertise, including both posterior and anterior portions of FFA bilaterally (FFA1/FFA2 respectively). Under high load, fewer areas were positively correlated with expertise and several areas were even negatively correlated, but the expertise effect in face-selective voxels in the anterior portion of FFA (FFA2) remained robust. Finally, we found that behavioral car expertise also predicted increased responses to sofa images but no behavioral advantages in sofa discrimination, suggesting that global shape similarity to a category of expertise is enough to elicit a response in FFA and other areas sensitive to experience, even when the category itself is not of special interest. The robustness of expertise effects in right FFA2 and the expertise effects driven by visual similarity both argue against attention being the sole determinant of expertise effects in extrastriate areas. PMID:25192631

  8. Assessing Expertise in Introductory Physics Using Categorization Task

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Mason, Andrew; Singh, Chandralekha

    2011-01-01

    The ability to categorize problems based upon underlying principles, rather than surface features or contexts, is considered one of several proxy predictors of expertise in problem solving. With inspiration from the classic study by Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser, we assess the distribution of expertise among introductory physics students by asking…

  9. Modeling Search Behaviors during the Acquisition of Expertise in a Sequential Decision-Making Task.

    PubMed

    Moënne-Loccoz, Cristóbal; Vergara, Rodrigo C; López, Vladimir; Mery, Domingo; Cosmelli, Diego

    2017-01-01

    Our daily interaction with the world is plagued of situations in which we develop expertise through self-motivated repetition of the same task. In many of these interactions, and especially when dealing with computer and machine interfaces, we must deal with sequences of decisions and actions. For instance, when drawing cash from an ATM machine, choices are presented in a step-by-step fashion and a specific sequence of choices must be performed in order to produce the expected outcome. But, as we become experts in the use of such interfaces, is it possible to identify specific search and learning strategies? And if so, can we use this information to predict future actions? In addition to better understanding the cognitive processes underlying sequential decision making, this could allow building adaptive interfaces that can facilitate interaction at different moments of the learning curve. Here we tackle the question of modeling sequential decision-making behavior in a simple human-computer interface that instantiates a 4-level binary decision tree (BDT) task. We record behavioral data from voluntary participants while they attempt to solve the task. Using a Hidden Markov Model-based approach that capitalizes on the hierarchical structure of behavior, we then model their performance during the interaction. Our results show that partitioning the problem space into a small set of hierarchically related stereotyped strategies can potentially capture a host of individual decision making policies. This allows us to follow how participants learn and develop expertise in the use of the interface. Moreover, using a Mixture of Experts based on these stereotyped strategies, the model is able to predict the behavior of participants that master the task.

  10. Thoughts on Expertise.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Glaser, Robert

    This paper briefly reviews research on tasks in knowledge-rich domains including developmental studies, work in artificial intelligence, studies of expert/novice problem solving, and information processing analysis of aptitude test tasks that have provided increased understanding of the nature of expertise. Particularly evident is the finding that…

  11. Eyes-on training and radiological expertise: an examination of expertise development and its effects on visual working memory.

    PubMed

    Beck, Melissa R; Martin, Benjamin A; Smitherman, Emily; Gaschen, Lorrie

    2013-08-01

    Our aim was to examine the specificity of the effects of acquiring expertise on visual working memory (VWM) and the degree to which higher levels of experience within the domain of expertise are associated with more efficient use of VWM. Previous research is inconsistent on whether expertise effects are specific to the area of expertise or generalize to other tasks that also involve the same cognitive processes. It is also unclear whether more training and/or experience will lead to continued improvement on domain-relevant tasks or whether a plateau could be reached. In Experiment I, veterinary medicine students completed a one-shot visual change detection task. In Experiment 2, veterinarians completed a flicker change detection task. Both experiments involved stimuli specific to the domain of radiology and general stimuli. In Experiment I, veterinary medicine students who had completed an "eyes-on" radiological training demonstrated a domain-specific effect in which performance was better on the domain-specific stimuli than on the domain-general stimuli. In Experiment 2, veterinarians again showed a domain-specific effect, but performance was unrelated to the amount of experience veterinarians had accumulated. The effect of experience is domain specific and occurs during the first few years of training, after which a plateau is reached. VWM training in one domain may not lead to improved performance on other VWM tasks. In acquiring expertise, eyes-on training is important initially, but continued experience may not be associated with further improvements in the efficiency of VWM.

  12. Fostering and Measuring General Scientific Reasoning Expertise at the Second Year Level

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Jones, F. M.; Jellinek, M.; Bostock, M. G.

    2010-12-01

    Geoscience faculty members often debate about the definition and development of scientific expertise. Some will argue it emerges at the graduate level, others that novice students can develop relevant skills. The debate hinges on definitions of “expertise”, “scientific skills” and how these abilities are assessed. We present data from a second year geoscience course specifically designed to help research scientists foster generic skills associated with critical scientific thinking, presentation, and framing of scientific arguments and questions. To develop the course, key characteristics that professional scientists exhibit were identified from the literature and our experience. These are the abilities to: a) read critically; b) succinctly summarize and communicate; c) pose insightful questions; d) use and discuss models, data and their relationships; and e) work effectively as part of a team. To help with learning and assessment of these skills in students who do not yet have significant discipline-specific background, classroom practices were chosen so that students must think and act more like professional scientists. These include use of some team-based learning strategies, replacing exams with quizzes and projects, mixing team-teaching with solo-teaching, discursive rather than didactic instruction, and use of diverse topics representative of research in our Department. Specific strategies employed which enable “master geoscientists” to actively guide and assess novices as they practice desired skills are: homework involving reading, writing abstracts and posing questions for one or two articles each week, pre-post testing of model based reasoning abilities, interaction with guest scientists, and oral and poster presentations on topics chosen by students. Results of collecting data over two terms of using these general and specific strategies include: 1. Abstract writing skills improved during the first two thirds of the course, then leveled off in

  13. Selective Effects of Sport Expertise on the Stages of Mental Rotation Tasks With Object-Based and Egocentric Transformations

    PubMed Central

    Feng, Tian; Zhang, Zhongqiu; Ji, Zhiguang; Jia, Binbin; Li, Yawei

    2017-01-01

    It is well established that motor expertise is linked to superior mental rotation ability, but few studies have attempted to explain the factors that influence the stages of mental rotation in sport experts. Some authors have argued that athletes are faster in the perceptual and decision stages but not in the rotation stages of object-based transformations; however, stimuli related to sport have not been used to test mental rotation with egocentric transformations. Therefore, 24 adolescent elite divers and 23 adolescent nonathletes completed mental rotation tasks with object-based and egocentric transformations. The results showed faster reaction times (RTs) for the motor experts in tasks with both types of transformations (object-based cube, object-based body, and egocentric body). Additionally, the differences in favour of motor experts in the perceptual and decision stages were confirmed. Interestingly, motor experts also outperformed nonathletes in the rotation stages in the egocentric transformations. These findings are discussed against the background of the effects of sport expertise on mental rotation. PMID:29071008

  14. Challenging Expertise: Paul Feyerabend vs. Harry Collins & Robert Evans on democracy, public participation and scientific authority: Paul Feyerabend vs. Harry Collins & Robert Evans on scientific authority and public participation.

    PubMed

    Sorgner, Helene

    2016-06-01

    This paper compares Feyerabend's arguments in Science in a Free Society to the controversial theory of expertise proposed by Harry Collins and Robert Evans as a Third Wave of Science Studies. Is the legitimacy of democratic decisions threatened by the unquestioned authority of scientific advice? Or does, on the contrary, science need protection from too much democratic participation in technical decisions? Where Feyerabend's political relativism envisions democratic society as inherently pluralist and demands equal contribution of all traditions and worldviews to public decision-making, Collins and Evans hold a conception of elective modernism, defending the reality and value of technical expertise and arguing that science deserves a privileged status in modern democracies, because scientific values are also democratic values. I will argue that Feyerabend's political relativism provides a valuable framework for the evaluation of Collins' and Evans' theory of expertise. By constructing a dialog between Feyerabend and this more recent approach in Science and Technology Studies, the aim of this article is not only to show where the two positions differ and in what way they might be reconciled, but also how Feyerabend's philosophy provides substantial input to contemporary debate. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  15. Response to Vogelstein: How the 2012 AAP Task Force on circumcision went wrong.

    PubMed

    Van Howe, Robert S

    2018-01-01

    Vogelstein cautions medical organizations against jumping into the fray of controversial issues, yet proffers the 2012 American Academy of Pediatrics' Task Force policy position on infant male circumcision as 'an appropriate use of position-statements.' Only a scratch below the surface of this policy statement uncovers the Task Force's failure to consider Vogelstein's many caveats. The Task Force supported the cultural practice by putting undeserved emphasis on questionable scientific data, while ignoring or underplaying the importance of valid contrary scientific data. Without any effort to quantitatively assess the risk/benefit balance, the Task Force concluded the benefits of circumcision outweighed the risks, while acknowledging that the incidence of risks was unknown. This Task Force differed from other Academy policy-forming panels by ignoring the Academy's standard quality measures and by not appointing members with extensive research experience, extensive publications, or recognized expertise directly related to this topic. Despite nearly 100 publications available at the time addressing the substantial ethical issues associated with infant male circumcision, the Task Force chose to ignore the ethical controversy. They merely stated, with minimal justification, the opinion of one of the Task Force members that the practice of infant male circumcision is morally permissible. The release of the report has fostered an explosion of academic discussion on the ethics of infant male circumcision with a number of national medical organizations now decrying the practice as a human rights violation. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

  16. Intuitive Expertise: Theories and Empirical Evidence

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Harteis, Christian; Billett, Stephen

    2013-01-01

    Intuition has been long seen as an element of effective human performance in demanding tasks (i.e. expertise). But its form, constitutive elements and development remain subject to diverse explanations. This paper discusses these elements and explores theories and empirical evidence about what constitutes intuitive expertise, and offers an account…

  17. Cultivating Data Expertise and Roles at a National Research Center

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Thompson, C. A.

    2015-12-01

    As research becomes more computation and data-intensive, it brings new demands for staff that can manage complex data, design user services, and facilitate open access. Responding to these new demands, universities and research institutions are developing data services to support their scientists and scholarly communities. As more organizations extend their operations to research data, a better understanding of the staff roles and expertise required to support data-intensive research services is needed. What is data expertise - knowledge, skills, and roles? This study addresses this question through a case study of an exemplar research center, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO. The NCAR case study results were supplemented and validated with a set of interviews of managers at additional geoscience data centers. To date, 11 interviews with NCAR staff and 19 interviews with managers at supplementary data centers have been completed. Selected preliminary results from the qualitative analysis will be reported in the poster: Data professionals have cultivated expertise in areas such as managing scientific data and products, understanding use and users, harnessing technology for data solutions, and standardizing metadata and data sets. Staff roles and responsibilities have evolved over the years to create new roles for data scientists, data managers/curators, data engineers, and senior managers of data teams, embedding data expertise into each NCAR lab. Explicit career paths and ladders for data professionals are limited but starting to emerge. NCAR has supported organization-wide efforts for data management, leveraging knowledge and best practices across all the labs and their staff. Based on preliminary results, NCAR provides a model for how organizations can build expertise and roles into their data service models. Data collection for this study is ongoing. The author anticipates that the results will help answer questions on what are

  18. 75 FR 4402 - Task Force on Community Preventive Services

    Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

    2010-01-27

    ... interventions to reduce inequalities in health outcomes. Agenda items are subject to change as priorities... DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Task Force on... scientific evidence and current expertise regarding essential public health and what works in the delivery of...

  19. Using Highlighting to Train Attentional Expertise

    PubMed Central

    Roads, Brett; Mozer, Michael C.; Busey, Thomas A.

    2016-01-01

    Acquiring expertise in complex visual tasks is time consuming. To facilitate the efficient training of novices on where to look in these tasks, we propose an attentional highlighting paradigm. Highlighting involves dynamically modulating the saliency of a visual image to guide attention along the fixation path of a domain expert who had previously viewed the same image. In Experiment 1, we trained naive subjects via attentional highlighting on a fingerprint-matching task. Before and after training, we asked subjects to freely inspect images containing pairs of prints and determine whether the prints matched. Fixation sequences were automatically scored for the degree of expertise exhibited using a Bayesian discriminative model of novice and expert gaze behavior. Highlighted training causes gaze behavior to become more expert-like not only on the trained images but also on transfer images, indicating generalization of learning. In Experiment 2, to control for the possibility that the increase in expertise is due to mere exposure, we trained subjects via highlighting of fixation sequences from novices, not experts, and observed no transition toward expertise. In Experiment 3, to determine the specificity of the training effect, we trained subjects with expert fixation sequences from images other than the one being viewed, which preserves coarse-scale statistics of expert gaze but provides no information about fine-grain features. Observing at least a partial transition toward expertise, we obtain only weak evidence that the highlighting procedure facilitates the learning of critical local features. We discuss possible improvements to the highlighting procedure. PMID:26744839

  20. Using Highlighting to Train Attentional Expertise.

    PubMed

    Roads, Brett; Mozer, Michael C; Busey, Thomas A

    2016-01-01

    Acquiring expertise in complex visual tasks is time consuming. To facilitate the efficient training of novices on where to look in these tasks, we propose an attentional highlighting paradigm. Highlighting involves dynamically modulating the saliency of a visual image to guide attention along the fixation path of a domain expert who had previously viewed the same image. In Experiment 1, we trained naive subjects via attentional highlighting on a fingerprint-matching task. Before and after training, we asked subjects to freely inspect images containing pairs of prints and determine whether the prints matched. Fixation sequences were automatically scored for the degree of expertise exhibited using a Bayesian discriminative model of novice and expert gaze behavior. Highlighted training causes gaze behavior to become more expert-like not only on the trained images but also on transfer images, indicating generalization of learning. In Experiment 2, to control for the possibility that the increase in expertise is due to mere exposure, we trained subjects via highlighting of fixation sequences from novices, not experts, and observed no transition toward expertise. In Experiment 3, to determine the specificity of the training effect, we trained subjects with expert fixation sequences from images other than the one being viewed, which preserves coarse-scale statistics of expert gaze but provides no information about fine-grain features. Observing at least a partial transition toward expertise, we obtain only weak evidence that the highlighting procedure facilitates the learning of critical local features. We discuss possible improvements to the highlighting procedure.

  1. Should We Reject the Expertise Hypothesis?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Gauthier, Isabel; Bukach, Cindy

    2007-01-01

    On the basis of a review of the literature and the results of three experiments with dog experts, Robbins and McKone [Robbins, R. A., & McKone, E. (2006). No face-like processing for objects-of-expertise in three behavioural tasks, "Cognition"] argue that there is little or no evidence supporting an expertise account of the differences in…

  2. [Science, society and shared expertise: a European issue?].

    PubMed

    Yves, Charpak

    2012-01-01

    In recent years, the MML action plan has funded many projects designed to bring about a rapprochement between science (and scientists) and other civil society actors. The aim was to respond to social concerns about the various issues raised by science and to close the gap between scientific experts and society, especially during periods of crisis, when decisions that have a profound impact on society are taken on the basis of scientific findings. Other recent international organizations and initiatives have had similar objectives. At the same time, a wide range of sources of information and dissemination have emerged and developed in recent years, based on an extensive use of electronic tools and resources. While scientific information is becoming increasingly available, it has also paradoxically become increasingly subject to competition and criticism, and even 'manipulation'. A growing number of societal issues and challenges surrounding science have also emerged, and the capacity to share scientific expertise democratically and consensually has become an issue that transcends national boundaries.

  3. Brain dynamics of post-task resting state are influenced by expertise: Insights from baseball players.

    PubMed

    Muraskin, Jordan; Dodhia, Sonam; Lieberman, Gregory; Garcia, Javier O; Verstynen, Timothy; Vettel, Jean M; Sherwin, Jason; Sajda, Paul

    2016-12-01

    Post-task resting state dynamics can be viewed as a task-driven state where behavioral performance is improved through endogenous, non-explicit learning. Tasks that have intrinsic value for individuals are hypothesized to produce post-task resting state dynamics that promote learning. We measured simultaneous fMRI/EEG and DTI in Division-1 collegiate baseball players and compared to a group of controls, examining differences in both functional and structural connectivity. Participants performed a surrogate baseball pitch Go/No-Go task before a resting state scan, and we compared post-task resting state connectivity using a seed-based analysis from the supplementary motor area (SMA), an area whose activity discriminated players and controls in our previous results using this task. Although both groups were equally trained on the task, the experts showed differential activity in their post-task resting state consistent with motor learning. Specifically, we found (1) differences in bilateral SMA-L Insula functional connectivity between experts and controls that may reflect group differences in motor learning, (2) differences in BOLD-alpha oscillation correlations between groups suggests variability in modulatory attention in the post-task state, and (3) group differences between BOLD-beta oscillations that may indicate cognitive processing of motor inhibition. Structural connectivity analysis identified group differences in portions of the functionally derived network, suggesting that functional differences may also partially arise from variability in the underlying white matter pathways. Generally, we find that brain dynamics in the post-task resting state differ as a function of subject expertise and potentially result from differences in both functional and structural connectivity. Hum Brain Mapp 37:4454-4471, 2016. © 2016 The Authors Human Brain Mapping Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2016 The Authors Human Brain Mapping Published by Wiley Periodicals

  4. "No level up!": no effects of video game specialization and expertise on cognitive performance.

    PubMed

    Gobet, Fernand; Johnston, Stephen J; Ferrufino, Gabriella; Johnston, Matthew; Jones, Michael B; Molyneux, Antonia; Terzis, Argyrios; Weeden, Luke

    2014-01-01

    Previous research into the effects of action video gaming on cognition has suggested that long term exposure to this type of game might lead to an enhancement of cognitive skills that transfer to non-gaming cognitive tasks. However, these results have been controversial. The aim of the current study was to test the presence of positive cognitive transfer from action video games to two cognitive tasks. More specifically, this study investigated the effects that participants' expertise and genre specialization have on cognitive improvements in one task unrelated to video gaming (a flanker task) and one related task (change detection task with both control and genre-specific images). This study was unique in three ways. Firstly, it analyzed a continuum of expertise levels, which has yet to be investigated in research into the cognitive benefits of video gaming. Secondly, it explored genre-specific skill developments on these tasks by comparing Action and Strategy video game players (VGPs). Thirdly, it used a very tight experiment design, including the experimenter being blind to expertise level and genre specialization of the participant. Ninety-two university students aged between 18 and 30 (M = 21.25) were recruited through opportunistic sampling and were grouped by video game specialization and expertise level. While the results of the flanker task were consistent with previous research (i.e., effect of congruence), there was no effect of expertise, and the action gamers failed to outperform the strategy gamers. Additionally, contrary to expectation, there was no interaction between genre specialization and image type in the change detection task, again demonstrating no expertise effect. The lack of effects for game specialization and expertise goes against previous research on the positive effects of action video gaming on other cognitive tasks.

  5. Relative importance of expertise, lifting height and weight lifted on posture and lumbar external loading during a transfer task in manual material handling.

    PubMed

    Plamondon, André; Larivière, Christian; Delisle, Alain; Denis, Denys; Gagnon, Denis

    2012-01-01

    The objective of this study was to measure the effect size of three important factors in manual material handling, namely expertise, lifting height and weight lifted. The effect of expertise was evaluated by contrasting 15 expert and 15 novice handlers, the effect of the weight lifted with a 15-kg box and a 23-kg box and the effect of lifting height with two different box heights: ground level and a 32 cm height. The task consisted of transferring a series of boxes from a conveyor to a hand trolley. Lifting height and weight lifted had more effect size than expertise on external back loading variables (moments) while expertise had low impact. On the other hand, expertise showed a significant effect of posture variables on the lumbar spine and knees. All three factors are important, but for a reduction of external back loading, the focus should be on the lifting height and weight lifted. The objective was to measure the effect size of three important factors in a transfer of boxes from a conveyor to a hand trolley. Lifting height and weight lifted had more effect size than expertise on external back loading variables but expertise was a major determinant in back posture.

  6. Context and Expertise: The Case of Electronic Troubleshooting.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Flesher, Jeffrey W.

    Electronic troubleshooting expertise was explored in the three contexts (design, production, and repair) that reflect distinct problem solving task environments. The purpose of the effort was to provide a more precise definition of the boundaries of expertise in electronics troubleshooting and the relationship of context to the development of…

  7. Do neural correlates of face expertise vary with task demands? Event-related potential correlates of own- and other-race face inversion

    PubMed Central

    Wiese, Holger

    2013-01-01

    We are typically more accurate at remembering own- than other-race faces. This “own-race bias” has been suggested to result from enhanced expertise with and more efficient perceptual processing of own-race than other-race faces. In line with this idea, the N170, an event-related potential correlate of face perception, has been repeatedly found to be larger for other-race faces. Other studies, however, found no difference in N170 amplitude for faces from diverse ethnic groups. The present study tested whether these seemingly incongruent findings can be explained by varying task demands. European participants were presented with upright and inverted European and Asian faces (as well as European and Asian houses), and asked to either indicate the ethnicity or the orientation of the stimuli. Larger N170s for other-race faces were observed in the ethnicity but not in the orientation task, suggesting that the necessity to process facial category information is a minimum prerequisite for the occurrence of the effect. In addition, N170 inversion effects, with larger amplitudes for inverted relative to upright stimuli, were more pronounced for own- relative to other-race faces in both tasks. Overall, the present findings suggest that the occurrence of ethnicity effects in N170 for upright faces depends on the amount of facial detail required for the task at hand. At the same time, the larger inversion effects for own- than other-race faces occur independent of task and may reflect the fine-tuning of perceptual processing to faces of maximum expertise. PMID:24399955

  8. AGU's new task force on scientific ethics and integrity begins work

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Gleick, Peter; Townsend, Randy

    2011-11-01

    In support of the new strategic plan, AGU has established a new task force to review, evaluate, and update the Union's policies on scientific misconduct and the process for investigating and responding to allegations of possible misconduct by AGU members. As noted by AGU president Michael McPhaden, "AGU can only realize its vision of `collaboratively advancing and communicating science and its power to ensure a sustainable future' if we have the trust of the public and policy makers. That trust is earned by maintaining the highest standards of scientific integrity in all that we do. The work of the Task Force on Scientific Ethics is essential for defining norms of professional conduct that all our members can aspire to and that demonstrate AGU's unwavering commitment to excellence in Earth and space science."

  9. Invasive Species Working Group: Research Summary and Expertise Directory

    Treesearch

    Jack Butler; Dean Pearson; Mee-Sook Kim

    2009-01-01

    Rocky Mountain Research Station (RMRS) personnel have scientific expertise in widely ranging disciplines and conduct multidisciplinary research on invasive species issues with emphasis in terrestrial and aquatic habitats throughout the Interior West, Great Plains, and related areas (fig. 1; Expertise Directory; appendix). RMRS invasive species research covers an array...

  10. The Influence of Pre-stimulus EEG Activity on Reaction Time During a Verbal Sternberg Task is Related to Musical Expertise.

    PubMed

    Klein, Carina; Diaz Hernandez, Laura; Koenig, Thomas; Kottlow, Mara; Elmer, Stefan; Jäncke, Lutz

    2016-01-01

    Previous work highlighted the possibility that musical training has an influence on cognitive functioning. The suggested reason for this influence is the strong recruitment of attention, planning, and working memory functions during playing a musical instrument. The purpose of the present work was twofold, namely to evaluate the general relationship between pre-stimulus electrophysiological activity and cognition, and more specifically the influence of musical expertise on working memory functions. With this purpose in mind, we used covariance mapping analyses to evaluate whether pre-stimulus electroencephalographic activity is predictive for reaction time during a visual working memory task (Sternberg paradigm) in musicians and non-musicians. In line with our hypothesis, we replicated previous findings pointing to a general predictive value of pre-stimulus activity for working memory performance. Most importantly, we also provide first evidence for an influence of musical expertise on working memory performance that could distinctively be predicted by pre-stimulus spectral power. Our results open novel perspectives for better comprehending the vast influences of musical expertise on cognition.

  11. Investigating Community Concerns Regarding HIV Prevention Organizations' Expertise in Serving HIV-Vulnerable Populations.

    PubMed

    Bellows, Denise; Howard, Donna; Boekeloo, Brad; Randolph, Suzanne

    2015-01-01

    People living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/AIDS (PLWH/A) and others affected have expressed that cultural differences between patients and providers can create barriers to care and prevention. These barriers are exacerbated in the case of vulnerable populations who are often marginalized by society. During the formative phase of a community-based participatory research (CBPR) process, the researchers' community advisory committee (CAC) and HIV stakeholders shared anecdotes of incongruencies between needs of HIV-vulnerable populations and expertise of local providers. In response, researchers worked with the CAC to develop survey questions intended for providers of HIV prevention services in a region afflicted with some of the highest HIV prevalence rates in the country. The objective of this study was to identify and validate HIV stakeholders' perceptions about challenges to provision of HIV services through a sequential mixed methods study design. Thirty HIV prevention organizations (HPOs) were identified as local leaders in HIV prevention by community stakeholders and through community event attendance. Each HPO was invited to participate in an interviewer-assisted survey examining population-specific expertise and service for 15 HIV-vulnerable populations. Frequency analysis was used to compare HPOs' expertise relative to who they serve (n = 26). Although 13 of the HIV-vulnerable populations were served by more than 50% of the HPOs, only 2 of these 13 populations were served with high expertise by more than one half of the HPOs in the sample. These data give credence to the CAC's concern regarding misalliance between whom HPOs serve and with whom they have high expertise, a factor potentially influencing HIV outcomes among HIV-vulnerable populations.

  12. “No level up!”: no effects of video game specialization and expertise on cognitive performance

    PubMed Central

    Gobet, Fernand; Johnston, Stephen J.; Ferrufino, Gabriella; Johnston, Matthew; Jones, Michael B.; Molyneux, Antonia; Terzis, Argyrios; Weeden, Luke

    2014-01-01

    Previous research into the effects of action video gaming on cognition has suggested that long term exposure to this type of game might lead to an enhancement of cognitive skills that transfer to non-gaming cognitive tasks. However, these results have been controversial. The aim of the current study was to test the presence of positive cognitive transfer from action video games to two cognitive tasks. More specifically, this study investigated the effects that participants' expertise and genre specialization have on cognitive improvements in one task unrelated to video gaming (a flanker task) and one related task (change detection task with both control and genre-specific images). This study was unique in three ways. Firstly, it analyzed a continuum of expertise levels, which has yet to be investigated in research into the cognitive benefits of video gaming. Secondly, it explored genre-specific skill developments on these tasks by comparing Action and Strategy video game players (VGPs). Thirdly, it used a very tight experiment design, including the experimenter being blind to expertise level and genre specialization of the participant. Ninety-two university students aged between 18 and 30 (M = 21.25) were recruited through opportunistic sampling and were grouped by video game specialization and expertise level. While the results of the flanker task were consistent with previous research (i.e., effect of congruence), there was no effect of expertise, and the action gamers failed to outperform the strategy gamers. Additionally, contrary to expectation, there was no interaction between genre specialization and image type in the change detection task, again demonstrating no expertise effect. The lack of effects for game specialization and expertise goes against previous research on the positive effects of action video gaming on other cognitive tasks. PMID:25506330

  13. Perceptual learning and human expertise

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Kellman, Philip J.; Garrigan, Patrick

    2009-06-01

    We consider perceptual learning: experience-induced changes in the way perceivers extract information. Often neglected in scientific accounts of learning and in instruction, perceptual learning is a fundamental contributor to human expertise and is crucial in domains where humans show remarkable levels of attainment, such as language, chess, music, and mathematics. In Section 2, we give a brief history and discuss the relation of perceptual learning to other forms of learning. We consider in Section 3 several specific phenomena, illustrating the scope and characteristics of perceptual learning, including both discovery and fluency effects. We describe abstract perceptual learning, in which structural relationships are discovered and recognized in novel instances that do not share constituent elements or basic features. In Section 4, we consider primary concepts that have been used to explain and model perceptual learning, including receptive field change, selection, and relational recoding. In Section 5, we consider the scope of perceptual learning, contrasting recent research, focused on simple sensory discriminations, with earlier work that emphasized extraction of invariance from varied instances in more complex tasks. Contrary to some recent views, we argue that perceptual learning should not be confined to changes in early sensory analyzers. Phenomena at various levels, we suggest, can be unified by models that emphasize discovery and selection of relevant information. In a final section, we consider the potential role of perceptual learning in educational settings. Most instruction emphasizes facts and procedures that can be verbalized, whereas expertise depends heavily on implicit pattern recognition and selective extraction skills acquired through perceptual learning. We consider reasons why perceptual learning has not been systematically addressed in traditional instruction, and we describe recent successful efforts to create a technology of perceptual

  14. No Face-Like Processing for Objects-of-Expertise in Three Behavioural Tasks

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Robbins, Rachel; McKone, Elinor

    2007-01-01

    In the debate between expertise and domain-specific explanations of "special" processing for faces, a common belief is that behavioural studies support the expertise hypothesis. The present article refutes this view, via a combination of new data and review. We tested dog experts with confirmed good individuation of exemplars of their…

  15. Musical expertise and second language learning.

    PubMed

    Chobert, Julie; Besson, Mireille

    2013-06-06

    Increasing evidence suggests that musical expertise influences brain organization and brain functions. Moreover, results at the behavioral and neurophysiological levels reveal that musical expertise positively influences several aspects of speech processing, from auditory perception to speech production. In this review, we focus on the main results of the literature that led to the idea that musical expertise may benefit second language acquisition. We discuss several interpretations that may account for the influence of musical expertise on speech processing in native and foreign languages, and we propose new directions for future research.

  16. Musical Expertise and Second Language Learning

    PubMed Central

    Chobert, Julie; Besson, Mireille

    2013-01-01

    Increasing evidence suggests that musical expertise influences brain organization and brain functions. Moreover, results at the behavioral and neurophysiological levels reveal that musical expertise positively influences several aspects of speech processing, from auditory perception to speech production. In this review, we focus on the main results of the literature that led to the idea that musical expertise may benefit second language acquisition. We discuss several interpretations that may account for the influence of musical expertise on speech processing in native and foreign languages, and we propose new directions for future research. PMID:24961431

  17. Task-Technology Fit Assessment of an Expertise Transfer System

    DTIC Science & Technology

    2009-03-01

    Air Education and Training Command In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Information Resource Management...Transfer Forum (ETF) developed by the Oklahoma State University for the Defense Ammunition Center’s quality assurance personnel. The preliminary findings...Technology-to-Performance Chain (TPC) ....................................................................13 Expertise Transfer Forum (ETF

  18. Threading Together Patient Expertise

    PubMed Central

    Civan, Andrea; Pratt, Wanda

    2007-01-01

    Patients are valuable sources of expertise for other patients in similar situations, but little is understood about the nature of this expertise. To address this knowledge gap, we investigated informational support as a mechanism for peers to help one another learn to cope with the breast cancer experience. We analyzed the types of problems discussed and recommendations offered by correspondents in three online breast cancer communities. Informational support was prevalent and directed towards problems in which correspondents were planning for future events or coping with emergent situations. Peers shared a wealth of patient expertise, including action strategies, recommended knowledge, suggested approaches, and information resources for dealing with problems. Our results highlight how peers are helping one another to learn. These findings bring insight to new support we could provide to patients for developing and sharing patient expertise, such as problem-based information organization and functionality for collaborative problem solving. PMID:18693814

  19. Organization of Biomedical Data for Collaborative Scientific Research: A Research Information Management System

    PubMed Central

    Myneni, Sahiti; Patel, Vimla L.

    2010-01-01

    Biomedical researchers often work with massive, detailed and heterogeneous datasets. These datasets raise new challenges of information organization and management for scientific interpretation, as they demand much of the researchers’ time and attention. The current study investigated the nature of the problems that researchers face when dealing with such data. Four major problems identified with existing biomedical scientific information management methods were related to data organization, data sharing, collaboration, and publications. Therefore, there is a compelling need to develop an efficient and user-friendly information management system to handle the biomedical research data. This study evaluated the implementation of an information management system, which was introduced as part of the collaborative research to increase scientific productivity in a research laboratory. Laboratory members seemed to exhibit frustration during the implementation process. However, empirical findings revealed that they gained new knowledge and completed specified tasks while working together with the new system. Hence, researchers are urged to persist and persevere when dealing with any new technology, including an information management system in a research laboratory environment. PMID:20543892

  20. Organization of Biomedical Data for Collaborative Scientific Research: A Research Information Management System.

    PubMed

    Myneni, Sahiti; Patel, Vimla L

    2010-06-01

    Biomedical researchers often work with massive, detailed and heterogeneous datasets. These datasets raise new challenges of information organization and management for scientific interpretation, as they demand much of the researchers' time and attention. The current study investigated the nature of the problems that researchers face when dealing with such data. Four major problems identified with existing biomedical scientific information management methods were related to data organization, data sharing, collaboration, and publications. Therefore, there is a compelling need to develop an efficient and user-friendly information management system to handle the biomedical research data. This study evaluated the implementation of an information management system, which was introduced as part of the collaborative research to increase scientific productivity in a research laboratory. Laboratory members seemed to exhibit frustration during the implementation process. However, empirical findings revealed that they gained new knowledge and completed specified tasks while working together with the new system. Hence, researchers are urged to persist and persevere when dealing with any new technology, including an information management system in a research laboratory environment.

  1. The Cambridge Car Memory Test: a task matched in format to the Cambridge Face Memory Test, with norms, reliability, sex differences, dissociations from face memory, and expertise effects.

    PubMed

    Dennett, Hugh W; McKone, Elinor; Tavashmi, Raka; Hall, Ashleigh; Pidcock, Madeleine; Edwards, Mark; Duchaine, Bradley

    2012-06-01

    Many research questions require a within-class object recognition task matched for general cognitive requirements with a face recognition task. If the object task also has high internal reliability, it can improve accuracy and power in group analyses (e.g., mean inversion effects for faces vs. objects), individual-difference studies (e.g., correlations between certain perceptual abilities and face/object recognition), and case studies in neuropsychology (e.g., whether a prosopagnosic shows a face-specific or object-general deficit). Here, we present such a task. Our Cambridge Car Memory Test (CCMT) was matched in format to the established Cambridge Face Memory Test, requiring recognition of exemplars across view and lighting change. We tested 153 young adults (93 female). Results showed high reliability (Cronbach's alpha = .84) and a range of scores suitable both for normal-range individual-difference studies and, potentially, for diagnosis of impairment. The mean for males was much higher than the mean for females. We demonstrate independence between face memory and car memory (dissociation based on sex, plus a modest correlation between the two), including where participants have high relative expertise with cars. We also show that expertise with real car makes and models of the era used in the test significantly predicts CCMT performance. Surprisingly, however, regression analyses imply that there is an effect of sex per se on the CCMT that is not attributable to a stereotypical male advantage in car expertise.

  2. Improving performance through an organizational culture of employee expertise.

    PubMed

    Jacobs, R L

    1996-01-01

    Managers can do many things to improve organizational performance, but the accomplishments of the most skillful employees often are most important. This article makes the point that managers should be aware of employee expertise and its relationship to organizational performance. The article also describes the components of an organizational culture of employee expertise. An organizational culture of employee expertise builds on the learning organization metaphor that has frequently appeared in the management literature. How employees develop expertise to do their jobs is emerging as a critical issue for organizations, and managers will likely play a key role in that process.

  3. Challenging the 'view from nowhere': citizen reflections on specialist expertise in a deliberative process.

    PubMed

    Davies, Gail; Burgess, Jacquelin

    2004-12-01

    This paper presents analysis of citizen encounters with specialists in a deliberative process, called Deliberative Mapping, which explored options for addressing the shortage of organs for transplantation in the UK. There is a rich theoretical literature about the extent to which citizens are competent to question the knowledge claims of specialists in complex decision-making processes, suggesting the trustworthiness of scientific expertise will depend on the qualities of social interaction in face-to-face dialogue, but little empirical analysis of specific encounters. This paper presents evidence of how citizens located specialist expertise in making judgements about the legitimacy and credibility of specialist knowledge claims, in ways that reflect differences in epistemic procedures valued by the panels of men and women in this process.

  4. Change deafness, dual-task performance, and domain-specific expertise.

    PubMed

    Neuhoff, John G; Bochtler, Katharina S

    2018-05-01

    In a change deafness manipulation using radio broadcasts of sporting events, we show that change deafness to a switch in talker increases when listeners are asked to monitor both lexical and indexical information for change. We held semantic content constant and demonstrated a change deafness rate of 85% when participants listened to the home team broadcast of a hockey game that switched midway to the away team broadcast with a different announcer. In Study 2, participants were asked to monitor either the indexical characteristics ( listen for a change in announcer) or both the indexical and semantic components ( listen for a change in announcer or a goal scored). Monitoring both components led to significantly greater change deafness even though both groups were alerted to the possibility of a change in announcer. In Study 3, we changed both the indexical and the semantic components when the broadcast switched from a hockey game to a basketball game. We found a negative correlation between sports expertise and change deafness. The results are discussed in terms of the nature of perceptual representation and the influence of expertise and evolution on attention allocation.

  5. Musical expertise has minimal impact on dual task performance.

    PubMed

    Cocchini, Gianna; Filardi, Maria Serena; Crhonkova, Marcela; Halpern, Andrea R

    2017-05-01

    Studies investigating effect of practice on dual task performance have yielded conflicting findings, thus supporting different theoretical accounts about the organisation of attentional resources when tasks are performed simultaneously. Because practice has been proven to reduce the demand of attention for the trained task, the impact of long-lasting training on one task is an ideal way to better understand the mechanisms underlying dual task decline in performance. Our study compared performance during dual task execution in expert musicians compared to controls with little if any musical experience. Participants performed a music recognition task and a visuo-spatial task separately (single task) or simultaneously (dual task). Both groups showed a significant but similar performance decline during dual tasks. In addition, the two groups showed a similar decline of dual task performance during encoding and retrieval of the musical information, mainly attributed to a decline in sensitivity. Our results suggest that attention during dual tasks is similarly distributed by expert and non-experts. These findings are in line with previous studies showing a lack of sensitivity to difficulty and lack of practice effect during dual tasks, supporting the idea that different tasks may rely on different and not-sharable attentional resources.

  6. Training enhances attentional expertise, but not attentional capacity: Evidence from content-specific training benefits.

    PubMed

    Strong, Roger W; Alvarez, George A

    2017-04-01

    Cognitive training has become a billion-dollar industry with the promise that exercising a cognitive faculty (e.g., attention) on simple "brain games" will lead to improvements on any task relying on the same faculty. Although this logic seems sound, it assumes performance improves on training tasks because attention's capacity has been enhanced. Alternatively, training may result in attentional expertise-an enhancement of the ability to deploy attention to particular content-such that improvement on training tasks is specific to the features of the training context. The present study supported this attentional expertise hypothesis, showing that training benefits did not generalize fully from a trained attentional tracking task to untrained tracking tasks requiring a common attentional capacity, but differing in seemingly superficial features (i.e., retinotopic location and or motion type). This specificity suggests that attentional training benefits are linked to enhanced coordination between attentional processes and content-specific perceptual representations. Thus, these results indicate that shared attentional capacity between tasks is insufficient for producing generalized training benefits, and predict that generalization requires attentional expertise for content present in both training and outcome tasks.

  7. Moral Expertise in the Clinic: Lessons Learned from Medicine and Science

    PubMed Central

    McClimans, Leah; Slowther, Anne

    2016-01-01

    Philosophers and others have questioned whether or not expertise in morality is possible. This debate is not only theoretical, but also affects the perceived legitimacy of clinical ethicists. One argument against moral expertise is that in a pluralistic society with competing moral theories no one can claim expertise regarding what another ought morally to do. There are simply too many reasonable moral values and intuitions that affect theory choice and its application; expertise is epistemically uniform. In this article, we discuss how similar concerns have recently threatened to undermine expertise in medicine and science. In contrast, we argue that the application of values is needed to exercise medical, scientific, and moral expertise. As long as these values are made explicit, worries about a pretense to authority in the context of a liberal democracy are ill-conceived. In conclusion, we argue for an expertise that is epistemically diverse. PMID:27302969

  8. Strategic science: new frameworks to bring scientific expertise to environmental disaster response

    USGS Publications Warehouse

    Stoepler, Teresa Michelle; Ludwig, Kristin A.

    2015-01-01

    Science is critical to society’s ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from environmental crises. Natural and technological disasters such as disease outbreaks, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, oil spills, and tsunamis require coordinated scientific expertise across a range of disciplines to shape effective policies and protocols. Five years after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, new organizational frameworks have arisen for scientists and engineers to apply their expertise to disaster response and recovery in a variety of capacities. Here, we describe examples of these opportunities, including an exciting new collaboration between the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) and the Department of the Interior’s (DOI) Strategic Sciences Group (SSG).

  9. An Expertise Engine: MAST in the 2020s

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Goldston Peek, Joshua Eli; Smith, Arfon M.; Momcheva, Ivelina G.

    2018-06-01

    The original Hubble Space Telescope archive showed how encapsulating expertise in science-ready data products could accelerate the pace of scientific advancement, and enable extremely productive archival research. In the 2000s, MAST and the Hubble Legacy Archive showed how taking these products to the next level further democratized astronomy, with archival science overtaking PI science as the dominant output of MAST missions. We argue that these data products fundamentally act as a vector for expertise, allowing novice users access to the detailed and advanced techniques of experts. In the 2020s we will see an explosion of data volume, data precision, and data complexity which will demand an even more powerful and sophisticated expertise engine. We’ll discuss how MAST plans to rise to meet that challenge.

  10. Moral Expertise in the Clinic: Lessons Learned from Medicine and Science.

    PubMed

    McClimans, Leah; Slowther, Anne

    2016-08-01

    Philosophers and others have questioned whether or not expertise in morality is possible. This debate is not only theoretical, but also affects the perceived legitimacy of clinical ethicists. One argument against moral expertise is that in a pluralistic society with competing moral theories no one can claim expertise regarding what another ought morally to do. There are simply too many reasonable moral values and intuitions that affect theory choice and its application; expertise is epistemically uniform. In this article, we discuss how similar concerns have recently threatened to undermine expertise in medicine and science. In contrast, we argue that the application of values is needed to exercise medical, scientific, and moral expertise. As long as these values are made explicit, worries about a pretense to authority in the context of a liberal democracy are ill-conceived. In conclusion, we argue for an expertise that is epistemically diverse. © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

  11. Instructional Design for Accelerated Macrocognitive Expertise in the Baseball Workplace

    PubMed Central

    Fadde, Peter J.

    2016-01-01

    The goal of accelerating expertise can leave researchers and trainers in human factors, naturalistic decision making, sport science, and expertise studies concerned about seemingly insufficient application of expert performance theories, findings and methods for training macrocognitive aspects of human performance. Video-occlusion methods perfected by sports expertise researchers have great instructional utility, in some cases offering an effective and inexpensive alternative to high-fidelity simulation. A key problem for instructional designers seems to be that expertise research done in laboratory and field settings doesn't get adequately translated into workplace training. Therefore, this article presents a framework for better linkage of expertise research/training across laboratory, field, and workplace settings. It also uses a case study to trace the development and implementation of a macrocognitive training program in the very challenging workplace of the baseball batters' box. This training, which was embedded for a full season in a college baseball team, targeted the perceptual-cognitive skill of pitch recognition that allows expert batters to circumvent limitations of human reaction time in order to hit a 90 mile-per-hour slider. While baseball batting has few analogous skills outside of sports, the instructional design principles of the training program developed to improve batting have wider applicability and implications. Its core operational principle, supported by information processing models but challenged by ecological models, decouples the perception-action link for targeted part-task training of the perception component, in much the same way that motor components routinely are isolated to leverage instructional efficiencies. After targeted perceptual training, perception and action were recoupled via transfer-appropriate tasks inspired by in situ research tasks. Using NCAA published statistics as performance measures, the cooperating team

  12. Advancing Scientific Reasoning in Upper Elementary Classrooms: Direct Instruction Versus Task Structuring

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Lazonder, Ard W.; Wiskerke-Drost, Sjanou

    2015-02-01

    Several studies found that direct instruction and task structuring can effectively promote children's ability to design unconfounded experiments. The present study examined whether the impact of these interventions extends to other scientific reasoning skills by comparing the inquiry activities of 55 fifth-graders randomly assigned to one of three conditions. Children in the control condition investigated a four-variable inquiry task without additional support. Performance of this task in the direct instruction condition was preceded by a short training in experimental design, whereas children in the task structuring condition, who did not receive the introductory training, were given a version of the task that addressed the four variables one at a time. Analysis of children's experimentation behavior confirmed that direct instruction and task structuring are equally effective and superior to unguided inquiry. Both interventions also evoked more determinate predictions and valid inferences. These findings demonstrate that the effect of short-term interventions designed to promote unconfounded experimentation extends beyond the control of variables.

  13. Distributing Expertise: A Dutch Experiment in Public Interest Science.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Nelkin, Dorothy; Rip, Arie

    1979-01-01

    In order to provide public access to scientific expertise, the Dutch have instituted a science shops program. Science advisory groups, located at five universities, promote socially relevant research in the universities and provide technical information to client groups. (BB)

  14. Domain specificity versus expertise: factors influencing distinct processing of faces.

    PubMed

    Carmel, David; Bentin, Shlomo

    2002-02-01

    To explore face specificity in visual processing, we compared the role of task-associated strategies and expertise on the N170 event-related potential (ERP) component elicited by human faces with the ERPs elicited by cars, birds, items of furniture, and ape faces. In Experiment 1, participants performed a car monitoring task and an animacy decision task. In Experiment 2, participants monitored human faces while faces of apes were the distracters. Faces elicited an equally conspicuous N170, significantly larger than the ERPs elicited by non-face categories regardless of whether they were ignored or had an equal status with other categories (Experiment 1), or were the targets (in Experiment 2). In contrast, the negative component elicited by cars during the same time range was larger if they were targets than if they were not. Furthermore, unlike the posterior-temporal distribution of the N170, the negative component elicited by cars and its modulation by task were more conspicuous at occipital sites. Faces of apes elicited an N170 that was similar in amplitude to that elicited by the human face targets, albeit peaking 10 ms later. As our participants were not ape experts, this pattern indicates that the N170 is face-specific, but not specie-specific, i.e. it is elicited by particular face features regardless of expertise. Overall, these results demonstrate the domain specificity of the visual mechanism implicated in processing faces, a mechanism which is not influenced by either task or expertise. The processing of other objects is probably accomplished by a more general visual processor, which is sensitive to strategic manipulations and attention.

  15. Dependence of the Teacher's Overall Work Capacity on the Professional Expertise

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Barmin, Nikolay; Petrov, Yuri; Petrov, Aleksey; Bulaeva, Marina

    2016-01-01

    The topicality of the research is conditioned by the social and pedagogic, scientific and theoretical, and scientific and methodical aspects. With regard to this, the paper is aimed at revealing the dependence of the teacher's overall work capacity on the development of his/her professional expertise. The leading methods in studying this problem…

  16. The "Ethics" Expertise in Clinical Ethics Consultation.

    PubMed

    Iltis, Ana S; Rasmussen, Lisa M

    2016-08-01

    The nature, possibility, and implications of ethics expertise (or moral expertise) in general and of bioethics expertise in particular has been the focus of extensive debate for over thirty years. What is ethics expertise and what does it enable experts to do? Knowing what ethics expertise is can help answer another important question: What, if anything, makes a claim of expertise legitimate? In other words, how does someone earn the appellation "ethics expert?" There remains deep disagreement on whether ethics expertise is possible, and if so, what constitutes such expertise and what it entails and legitimates. Discussion of bioethics expertise has become particularly important given the growing presence of bioethicists in the clinical setting as well as efforts to professionalize bioethics through codes of ethics and certification (or quasi-certification) efforts. Unlike in the law or in engineering, where there may be a body of knowledge that professional organizations or others have articulated as important for education and training of experts, ethics expertise admits of no such body of knowledge or required experience. Nor is there an entity seen as having the authority to articulate the necessary scope of knowledge. Questions about whether there is such a body of knowledge for particular areas within bioethics have emerged and played a central role in professionalization efforts in recent years, especially in the area of clinical ethics. © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

  17. The epistemic integrity of scientific research.

    PubMed

    De Winter, Jan; Kosolosky, Laszlo

    2013-09-01

    We live in a world in which scientific expertise and its epistemic authority become more important. On the other hand, the financial interests in research, which could potentially corrupt science, are increasing. Due to these two tendencies, a concern for the integrity of scientific research becomes increasingly vital. This concern is, however, hollow if we do not have a clear account of research integrity. Therefore, it is important that we explicate this concept. Following Rudolf Carnap's characterization of the task of explication, this means that we should develop a concept that is (1) similar to our common sense notion of research integrity, (2) exact, (3) fruitful, and (4) as simple as possible. Since existing concepts do not meet these four requirements, we develop a new concept in this article. We describe a concept of epistemic integrity that is based on the property of deceptiveness, and argue that this concept does meet Carnap's four requirements of explication. To illustrate and support our claims we use several examples from scientific practice, mainly from biomedical research.

  18. Scientific Diving Training Course. Red Sea & Gulf of Aden Programme (PERSGA).

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Arab Organization for Education and Science, Cairo (Egypt).

    This document presents the scientific diving training course organized by the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (ALECSO) for the Program for Environmental Studies, Red Sea and Gulf of Aden (PERSGA). This course of six weeks duration aims to produce a person who is capable of carrying out scientific diving tasks in the…

  19. Using the Biology Card Sorting Task to Measure Changes in Conceptual Expertise during Postsecondary Biology Education

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Bissonnette, Sarah A.; Combs, Elijah D.; Nagami, Paul H.; Byers, Victor; Fernandez, Juliana; Le, Dinh; Realin, Jared; Woodham, Selina; Smith, Julia I.; Tanner, Kimberly D.

    2017-01-01

    While there have been concerted efforts to reform undergraduate biology toward teaching students to organize their conceptual knowledge like experts, there are few tools that attempt to measure this. We previously developed the Biology Card Sorting Task (BCST), designed to probe how individuals organize their conceptual biological knowledge.…

  20. Expertise for Teaching Biology Situated in the Context of Genetic Testing

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Van der Zande, Paul; Akkerman, Sanne F.; Brekelmans, Mieke; Waarlo, Arend Jan; Vermunt, Jan D.

    2012-07-01

    Contemporary genomics research will impact the daily practice of biology teachers who want to teach up-to-date genetics in secondary education. This article reports on a research project aimed at enhancing biology teachers' expertise for teaching genetics situated in the context of genetic testing. The increasing body of scientific knowledge concerning genetic testing and the related consequences for decision-making indicate the societal relevance of an educational approach based on situated learning. What expertise do biology teachers need for teaching genetics in the personal health context of genetic testing? This article describes the required expertise by exploring the educational practice. Nine experienced teachers were interviewed about the pedagogical content, moral and interpersonal expertise areas concerning how to teach genetics in the personal health context of genetic testing, and the lessons of five of them were observed. The findings showed that the required teacher expertise encompasses specific pedagogical content expertise, interpersonal expertise and a preference for teacher roles and teaching approaches for the moral aspects of teaching in this context. A need for further development of teaching and learning activities for (reflection on) moral reasoning came to the fore. Suggestions regarding how to apply this expertise into context-based genetics education are discussed.

  1. 7 CFR 205.504 - Evidence of expertise and ability.

    Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

    2013-01-01

    ... 7 Agriculture 3 2013-01-01 2013-01-01 false Evidence of expertise and ability. 205.504 Section 205... expertise and ability. A private or governmental entity seeking accreditation as a certifying agent must... handling techniques; its ability to fully comply with and implement the organic certification program...

  2. Advancing Scientific Reasoning in Upper Elementary Classrooms: Direct Instruction versus Task Structuring

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Lazonder, Ard W.; Wiskerke-Drost, Sjanou

    2015-01-01

    Several studies found that direct instruction and task structuring can effectively promote children's ability to design unconfounded experiments. The present study examined whether the impact of these interventions extends to other scientific reasoning skills by comparing the inquiry activities of 55 fifth-graders randomly assigned to one of…

  3. Conceptualizing and Exemplifying Science Teachers' Assessment Expertise

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Geaney Lyon, Edward

    2013-05-01

    Although research in science education has led to new assessment forms and functions, the reality is that little work has been done to unpack and capture what it means for a teacher to develop expertise at assessing science. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, I suggest a conceptualization of assessment expertise that is organized around three dimensions: (a) designing aligned and theoretically cohesive assessment (Design), (b) using assessment to support students' science learning (Use), and (c) equitably assessing language minorities (Equity). The second purpose is to suggest and exemplify various levels of teaching expertise across the three conceptual dimensions using written assessment plans gathered from a study on secondary science pre-service teachers' assessment growth. The contribution of this paper lies in its further conceptual development of assessment expertise, instantiated in a rubric, which can spark discussion about how to capture the range of assessment practices that might be found in science classrooms as well as move toward a potential learning progression of assessment expertise.

  4. Task context and organization in free recall

    PubMed Central

    Polyn, Sean M.; Norman, Kenneth A.; Kahana, Michael J.

    2009-01-01

    Prior work on organization in free recall has focused on the ways in which semantic and temporal information determine the order in which material is retrieved from memory. Tulving’s theory of ecphory suggests that these organizational effects arise from the interaction of a retrieval cue with the contents of memory. Using the continual-distraction free-recall paradigm (Bjork & Whitten, 1974) to minimize retrieval during the study period, we show that encoding task context can organize recall, suggesting that task-related information is part of the retrieval cue. We interpret these results in terms of the Context Maintenance and Retrieval model (CMR; Polyn, Norman, & Kahana, in press), in which an internal contextual representation, containing semantic, temporal, and source-related information, serves as the retrieval cue and organizes the retrieval of information from memory. We discuss these results in terms of the guided activation theory (Miller & Cohen, 2001) of the role of prefrontal cortex in task performance, as well as the rich neuropsychological literature implicating prefrontal cortex in memory search (e.g, Schacter, 1987). PMID:19524086

  5. Transfer of Expertise: An Eye Tracking and Think Aloud Study Using Dynamic Medical Visualizations

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Gegenfurtner, Andreas; Seppanen, Marko

    2013-01-01

    Expertise research has produced mixed results regarding the problem of transfer of expertise. Is expert performance context-bound or can the underlying processes be applied to more general situations? The present study tests whether expert performance and its underlying processes transfer to novel tasks within a domain. A mixed method study using…

  6. Selective Effects of Motor Expertise in Mental Body Rotation Tasks: Comparing Object-Based and Perspective Transformations

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Steggemann, Yvonne; Engbert, Kai; Weigelt, Matthias

    2011-01-01

    Brain imaging studies provide strong evidence for the involvement of the human mirror system during the observation of complex movements, depending on the individual's motor expertise. Here, we ask the question whether motor expertise not only affects perception while observing movements, but also benefits perception while solving mental rotation…

  7. The geometry of expertise

    PubMed Central

    Leone, María J.; Fernandez Slezak, Diego; Cecchi, Guillermo A.; Sigman, Mariano

    2014-01-01

    Theories of expertise based on the acquisition of chunk and templates suggest a differential geometric organization of perception between experts and novices. It is implied that expert representation is less anchored by spatial (Euclidean) proximity and may instead be dictated by the intrinsic relation in the structure and grammar of the specific domain of expertise. Here we set out to examine this hypothesis. We used the domain of chess which has been widely used as a tool to study human expertise. We reasoned that the movement of an opponent piece to a specific square constitutes an external cue and the reaction of the player to this “perturbation” should reveal his internal representation of proximity. We hypothesized that novice players will tend to respond by moving a piece in closer squares than experts. Similarly, but now in terms of object representations, we hypothesized weak players will more likely focus on a specific piece and hence produce sequence of actions repeating movements of the same piece. We capitalized on a large corpus of data obtained from internet chess servers. Results showed that, relative to experts, weaker players tend to (1) produce consecutive moves in proximal board locations, (2) move more often the same piece and (3) reduce the number of remaining pieces more rapidly, most likely to decrease cognitive load and mental effort. These three principles might reflect the effect of expertise on human actions in complex setups. PMID:24550869

  8. Musical expertise induces neuroplasticity of the planum temporale.

    PubMed

    Meyer, Martin; Elmer, Stefan; Jäncke, Lutz

    2012-04-01

    The present manuscript summarizes and discusses the implications of recent neuroimaging studies, which have investigated the relationship between musical expertise and structural, as well as functional, changes in an auditory-related association cortex, namely, the planum temporale (PT). Since the bilateral PT is known to serve as a spectrotemporal processor that supports perception of acoustic modulations in both speech and music, it comes as no surprise that musical expertise corresponds to functional sensitivity and neuroanatomical changes in cortical architecture. In this context, we focus on the following question: To what extent does musical expertise affect the functioning of the left and right plana temporalia? We discuss the relationship between behavioral, hemodynamic, and neuroanatomical data obtained from musicians in light of maturational and developmental issues. In particular, we introduce two studies of our group that show to what extent brains of musicians are more proficient in phonetic task performance. © 2012 New York Academy of Sciences.

  9. Expertise, Ethics Expertise, and Clinical Ethics Consultation: Achieving Terminological Clarity

    PubMed Central

    Iltis, Ana S.; Sheehan, Mark

    2016-01-01

    The language of ethics expertise has become particularly important in bioethics in light of efforts to establish the value of the clinical ethics consultation (CEC), to specify who is qualified to function as a clinical ethics consultant, and to characterize how one should evaluate whether or not a person is so qualified. Supporters and skeptics about the possibility of ethics expertise use the language of ethics expertise in ways that reflect competing views about what ethics expertise entails. We argue for clarity in understanding the nature of expertise and ethics expertise. To be an ethics expert, we argue, is to be an expert in knowing what ought to be done. Any attempt to articulate expertise with respect to knowing what ought to be done must include an account of ethics that specifies the nature of moral truth and the means by which we access this truth or a theoretical account of ethics such that expertise in another domain is linked to knowing or being better at judging what ought to be done and the standards by which this “knowing” or “being better at judging” is determined. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our analysis for the literature on ethics expertise in CEC. We do think that there are clear domains in which a clinical ethics consultant might be expert but we are skeptical about the possibility that this includes ethics expertise. Clinical ethics consultants should not be referred to as ethics experts. PMID:27256848

  10. Interference between face and non-face domains of perceptual expertise: a replication and extension

    PubMed Central

    Curby, Kim M.; Gauthier, Isabel

    2014-01-01

    As car expertise increases, so does interference between the visual processing of faces and that of cars; this suggests performance trade-offs across domains of real-world expertise. Such interference between expert domains has been previously revealed in a relatively complex design, interleaving 2-back part-judgment task with faces and cars (Gauthier et al., 2003). However, the basis of this interference is unclear. Experiment 1A replicated the finding of interference between faces and cars, as a function of car expertise. Experiments 1B and 2 investigated the mechanisms underlying this effect by (1) providing baseline measures of performance and (2) assessing the specificity of this interference effect. Our findings support the presence of expertise-dependent interference between face and non-face domains of expertise. However, surprisingly, it is in the condition where faces are processed among cars with a disrupted configuration where expertise has a greater influence on faces. This finding highlights how expertise-related processing changes also occur for transformed objects of expertise and that such changes can also drive interference across domains of expertise. PMID:25346702

  11. 7 CFR 205.504 - Evidence of expertise and ability.

    Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

    2012-01-01

    ... SERVICE (Standards, Inspections, Marketing Practices), DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE (CONTINUED) ORGANIC FOODS PRODUCTION ACT PROVISIONS NATIONAL ORGANIC PROGRAM Accreditation of Certifying Agents § 205.504 Evidence of... submit the following documents and information to demonstrate its expertise in organic production or...

  12. 7 CFR 205.504 - Evidence of expertise and ability.

    Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

    2014-01-01

    ... SERVICE (Standards, Inspections, Marketing Practices), DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE (CONTINUED) ORGANIC FOODS PRODUCTION ACT PROVISIONS NATIONAL ORGANIC PROGRAM Accreditation of Certifying Agents § 205.504 Evidence of... submit the following documents and information to demonstrate its expertise in organic production or...

  13. Articulating uncertainty as part of scientific argumentation during model-based exoplanet detection tasks

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Lee, Hee-Sun; Pallant, Amy; Pryputniewicz, Sarah

    2015-08-01

    Teaching scientific argumentation has emerged as an important goal for K-12 science education. In scientific argumentation, students are actively involved in coordinating evidence with theory based on their understanding of the scientific content and thinking critically about the strengths and weaknesses of the cited evidence in the context of the investigation. We developed a one-week-long online curriculum module called "Is there life in space?" where students conduct a series of four model-based tasks to learn how scientists detect extrasolar planets through the “wobble” and transit methods. The simulation model allows students to manipulate various parameters of an imaginary star and planet system such as planet size, orbit size, planet-orbiting-plane angle, and sensitivity of telescope equipment, and to adjust the display settings for graphs illustrating the relative velocity and light intensity of the star. Students can use model-based evidence to formulate an argument on whether particular signals in the graphs guarantee the presence of a planet. Students' argumentation is facilitated by the four-part prompts consisting of multiple-choice claim, open-ended explanation, Likert-scale uncertainty rating, and open-ended uncertainty rationale. We analyzed 1,013 scientific arguments formulated by 302 high school student groups taught by 7 teachers. We coded these arguments in terms of the accuracy of their claim, the sophistication of explanation connecting evidence to the established knowledge base, the uncertainty rating, and the scientific validity of uncertainty. We found that (1) only 18% of the students' uncertainty rationale involved critical reflection on limitations inherent in data and concepts, (2) 35% of students' uncertainty rationale reflected their assessment of personal ability and knowledge, rather than scientific sources of uncertainty related to the evidence, and (3) the nature of task such as the use of noisy data or the framing of

  14. Perceptual-cognitive expertise in sport: some considerations when applying the expert performance approach.

    PubMed

    Williams, A Mark; Ericsson, K Anders

    2005-06-01

    The number of researchers studying perceptual-cognitive expertise in sport is increasing. The intention in this paper is to review the currently accepted framework for studying expert performance and to consider implications for undertaking research work in the area of perceptual-cognitive expertise in sport. The expert performance approach presents a descriptive and inductive approach for the systematic study of expert performance. The nature of expert performance is initially captured in the laboratory using representative tasks that identify reliably superior performance. Process-tracing measures are employed to determine the mechanisms that mediate expert performance on the task. Finally, the specific types of activities that lead to the acquisition and development of these mediating mechanisms are identified. General principles and mechanisms may be discovered and then validated by more traditional experimental designs. The relevance of this approach to the study of perceptual-cognitive expertise in sport is discussed and suggestions for future work highlighted.

  15. The challenges of studying visual expertise in medical image diagnosis.

    PubMed

    Gegenfurtner, Andreas; Kok, Ellen; van Geel, Koos; de Bruin, Anique; Jarodzka, Halszka; Szulewski, Adam; van Merriënboer, Jeroen Jg

    2017-01-01

    Visual expertise is the superior visual skill shown when executing domain-specific visual tasks. Understanding visual expertise is important in order to understand how the interpretation of medical images may be best learned and taught. In the context of this article, we focus on the visual skill of medical image diagnosis and, more specifically, on the methodological set-ups routinely used in visual expertise research. We offer a critique of commonly used methods and propose three challenges for future research to open up new avenues for studying characteristics of visual expertise in medical image diagnosis. The first challenge addresses theory development. Novel prospects in modelling visual expertise can emerge when we reflect on cognitive and socio-cultural epistemologies in visual expertise research, when we engage in statistical validations of existing theoretical assumptions and when we include social and socio-cultural processes in expertise development. The second challenge addresses the recording and analysis of longitudinal data. If we assume that the development of expertise is a long-term phenomenon, then it follows that future research can engage in advanced statistical modelling of longitudinal expertise data that extends the routine use of cross-sectional material through, for example, animations and dynamic visualisations of developmental data. The third challenge addresses the combination of methods. Alternatives to current practices can integrate qualitative and quantitative approaches in mixed-method designs, embrace relevant yet underused data sources and understand the need for multidisciplinary research teams. Embracing alternative epistemological and methodological approaches for studying visual expertise can lead to a more balanced and robust future for understanding superior visual skills in medical image diagnosis as well as other medical fields. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd and The Association for the Study of Medical Education.

  16. Perceptual expertise in forensic facial image comparison

    PubMed Central

    White, David; Phillips, P. Jonathon; Hahn, Carina A.; Hill, Matthew; O'Toole, Alice J.

    2015-01-01

    Forensic facial identification examiners are required to match the identity of faces in images that vary substantially, owing to changes in viewing conditions and in a person's appearance. These identifications affect the course and outcome of criminal investigations and convictions. Despite calls for research on sources of human error in forensic examination, existing scientific knowledge of face matching accuracy is based, almost exclusively, on people without formal training. Here, we administered three challenging face matching tests to a group of forensic examiners with many years' experience of comparing face images for law enforcement and government agencies. Examiners outperformed untrained participants and computer algorithms, thereby providing the first evidence that these examiners are experts at this task. Notably, computationally fusing responses of multiple experts produced near-perfect performance. Results also revealed qualitative differences between expert and non-expert performance. First, examiners' superiority was greatest at longer exposure durations, suggestive of more entailed comparison in forensic examiners. Second, experts were less impaired by image inversion than non-expert students, contrasting with face memory studies that show larger face inversion effects in high performers. We conclude that expertise in matching identity across unfamiliar face images is supported by processes that differ qualitatively from those supporting memory for individual faces. PMID:26336174

  17. Perceptual expertise in forensic facial image comparison.

    PubMed

    White, David; Phillips, P Jonathon; Hahn, Carina A; Hill, Matthew; O'Toole, Alice J

    2015-09-07

    Forensic facial identification examiners are required to match the identity of faces in images that vary substantially, owing to changes in viewing conditions and in a person's appearance. These identifications affect the course and outcome of criminal investigations and convictions. Despite calls for research on sources of human error in forensic examination, existing scientific knowledge of face matching accuracy is based, almost exclusively, on people without formal training. Here, we administered three challenging face matching tests to a group of forensic examiners with many years' experience of comparing face images for law enforcement and government agencies. Examiners outperformed untrained participants and computer algorithms, thereby providing the first evidence that these examiners are experts at this task. Notably, computationally fusing responses of multiple experts produced near-perfect performance. Results also revealed qualitative differences between expert and non-expert performance. First, examiners' superiority was greatest at longer exposure durations, suggestive of more entailed comparison in forensic examiners. Second, experts were less impaired by image inversion than non-expert students, contrasting with face memory studies that show larger face inversion effects in high performers. We conclude that expertise in matching identity across unfamiliar face images is supported by processes that differ qualitatively from those supporting memory for individual faces. © 2015 The Author(s).

  18. Multi-team dynamics and distributed expertise in imission operations.

    PubMed

    Caldwell, Barrett S

    2005-06-01

    The evolution of space exploration has brought an increased awareness of the social and socio-technical issues associated with team performance and task coordination, both for the onboard astronauts and in mission control. Spaceflight operations create a unique environment in which to address classic group dynamics topics including communication, group process, knowledge development and sharing, and time-critical task performance. Mission operations in the early years of the 21st century have developed into a set of complex, multi-team task settings incorporating multiple mission control teams and flight crews interacting in novel ways. These more complex operational settings help highlight the emergence of a new paradigm of distributed supervisory coordination, and the need to consider multiple dimensions of expertise being supported and exchanged among team members. The creation of new mission profiles with very long-duration time scales (months, rather than days) for the International Space Station, as well as planned exploration missions to the Moon and Mars, emphasize fundamental distinctions from the 40 yr from Mercury to the Space Shuttle. Issues in distributed expertise and information flow in mission control settings from two related perspectives are described. A general conceptual view of knowledge sharing and task synchronization is presented within the context of the mission control environment. This conceptual presentation is supplemented by analysis of quasi-experimental data collected from actual flight controllers at NASA-Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX.

  19. Effect of expertise in shooting and Taekwondo on bipedal and unipedal postural control isolated or concurrent with a reaction-time task.

    PubMed

    Negahban, Hossein; Aryan, Najmolhoda; Mazaheri, Masood; Norasteh, Ali Asghar; Sanjari, Mohammad Ali

    2013-06-01

    It was hypothesized that training in 'static balance' or 'dynamic balance' sports has differential effects on postural control and its attention demands during quiet standing. In order to test this hypothesis, two groups of female athletes practicing shooting, as a 'static balance' sport, and Taekwondo, as a 'dynamic balance' sport, and a control group of non-physically active females voluntarily participated in this study. Postural control was assessed during bipedal and unipedal stance with and without performing a Go/No-go reaction time task. Visual and/or support surface conditions were manipulated in bipedal and unipedal stances in order to modify postural difficulty. Mixed model analysis of variance was used to determine the effects of dual tasking on postural and cognitive performance. Similar pattern of results were found in bipedal and unipedal stances, with Taekwondo practitioners displaying larger sway, shooters displaying lower sway and non-athletes displaying sway characteristics intermediate to Taekwondo and shooting athletes. Larger effect was found in bipedal stance. Single to dual-task comparison of postural control showed no significant effect of mental task on sway velocity in shooters, indicating less cognitive effort invested in balance control during bipedal stance. We suggest that expertise in shooting has a more pronounced effect on decreased sway in static balance conditions. Furthermore, shooters invest less attention in postures that are more specific to their training, i.e. bipedal stance. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  20. Electrical innovations, authority and consulting expertise in late Victorian Britain

    PubMed Central

    Arapostathis, Stathis

    2013-01-01

    In this article I examine the practices of electrical engineering experts, with special reference to their role in the implementation of innovations in late Victorian electrical networks. I focus on the consulting work of two leading figures in the scientific and engineering world of the period, Alexander Kennedy and William Preece. Both were Fellows of the Royal Society and both developed large-scale consulting activities in the emerging electrical industry of light and power. At the core of the study I place the issues of trust and authority, and the bearing of these on the engineering expertise of consultants in late Victorian Britain. I argue that the ascription of expertise to these engineers and the trust placed in their advice were products of power relations on the local scale. The study seeks to unravel both the technical and the social reasons for authoritative patterns of consulting expertise. PMID:24686584

  1. A neural marker of medical visual expertise: implications for training.

    PubMed

    Rourke, Liam; Cruikshank, Leanna C; Shapke, Larissa; Singhal, Anthony

    2016-12-01

    Researchers have identified a component of the EEG that discriminates visual experts from novices. The marker indexes a comprehensive model of visual processing, and if it is apparent in physicians, it could be used to investigate the development and training of their visual expertise. The purpose of this study was to determine whether a neural marker of visual expertise-the enhanced N170 event-related potential-is apparent in the EEGs of physicians as they interpret diagnostic images. We conducted a controlled trial with 10 cardiologists and 9 pulmonologists. Each participant completed 520 trials of a standard visual processing task involving the rapid evaluation of EKGs and CXRs-indicating-lung-disease. Ostensibly, each participant is expert with one type of image and competent with the other. We collected behavioral data on the participants' expertise with EKGs and CXRs and electrophysiological data on the magnitude, latency, and scalp location of their N170 ERPs as they interpreted the two types of images. Cardiologists demonstrated significantly more expertise with EKGs than CXRs, and this was reflected in an increased amplitude of their N170 ERPs while reading EKGs compared to CXRs. Pulmonologists demonstrated equal expertise with both types of images, and this was reflected in equal N170 ERP amplitudes for EKGs and CXRs. The results suggest provisionally that visual expertise has a similar substrate in medical practice as it does in other domains that have been studied extensively. This provides support for applying a sophisticated body of literature to questions about training and assessment of visual expertise among physicians.

  2. [The genesis, system, functions, and tendencies in the development of forensic expertise].

    PubMed

    Rossinskaya, E R

    The author considers the main landmarks in the formation and development of the science of forensic expertise and related activities. Special attention is given to the necessity of increasing knowledge and skills in judicial proceedings, further elaboration and perfection of the theory and practice of forensic expertise to meet the requirements put forward by the XXIth century. It is emphasized that this work is needed to lay the foundation for the creation of the self-consistent science - forensic expertology, based on the interdisciplinary general theory of forensic expertise. The author builds up the definition of the subject of forensic expertology taking into consideration the basic issues studied by this science. The scientific paradigm, its functions, tendencies and prospects for its further development are substantiated.

  3. Pupillometry as a Tool to Study Expertise in Medicine

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Szulewski, Adam; Kelton, Danielle; Howes, Daniel

    2017-01-01

    Background: Pupillometry has been studied as a physiological marker for quantifying cognitive load since the early 1960s. It has been established that small changes in pupillary size can provide an index of the cognitive load of an individual as he/she performs a mental task. The utility of pupillometry as a measure of expertise is less well…

  4. Attending to the Execution of a Complex Sensorimotor Skill: Expertise Differences, Choking, and Slumps

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Gray, Rob

    2004-01-01

    A simulated baseball batting task was used to compare the relative effects of attending to extraneous information (tone frequency) and attending to skill execution (direction of bat movement) on performance and swing kinematics and to evaluate how these effects differ as a function of expertise. The extraneous dual task degraded batting…

  5. Many faces of expertise: fusiform face area in chess experts and novices.

    PubMed

    Bilalić, Merim; Langner, Robert; Ulrich, Rolf; Grodd, Wolfgang

    2011-07-13

    The fusiform face area (FFA) is involved in face perception to such an extent that some claim it is a brain module for faces exclusively. The other possibility is that FFA is modulated by experience in individuation in any visual domain, not only faces. Here we test this latter FFA expertise hypothesis using the game of chess as a domain of investigation. We exploited the characteristic of chess, which features multiple objects forming meaningful spatial relations. In three experiments, we show that FFA activity is related to stimulus properties and not to chess skill directly. In all chess and non-chess tasks, experts' FFA was more activated than that of novices' only when they dealt with naturalistic full-board chess positions. When common spatial relationships formed by chess objects in chess positions were randomly disturbed, FFA was again differentially active only in experts, regardless of the actual task. Our experiments show that FFA contributes to the holistic processing of domain-specific multipart stimuli in chess experts. This suggests that FFA may not only mediate human expertise in face recognition but, supporting the expertise hypothesis, may mediate the automatic holistic processing of any highly familiar multipart visual input.

  6. Relationship Between Auditory Context and Visual Distance Perception: Effect of Musical Expertise in the Ability to Translate Reverberation Cues Into Room-Size Perception.

    PubMed

    Etchemendy, Pablo E; Spiousas, Ignacio; Vergara, Ramiro

    2018-01-01

    In a recently published work by our group [ Scientific Reports, 7, 7189 (2017)], we performed experiments of visual distance perception in two dark rooms with extremely different reverberation times: one anechoic ( T ∼ 0.12 s) and the other reverberant ( T ∼ 4 s). The perceived distance of the targets was systematically greater in the reverberant room when contrasted to the anechoic chamber. Participants also provided auditorily perceived room-size ratings which were greater for the reverberant room. Our hypothesis was that distance estimates are affected by room size, resulting in farther responses for the room perceived larger. Of much importance to the task was the subjects' ability to infer room size from reverberation. In this article, we report a postanalysis showing that participants having musical expertise were better able to extract and translate reverberation cues into room-size information than nonmusicians. However, the degree to which musical expertise affects visual distance estimates remains unclear.

  7. The development of expertise on an intelligent tutoring system

    NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

    Johnson, Debra Steele

    1989-01-01

    An initial examination was conducted of an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) developed for use in industry. The ITS, developed by NASA, simulated a satellite deployment task. More specifically, the PD (Payload Assist Module Deployment)/ICAT (Intelligent Computer Aided Training) System simulated a nominal Payload Assist Module (PAM) deployment. The development of expertise on this task was examined using three Flight Dynamics Officer (FDO) candidates who had no previous experience with this task. The results indicated that performance improved rapidly until Trial 5, followed by more gradual improvements through Trial 12. The performance dimensions measured included performance speed, actions completed, errors, help required, and display fields checked. Suggestions for further refining the software and for deciding when to expose trainees to more difficult task scenarios are discussed. Further, the results provide an initial demonstration of the effectiveness of the PD/ICAT system in training the nominal PAM deployment task and indicate the potential benefits of using ITS's for training other FDO tasks.

  8. Use of a machine learning algorithm to classify expertise: analysis of hand motion patterns during a simulated surgical task.

    PubMed

    Watson, Robert A

    2014-08-01

    To test the hypothesis that machine learning algorithms increase the predictive power to classify surgical expertise using surgeons' hand motion patterns. In 2012 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 14 surgical attendings and 10 first- and second-year surgical residents each performed two bench model venous anastomoses. During the simulated tasks, the participants wore an inertial measurement unit on the dorsum of their dominant (right) hand to capture their hand motion patterns. The pattern from each bench model task performed was preprocessed into a symbolic time series and labeled as expert (attending) or novice (resident). The labeled hand motion patterns were processed and used to train a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification algorithm. The trained algorithm was then tested for discriminative/predictive power against unlabeled (blinded) hand motion patterns from tasks not used in the training. The Lempel-Ziv (LZ) complexity metric was also measured from each hand motion pattern, with an optimal threshold calculated to separately classify the patterns. The LZ metric classified unlabeled (blinded) hand motion patterns into expert and novice groups with an accuracy of 70% (sensitivity 64%, specificity 80%). The SVM algorithm had an accuracy of 83% (sensitivity 86%, specificity 80%). The results confirmed the hypothesis. The SVM algorithm increased the predictive power to classify blinded surgical hand motion patterns into expert versus novice groups. With further development, the system used in this study could become a viable tool for low-cost, objective assessment of procedural proficiency in a competency-based curriculum.

  9. Educational Expertise, Advocacy, and Media Influence

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Malin, Joel R.; Lubienski, Christopher

    2015-01-01

    The efforts of many advocacy organizations to advance their preferred policies despite conflicting evidence of the effectiveness of these policies raise questions about factors that shape successful policy promotion. While many may like to think that expertise on an issue in question is an essential prerequisite for influence in public policy…

  10. Seeing Fluid Physics via Visual Expertise Training

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Hertzberg, Jean; Goodman, Katherine; Curran, Tim

    2016-11-01

    In a course on Flow Visualization, students often expressed that their perception of fluid flows had increased, implying the acquisition of a type of visual expertise, akin to that of radiologists or dog show judges. In the first steps towards measuring this expertise, we emulated an experimental design from psychology. The study had two groups of participants: "novices" with no formal fluids education, and "experts" who had passed as least one fluid mechanics course. All participants were trained to place static images of fluid flows into two categories (laminar and turbulent). Half the participants were trained on flow images with a specific format (Von Kármán vortex streets), and the other half on a broader group. Novices' results were in line with past perceptual expertise studies, showing that it is easier to transfer learning from a broad category to a new specific format than vice versa. In contrast, experts did not have a significant difference between training conditions, suggesting the experts did not undergo the same learning process as the novices. We theorize that expert subjects were able to access their conceptual knowledge about fluids to perform this new, visual task. This finding supports new ways of understanding conceptual learning.

  11. 27 CFR 22.104 - Educational organizations, colleges of learning, and scientific universities.

    Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

    2012-04-01

    ..., colleges of learning, and scientific universities. 22.104 Section 22.104 Alcohol, Tobacco Products and...-free alcohol withdrawn by educational organizations, scientific universities, and colleges of learning... OF TAX-FREE ALCOHOL Use of Tax-Free Alcohol § 22.104 Educational organizations, colleges of learning...

  12. 27 CFR 22.104 - Educational organizations, colleges of learning, and scientific universities.

    Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

    2013-04-01

    ..., colleges of learning, and scientific universities. 22.104 Section 22.104 Alcohol, Tobacco Products and...-free alcohol withdrawn by educational organizations, scientific universities, and colleges of learning... OF TAX-FREE ALCOHOL Use of Tax-Free Alcohol § 22.104 Educational organizations, colleges of learning...

  13. 27 CFR 22.104 - Educational organizations, colleges of learning, and scientific universities.

    Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

    2014-04-01

    ..., colleges of learning, and scientific universities. 22.104 Section 22.104 Alcohol, Tobacco Products and...-free alcohol withdrawn by educational organizations, scientific universities, and colleges of learning... OF TAX-FREE ALCOHOL Use of Tax-Free Alcohol § 22.104 Educational organizations, colleges of learning...

  14. Expertise for Teaching Biology Situated in the Context of Genetic Testing

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    van der Zande, Paul; Akkerman, Sanne F.; Brekelmans, Mieke; Waarlo, Arend Jan; Vermunt, Jan D.

    2012-01-01

    Contemporary genomics research will impact the daily practice of biology teachers who want to teach up-to-date genetics in secondary education. This article reports on a research project aimed at enhancing biology teachers' expertise for teaching genetics situated in the context of genetic testing. The increasing body of scientific knowledge…

  15. The Quiet Eye and Motor Expertise: Explaining the “Efficiency Paradox”

    PubMed Central

    Klostermann, André; Hossner, Ernst-Joachim

    2018-01-01

    It has been consistently reported that experts show longer quiet eye (QE) durations when compared to near-experts and novices. However, this finding is rather paradoxical as motor expertise is characterized by an economization of motor-control processes rather than by a prolongation in response programming, a suggested explanatory mechanism of the QE phenomenon. Therefore, an inhibition hypothesis was proposed that suggests an inhibition of non-optimal task solutions over movement parametrization, which is particularly necessary in experts due to the great extent and high density of their experienced task-solution space. In the current study, the effect of the task-solution space’ extension was tested by comparing the QE-duration gains in groups that trained a far-aiming task with a small number (low-extent) vs. a large number (high-extent) of task variants. After an extensive training period of more than 750 trials, both groups showed superior performance in post-test and retention test when compared to pretest and longer QE durations in post-test when compared to pretest. However, the QE durations dropped to baseline values at retention. Finally, the expected additional gain in QE duration for the high-extent group was not found and thus, the assumption of long QE durations due to an extended task-solution space was not confirmed. The findings were (by tendency) more in line with the density explanation of the inhibition hypothesis. This density argument suits research revealing a high specificity of motor skills in experts thus providing worthwhile options for future research on the paradoxical relation between the QE and motor expertise. PMID:29472882

  16. Ontolology Negotiation Between Scientific Archives

    NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

    Bailin, Sidney C.; Truszkowski, Walt; Obenschain, Arthur F. (Technical Monitor)

    2001-01-01

    This paper describes an approach to ontology negotiation between information agents. Ontologies are declarative (data driven) expressions of an agent's "world": the objects, operations, facts, and rules that constitute the logical space within which an agent performs. Ontology negotiation enables agents to cooperate in performing a task, even if they are based on different ontologies. 'Me process allows agents to discover ontology conflicts and then, though incremental interpretation, clarification, and explanation, establish a common basis for communicating with each other. The need for ontology negotiation stems from the proliferation of information sources and of agents with widely varying specialty expertise. The unmanageability of massive amounts of web-based information is already becoming apparent. It is starting to have an impact on professions that rely on distributed archived information. If the expansion continues at its present rate without an ontology negotiation process being introduced, there will soon be no way to ensure the accuracy and completeness of information that scientists obtain from sources other than their own experiments. Ontology negotiation is becoming increasingly recognized as a crucial element of scalable agent technology. This is because agents, by their very nature, are supposed to operate with a fair amount of autonomy and independence from their end-users. Part of this independence is the ability to enlist other agents for help in performing a task (such as locating information on the web). The agents enlisted for help may be "owned" by a different end-user or organization (such as a document archive), and there is no guarantee that they will use the same terminology or understand the same concepts (objects, operators, theorems, rules) as the recruiting agent. For NASA, the need for ontology negotiation arises at the boundaries between scientific disciplines. For example: modeling the effects of global warming might involve

  17. The Flash-Preview Moving Window Paradigm: Unpacking Visual Expertise One Glimpse at a Time

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Litchfield, Damien; Donovan, Tim

    2017-01-01

    How we make sense of what we see and where best to look is shaped by our experience, our current task goals and how we first perceive our environment. An established way of demonstrating these factors work together is to study how eye movement patterns change as a function of expertise and to observe how experts can solve complex tasks after only…

  18. Developmental change in cognitive organization underlying stroop tasks of Japanese orthographies.

    PubMed

    Toma, C; Toshima, T

    1989-01-01

    Cognitive processes underlying Stroop interference tasks of two Japanese orthographies, hiragana (a phonetic orthography) and kanji (a logographic orthography) were studied from the developmental point of view. Four age groups (first, second, third graders, and university students) were employed as subjects. Significant interference was yielded both in the hiragana and in the kanji version. Performance time on interference task decreased with age. For elementary school children, the error frequency on the interference task was higher than that on the task of naming patch colors or on the task of reading words printed in black ink, but the error frequencies did not differ among tasks for university students. In the interference task more word reading errors were yielded in the kanji version than in the hiragana version during and after third grade. The findings suggested that (1) the recognition system of hiragana and of kanji becomes qualitatively different during and after third grade, (2) the integrative system, which organizes cognitive processes underlying Stroop task, develops with age, and (3) efficiency of the organization increases with age.

  19. [How to take up an expertise for medical liability in anaesthesiology?].

    PubMed

    Manaouil, C; Gignon, M; Montpellier, D; Kuhn, Ph; Jardé, O

    2008-04-01

    Search for responsibility in medicine became everyday. Anaesthetists are particularly exposed and will be, several times, confronted to it during their career. They have to have knowledge of some necessary elements to get to grips with expertise. Expertise can be asked by a penal jurisdiction. In that case, the anaesthetist can be directly and personally implicationed. When expertise is asked by a civil jurisdiction, it concerns anaesthetists, whichever the (liberal or employee of private). Expertise during administrative procedures concern hospital's anaesthetists. It is important to organize a preparatory meeting in any expertise. Praticians must collect together the complete medical file to establish the most exactly possible, chronology of facts. The anaesthetist can be accompanied by medical consultant appointed by the insurance companies and a lawyer. But he does not have to content with be represented by them. Presence in expertise is essential; praticians can so give evidence of their good faith and answer the expert's questions. Vagueness or doubt are never favorable to pratician. It is also, a responsible and respectful behavior toward the patient.

  20. The Interplay between Methodologies, Tasks and Visualisation Formats in the Study of Visual Expertise

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Boucheix, Jean-Michel

    2017-01-01

    This article introduces this special issue of "Frontline Learning Research." The first paper offers a methodological guide using Ericsson & Smith's (1991) "expert performance approach." This is followed by three papers that analyze the use of eye tracking in visual expertise models, and a paper reviewing the use of methods…

  1. Musical expertise and the ability to imagine loudness.

    PubMed

    Bishop, Laura; Bailes, Freya; Dean, Roger T

    2013-01-01

    Most perceived parameters of sound (e.g. pitch, duration, timbre) can also be imagined in the absence of sound. These parameters are imagined more veridically by expert musicians than non-experts. Evidence for whether loudness is imagined, however, is conflicting. In music, the question of whether loudness is imagined is particularly relevant due to its role as a principal parameter of performance expression. This study addressed the hypothesis that the veridicality of imagined loudness improves with increasing musical expertise. Experts, novices and non-musicians imagined short passages of well-known classical music under two counterbalanced conditions: 1) while adjusting a slider to indicate imagined loudness of the music and 2) while tapping out the rhythm to indicate imagined timing. Subtests assessed music listening abilities and working memory span to determine whether these factors, also hypothesised to improve with increasing musical expertise, could account for imagery task performance. Similarity between each participant's imagined and listening loudness profiles and reference recording intensity profiles was assessed using time series analysis and dynamic time warping. The results suggest a widespread ability to imagine the loudness of familiar music. The veridicality of imagined loudness tended to be greatest for the expert musicians, supporting the predicted relationship between musical expertise and musical imagery ability.

  2. Musical Expertise and the Ability to Imagine Loudness

    PubMed Central

    Bishop, Laura; Bailes, Freya; Dean, Roger T.

    2013-01-01

    Most perceived parameters of sound (e.g. pitch, duration, timbre) can also be imagined in the absence of sound. These parameters are imagined more veridically by expert musicians than non-experts. Evidence for whether loudness is imagined, however, is conflicting. In music, the question of whether loudness is imagined is particularly relevant due to its role as a principal parameter of performance expression. This study addressed the hypothesis that the veridicality of imagined loudness improves with increasing musical expertise. Experts, novices and non-musicians imagined short passages of well-known classical music under two counterbalanced conditions: 1) while adjusting a slider to indicate imagined loudness of the music and 2) while tapping out the rhythm to indicate imagined timing. Subtests assessed music listening abilities and working memory span to determine whether these factors, also hypothesised to improve with increasing musical expertise, could account for imagery task performance. Similarity between each participant’s imagined and listening loudness profiles and reference recording intensity profiles was assessed using time series analysis and dynamic time warping. The results suggest a widespread ability to imagine the loudness of familiar music. The veridicality of imagined loudness tended to be greatest for the expert musicians, supporting the predicted relationship between musical expertise and musical imagery ability. PMID:23460791

  3. Evolution of Self-Organized Task Specialization in Robot Swarms

    PubMed Central

    Ferrante, Eliseo; Turgut, Ali Emre; Duéñez-Guzmán, Edgar; Dorigo, Marco; Wenseleers, Tom

    2015-01-01

    Division of labor is ubiquitous in biological systems, as evidenced by various forms of complex task specialization observed in both animal societies and multicellular organisms. Although clearly adaptive, the way in which division of labor first evolved remains enigmatic, as it requires the simultaneous co-occurrence of several complex traits to achieve the required degree of coordination. Recently, evolutionary swarm robotics has emerged as an excellent test bed to study the evolution of coordinated group-level behavior. Here we use this framework for the first time to study the evolutionary origin of behavioral task specialization among groups of identical robots. The scenario we study involves an advanced form of division of labor, common in insect societies and known as “task partitioning”, whereby two sets of tasks have to be carried out in sequence by different individuals. Our results show that task partitioning is favored whenever the environment has features that, when exploited, reduce switching costs and increase the net efficiency of the group, and that an optimal mix of task specialists is achieved most readily when the behavioral repertoires aimed at carrying out the different subtasks are available as pre-adapted building blocks. Nevertheless, we also show for the first time that self-organized task specialization could be evolved entirely from scratch, starting only from basic, low-level behavioral primitives, using a nature-inspired evolutionary method known as Grammatical Evolution. Remarkably, division of labor was achieved merely by selecting on overall group performance, and without providing any prior information on how the global object retrieval task was best divided into smaller subtasks. We discuss the potential of our method for engineering adaptively behaving robot swarms and interpret our results in relation to the likely path that nature took to evolve complex sociality and task specialization. PMID:26247819

  4. Evolution of Self-Organized Task Specialization in Robot Swarms.

    PubMed

    Ferrante, Eliseo; Turgut, Ali Emre; Duéñez-Guzmán, Edgar; Dorigo, Marco; Wenseleers, Tom

    2015-08-01

    Division of labor is ubiquitous in biological systems, as evidenced by various forms of complex task specialization observed in both animal societies and multicellular organisms. Although clearly adaptive, the way in which division of labor first evolved remains enigmatic, as it requires the simultaneous co-occurrence of several complex traits to achieve the required degree of coordination. Recently, evolutionary swarm robotics has emerged as an excellent test bed to study the evolution of coordinated group-level behavior. Here we use this framework for the first time to study the evolutionary origin of behavioral task specialization among groups of identical robots. The scenario we study involves an advanced form of division of labor, common in insect societies and known as "task partitioning", whereby two sets of tasks have to be carried out in sequence by different individuals. Our results show that task partitioning is favored whenever the environment has features that, when exploited, reduce switching costs and increase the net efficiency of the group, and that an optimal mix of task specialists is achieved most readily when the behavioral repertoires aimed at carrying out the different subtasks are available as pre-adapted building blocks. Nevertheless, we also show for the first time that self-organized task specialization could be evolved entirely from scratch, starting only from basic, low-level behavioral primitives, using a nature-inspired evolutionary method known as Grammatical Evolution. Remarkably, division of labor was achieved merely by selecting on overall group performance, and without providing any prior information on how the global object retrieval task was best divided into smaller subtasks. We discuss the potential of our method for engineering adaptively behaving robot swarms and interpret our results in relation to the likely path that nature took to evolve complex sociality and task specialization.

  5. A distributed computing environment with support for constraint-based task scheduling and scientific experimentation

    DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

    Ahrens, J.P.; Shapiro, L.G.; Tanimoto, S.L.

    1997-04-01

    This paper describes a computing environment which supports computer-based scientific research work. Key features include support for automatic distributed scheduling and execution and computer-based scientific experimentation. A new flexible and extensible scheduling technique that is responsive to a user`s scheduling constraints, such as the ordering of program results and the specification of task assignments and processor utilization levels, is presented. An easy-to-use constraint language for specifying scheduling constraints, based on the relational database query language SQL, is described along with a search-based algorithm for fulfilling these constraints. A set of performance studies show that the environment can schedule and executemore » program graphs on a network of workstations as the user requests. A method for automatically generating computer-based scientific experiments is described. Experiments provide a concise method of specifying a large collection of parameterized program executions. The environment achieved significant speedups when executing experiments; for a large collection of scientific experiments an average speedup of 3.4 on an average of 5.5 scheduled processors was obtained.« less

  6. Balanced Expertise Distribution in Remote Ultrasound Imaging Aboard The International Space Station (ISS)

    NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

    Sargsyan, Ashot; Dulchavsky, Scott; Hamilton, Douglas; Melton, Shannon; Martin, David

    2004-01-01

    Astronaut training for ISS operations usually ensures independent performance. With small crew size same crews also conduct all science work onboard. With diverse backgrounds, a good "match" between the existing and required skills can only be anecdotal. Furthermore, full proficiency in most of the complex tasks can be attained only through long training and practice, which may not be justified and may be impossible given the scarcity of training time. To enable a number of operational and science advancements, authors have developed a new approach to expertise distribution in time and among the space and ground personnel. Methods: As part of NASA Operational Ultrasound Project (1998-2003) and the NASA-solicited experiment "Advanced Diagnostic Ultrasound in Microgravity-ADUM" (P.I. -S.D., ongoing), the authors have created a "Balanced Expertise Distribution" approach to perform complex ultrasound imaging tasks on ISS for both operational and science use. The four components of expertise are a) any pre-existing pertinent expertise; b) limited preflight training c) adaptive onboard proficiency enhancement tools; d) real-time ' guidance from the ground. Throughout the pre-flight training and flight time preceding the experiments, the four components are shaped in a dynamic fashion to meet in an optimum combination during the experiment sessions. Results: Procedure validation sessions and feasibility studies have given encouraging results. While several successful real-time remote guidance sessions have been conducted on ISS, Expedition 8 is the first to use an "on-orbit proficiency enhancement" tool. Conclusions: In spite of severely limited training time, daring peer-reviewed research and operational enhancements are feasible through a balanced distribution of expertise in time, as well as among the crewmembers and ground personnel. This approach shows great promise for biomedical research, but may be applicable for other areas of micro gravity-based science

  7. The Influence of Peer Reviewer Expertise on the Evaluation of Research Funding Applications

    PubMed Central

    Sullivan, Joanne H.; Glisson, Scott R.

    2016-01-01

    Although the scientific peer review process is crucial to distributing research investments, little has been reported about the decision-making processes used by reviewers. One key attribute likely to be important for decision-making is reviewer expertise. Recent data from an experimental blinded review utilizing a direct measure of expertise has found that closer intellectual distances between applicant and reviewer lead to harsher evaluations, possibly suggesting that information is differentially sampled across subject-matter expertise levels and across information type (e.g. strengths or weaknesses). However, social and professional networks have been suggested to play a role in reviewer scoring. In an effort to test whether this result can be replicated in a real-world unblinded study utilizing self-assessed reviewer expertise, we conducted a retrospective multi-level regression analysis of 1,450 individual unblinded evaluations of 725 biomedical research funding applications by 1,044 reviewers. Despite the large variability in the scoring data, the results are largely confirmatory of work from blinded reviews, by which a linear relationship between reviewer expertise and their evaluations was observed—reviewers with higher levels of self-assessed expertise tended to be harsher in their evaluations. However, we also found that reviewer and applicant seniority could influence this relationship, suggesting social networks could have subtle influences on reviewer scoring. Overall, these results highlight the need to explore how reviewers utilize their expertise to gather and weight information from the application in making their evaluations. PMID:27768760

  8. Science and Sandy: Lessons Learned

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Werner, K.

    2013-12-01

    Following Hurricane Sandy's impact on the mid-Atlantic region, President Obama established a Task Force to '...ensure that the Federal Government continues to provide appropriate resources to support affected State, local, and tribal communities to improve the region's resilience, health, and prosperity by building for the future.' The author was detailed from NOAA to the Task Force between January and June 2013. As the Task Force and others began to take stock of the region's needs and develop plans to address them, many diverse approaches emerged from different areas of expertise including: infrastructure, management and construction, housing, public health, and others. Decision making in this environment was complex with many interests and variables to consider and balance. Although often relevant, science and technical expertise was not always at the forefront of this process. This talk describes the author's experience with the Sandy Task Force focusing on organizing scientific expertise to support the work of the Task Force. This includes a description of federal activity supporting Sandy recovery efforts, the role of the Task Force, and lessons learned from developing a science support function within the Task Force.

  9. Developing expertise in surgery.

    PubMed

    Alderson, David

    2010-01-01

    The concept of expertise is widely embraced but poorly defined in surgery. Dictionary definitions differentiate between authority and experience, while a third view sees expertise as a mind-set rather than a status. Both absolute and relative models of expertise have been developed, and each allows a richer understanding of the application of these concepts to emerge. Trainees must develop both independent and interdependent expertise, and an appreciation of the essentially constructivist and uncertain nature of medical knowledge. Approach may be more important than innate talent; the concepts of 'flow', sustained 'deliberate practice' and 'adaptive expertise' are examples of expert approaches to learning. Non-analytical reasoning plays a key role in decision making at expert levels of practice. A technically gifted surgeon may be seen as a safety hazard rather than an expert if inter-dependent expertise has not been developed. Key roles of a surgical educator are to facilitate the development of an expert approach to education and to enable entry into and movement towards the centre of an expert community of practice.

  10. Integrating Cognitive Task Analysis into Instructional Systems Development.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Ryder, Joan M.; Redding, Richard E.

    1993-01-01

    Discussion of instructional systems development (ISD) focuses on recent developments in cognitive task analysis and describes the Integrated Task Analysis Model, a framework for integrating cognitive and behavioral task analysis methods within the ISD model. Three components of expertise are analyzed: skills, knowledge, and mental models. (96…

  11. Studying real-world perceptual expertise

    PubMed Central

    Shen, Jianhong; Mack, Michael L.; Palmeri, Thomas J.

    2014-01-01

    Significant insights into visual cognition have come from studying real-world perceptual expertise. Many have previously reviewed empirical findings and theoretical developments from this work. Here we instead provide a brief perspective on approaches, considerations, and challenges to studying real-world perceptual expertise. We discuss factors like choosing to use real-world versus artificial object domains of expertise, selecting a target domain of real-world perceptual expertise, recruiting experts, evaluating their level of expertise, and experimentally testing experts in the lab and online. Throughout our perspective, we highlight expert birding (also called birdwatching) as an example, as it has been used as a target domain for over two decades in the perceptual expertise literature. PMID:25147533

  12. Influence of Musical Expertise on Segmental and Tonal Processing in Mandarin Chinese

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Marie, Celine; Delogu, Franco; Lampis, Giulia; Belardinelli, Marta Olivetti; Besson, Mireille

    2011-01-01

    A same-different task was used to test the hypothesis that musical expertise improves the discrimination of tonal and segmental (consonant, vowel) variations in a tone language, Mandarin Chinese. Two four-word sequences (prime and target) were presented to French musicians and nonmusicians unfamiliar with Mandarin, and event-related brain…

  13. Hydrology and hydraulics expertise in participatory processes for climate change adaptation in the Dutch Meuse.

    PubMed

    Wesselink, Anna; de Vriend, Huib; Barneveld, Hermjan; Krol, Maarten; Bijker, Wiebe

    2009-01-01

    Many scientists feel that scientific outcomes are not sufficiently taken into account in policy-making. The research reported in this paper shows what happens with scientific information during such a process. In 2001 the Dutch Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management commissioned their regional office in Limburg to assess how flood management objectives could be achieved in future in the Dutch Meuse valley, assuming climate change will increase peak discharges. To ensure political support, regional discussion rounds were to help assess the measures previously identified. This paper discusses the ways in which hydrological and hydraulic expertise was input, understood and used in this assessment process. Project participants as a group had no trouble contesting assumptions and outcomes. Nevertheless, water expertise was generally accepted as providing facts, once basic choices such as starting situation had been discussed and agreed. The technical constraints determined that politically unacceptable measures would have to be selected to achieve the legally binding flood management objective. As a result, no additional space will be set aside for future flood management beyond the already reserved floodplain. In this case, political arguments clearly prevail over policy objectives, with hydraulic expertise providing decisive arbitration between the two.

  14. The neural circuitry of expertise: perceptual learning and social cognition

    PubMed Central

    Harré, Michael

    2013-01-01

    Amongst the most significant questions we are confronted with today include the integration of the brain's micro-circuitry, our ability to build the complex social networks that underpin society and how our society impacts on our ecological environment. In trying to unravel these issues one place to begin is at the level of the individual: to consider how we accumulate information about our environment, how this information leads to decisions and how our individual decisions in turn create our social environment. While this is an enormous task, we may already have at hand many of the tools we need. This article is intended to review some of the recent results in neuro-cognitive research and show how they can be extended to two very specific and interrelated types of expertise: perceptual expertise and social cognition. These two cognitive skills span a vast range of our genetic heritage. Perceptual expertise developed very early in our evolutionary history and is a highly developed part of all mammals' cognitive ability. On the other hand social cognition is most highly developed in humans in that we are able to maintain larger and more stable long term social connections with more behaviorally diverse individuals than any other species. To illustrate these ideas I will discuss board games as a toy model of social interactions as they include many of the relevant concepts: perceptual learning, decision-making, long term planning and understanding the mental states of other people. Using techniques that have been developed in mathematical psychology, I show that we can represent some of the key features of expertise using stochastic differential equations (SDEs). Such models demonstrate how an expert's long exposure to a particular context influences the information they accumulate in order to make a decision.These processes are not confined to board games, we are all experts in our daily lives through long exposure to the many regularities of daily tasks and social

  15. The development of expertise using an intelligent computer-aided training system

    NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

    Johnson, Debra Steele

    1991-01-01

    An initial examination was conducted of an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) developed for use in industry. The ITS, developed by NASA, simulated a satellite deployment task. More specifically, the PD (Payload Assist Module Deployment)/ICAT (Intelligent Computer Aided Training) System simulated a nominal Payload Assist Module (PAM) deployment. The development of expertise on this task was examined using three Flight Dynamics Officer (FDO) candidates who has no previous experience with this task. The results indicated that performance improved rapidly until Trial 5, followed by more gradual improvements through Trial 12. The performance dimensions measured included performance speed, actions completed, errors, help required, and display fields checked. Suggestions for further refining the software and for deciding when to expose trainees to more difficult task scenarios are discussed. Further, the results provide an initial demonstration of the effectiveness of the PD/ICAT system in training the nominal PAM deployment task and indicate the potential benefits of using ITS's for training other FDO tasks.

  16. Designing Capacity-Building in E-Learning Expertise: Challenges and Strategies

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Aczel, J. C.; Peake, S. R.; Hardy, P.

    2008-01-01

    This research study looks at how organizations in developing countries perceive the challenge of building capacity in e-learning expertise. Data was collected on six such organizations, and a range of perceived rationales and constraints were identified. The paper hypothesizes a four-part framework to define the e-learning capacity gaps that these…

  17. Hierarchical organization of brain functional networks during visual tasks.

    PubMed

    Zhuo, Zhao; Cai, Shi-Min; Fu, Zhong-Qian; Zhang, Jie

    2011-09-01

    The functional network of the brain is known to demonstrate modular structure over different hierarchical scales. In this paper, we systematically investigated the hierarchical modular organizations of the brain functional networks that are derived from the extent of phase synchronization among high-resolution EEG time series during a visual task. In particular, we compare the modular structure of the functional network from EEG channels with that of the anatomical parcellation of the brain cortex. Our results show that the modular architectures of brain functional networks correspond well to those from the anatomical structures over different levels of hierarchy. Most importantly, we find that the consistency between the modular structures of the functional network and the anatomical network becomes more pronounced in terms of vision, sensory, vision-temporal, motor cortices during the visual task, which implies that the strong modularity in these areas forms the functional basis for the visual task. The structure-function relationship further reveals that the phase synchronization of EEG time series in the same anatomical group is much stronger than that of EEG time series from different anatomical groups during the task and that the hierarchical organization of functional brain network may be a consequence of functional segmentation of the brain cortex.

  18. Perspective: The Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative and the role and contributions of the Private Partner Scientific Board (PPSB).

    PubMed

    Liu, Enchi; Luthman, Johan; Cedarbaum, Jesse M; Schmidt, Mark E; Cole, Patricia E; Hendrix, James; Carrillo, Maria C; Jones-Davis, Dorothy; Tarver, Erika; Novak, Gerald; De Santi, Susan; Soares, Holly D; Potter, William Z; Siemers, Eric; Schwarz, Adam J

    2015-07-01

    The Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) Private Partner Scientific Board (PPSB) is comprised of representatives of private, for-profit entities (including pharmaceutical, biotechnology, diagnostics, imaging companies, and imaging contract research organizations), and nonprofit organizations that provide financial and scientific support to ADNI through the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health. The PPSB serves as an independent, open, and precompetitive forum in which all private sector and not-for-profit partners in ADNI can collaborate, share information, and offer scientific and private-sector perspectives and expertise on issues relating to the ADNI project. In this article, we review and highlight the role, activities, and contributions of the PPSB within the ADNI project, and provide a perspective on remaining unmet needs and future directions. Copyright © 2015 The Alzheimer's Association. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  19. Pre-Service Science Teachers in Xinjiang "Scientific Inquiry" - Pedagogical Content Knowledge Research

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Li, Yufeng; Xiong, Jianwen

    2012-01-01

    Scientific inquiry is one of the science curriculum content, "Scientific inquiry" - Pedagogical Content Knowledge is the face of scientific inquiry and teachers - of course pedagogical content knowledge and scientific inquiry a teaching practice with more direct expertise. Pre-service teacher training phase of acquisition of knowledge is…

  20. Practice makes perfect: A systematic review of the expertise development of pharmacist and nurse independent prescribers in the United Kingdom.

    PubMed

    Abuzour, Aseel S; Lewis, Penny J; Tully, Mary P

    2018-01-01

    Prescribing is a complex and error-prone task that demands expertise. McLellan et al.'s theory of expertise development model ("the model"), developed to assess medical literature on prescribing by medical students, proposes that in order to develop, individuals should deliberately engage their knowledge, skills and attitudes within a social context. Its applicability to independent prescribers (IP) is unknown. A systematic review was conducted to explore whether the model is applicable to non-medical independent prescribing and to assess the factors underpinning expertise development reported in the literature. Six electronic databases (EMBASE, Medline, AMED, CINAHL, IPA and PsychInfo) were searched for articles published between 2006 and 2016, reporting empirical data on pharmacist and nurse IPs education or practice. Data were extracted using themes from the model and analysed using framework analysis. Thirty-four studies met the inclusion criteria. Knowledge, pre-registration education, experience, support and confidence were some of the intrinsic and extrinsic factors influencing IPs. Difficulty in transferring theory to practice was attributed to lack of basic pharmacology and bioscience content in pre-registration nursing rather than the prescribing programme. Students saw interventions using virtual learning or learning in practice as more useful with long-term benefits e.g. students were able to use their skills in history taking following the virtual learning intervention 6-months after the programme. All studies demonstrated how engaging knowledge and skills affected individuals' attitude by, for example, increasing professional dignity. IPs were able to develop their expertise when integrating their competencies in a workplace context with support from colleagues and adherence to guidelines. This is the first study to synthesize data systematically on expertise development from studies on IPs using the model. The model showed the need for stronger

  1. 76 FR 54197 - Census Scientific Advisory Committee

    Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

    2011-08-31

    ...-SAC). The Committee will address policy, research, and technical issues relating to a full range of... scientific and technical expertise, as appropriate, to address Census Bureau program needs and objectives...

  2. Questioning and Reading Goals: Information-Seeking Questions Asked on Scientific Texts Read under Different Task Conditions

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Ishiwa, Koto; Sanjose, Vicente; Otero, Jose

    2013-01-01

    Background: A number of studies report that few questions are asked in classrooms and that many of them are shallow questions. Aims: This study investigates the way in which reading goals determine questioning on scientific texts. Reading goals were manipulated through two different tasks: reading for understanding versus reading to solve a…

  3. The scientific conferences organized during war time (1992-1995) in sarajevo.

    PubMed

    Masic, Izet

    2011-01-01

    to the "survival" of B&H and its people. Some of the published articles, especially in the Medical Archives journal, which even in difficult war conditions did not break the continuity of its publication, and then it was the only scientific journal indexed in B&H, having been consequently cited in the major biomedical data bases in the world. Many scientists abroad have had the opportunity to learn about some of the wonders of Sarajevo "war medicine", thanks to this journal. Finally, despite the fact that it is another way of expressing its resistance to the aggression on B&H, the organized symposia in the war represented the continuity of the scientific research activities. Bosnia and Herzegovina and Sarajevo under siege, in this way, kept in touch with the civilized world and modern achievements, despite the fact that they were victims of medieval barbarism. In addition, these meetings sent a powerful message to the world about the willingness to register and systematize all the war experiences, especially those related to medicine and medical practice, in terms of what Europe has not known, since the Second World War. Partially, we succeeded in that. The total number of 286 presentations were presented in seven war Conferences, as quantitative and qualitative contribution to the scientific activities, despite the inhuman conditions, in which these articles emerged. These presentations and Conferences testify to the enthusiasm of B&H community and academic institutions that have collaborated with it. Authors and co-authors presented the "war" articles that deserve to be mentioned in the monograph "1479 days of the siege of Sarajevo". Unfortunately, many of these brave authors are not alive and cannot read this. The task for us remains to remember them by their own good. Old Persian proverb says; "The event which is not recorded is as like it had never happened". Sapienti sat.

  4. The Scientific Conferences Organized During War Time (1992-1995) in Sarajevo

    PubMed Central

    Masic, Izet

    2011-01-01

    was critical to the “survival” of B&H and its people. Some of the published articles, especially in the Medical Archives journal, which even in difficult war conditions did not break the continuity of its publication, and then it was the only scientific journal indexed in B&H, having been consequently cited in the major biomedical data bases in the world. Many scientists abroad have had the opportunity to learn about some of the wonders of Sarajevo “war medicine”, thanks to this journal. Finally, despite the fact that it is another way of expressing its resistance to the aggression on B&H, the organized symposia in the war represented the continuity of the scientific research activities. Bosnia and Herzegovina and Sarajevo under siege, in this way, kept in touch with the civilized world and modern achievements, despite the fact that they were victims of medieval barbarism. In addition, these meetings sent a powerful message to the world about the willingness to register and systematize all the war experiences, especially those related to medicine and medical practice, in terms of what Europe has not known, since the Second World War. Partially, we succeeded in that. The total number of 286 presentations were presented in seven war Conferences, as quantitative and qualitative contribution to the scientific activities, despite the inhuman conditions, in which these articles emerged. These presentations and Conferences testify to the enthusiasm of B&H community and academic institutions that have collaborated with it. Authors and co-authors presented the “war” articles that deserve to be mentioned in the monograph “1479 days of the siege of Sarajevo”. Unfortunately, many of these brave authors are not alive and cannot read this. The task for us remains to remember them by their own good. Old Persian proverb says; “The event which is not recorded is as like it had never happened”. Sapienti sat. PMID:23678305

  5. Interacting with notebook input devices: an analysis of motor performance and users' expertise.

    PubMed

    Sutter, Christine; Ziefle, Martina

    2005-01-01

    In the present study the usability of two different types of notebook input devices was examined. The independent variables were input device (touchpad vs. mini-joystick) and user expertise (expert vs. novice state). There were 30 participants, of whom 15 were touchpad experts and the other 15 were mini-joystick experts. The experimental tasks were a point-click task (Experiment 1) and a point-drag-drop task (Experiment 2). Dependent variables were the time and accuracy of cursor control. To assess carryover effects, we had the participants complete both experiments, using not only the input device for which they were experts but also the device for which they were novices. Results showed the touchpad performance to be clearly superior to mini-joystick performance. Overall, experts showed better performance than did novices. The significant interaction of input device and expertise showed that the use of an unknown device is difficult, but only for touchpad experts, who were remarkably slower and less accurate when using a mini-joystick. Actual and potential applications of this research include an evaluation of current notebook input devices. The outcomes allow ergonomic guidelines to be derived for optimized usage and design of the mini-joystick and touchpad devices.

  6. Transitions and the Development of Expertise

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Hallam, Susan

    2010-01-01

    This paper explores the relationships between the development of expertise and transitions. It sets out what we know about the development of expertise, changes in the brain as expertise develops, and how transitions between different learning contexts and the challenges that they present may impact on developing expertise. It sets out a series of…

  7. The influence of expertise on brain activation of the action observation network during anticipation of tennis and volleyball serves.

    PubMed

    Balser, Nils; Lorey, Britta; Pilgramm, Sebastian; Naumann, Tim; Kindermann, Stefan; Stark, Rudolf; Zentgraf, Karen; Williams, A Mark; Munzert, Jörn

    2014-01-01

    In many daily activities, and especially in sport, it is necessary to predict the effects of others' actions in order to initiate appropriate responses. Recently, researchers have suggested that the action-observation network (AON) including the cerebellum plays an essential role during such anticipation, particularly in sport expert performers. In the present study, we examined the influence of task-specific expertise on the AON by investigating differences between two expert groups trained in different sports while anticipating action effects. Altogether, 15 tennis and 16 volleyball experts anticipated the direction of observed tennis and volleyball serves while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The expert group in each sport acted as novice controls in the other sport with which they had only little experience. When contrasting anticipation in both expertise conditions with the corresponding untrained sport, a stronger activation of AON areas (SPL, SMA), and particularly of cerebellar structures, was observed. Furthermore, the neural activation within the cerebellum and the SPL was linearly correlated with participant's anticipation performance, irrespective of the specific expertise. For the SPL, this relationship also holds when an expert performs a domain-specific anticipation task. Notably, the stronger activation of the cerebellum as well as of the SMA and the SPL in the expertise conditions suggests that experts rely on their more fine-tuned perceptual-motor representations that have improved during years of training when anticipating the effects of others' actions in their preferred sport. The association of activation within the SPL and the cerebellum with the task achievement suggests that these areas are the predominant brain sites involved in fast motor predictions. The SPL reflects the processing of domain-specific contextual information and the cerebellum the usage of a predictive internal model to solve the anticipation task.

  8. The influence of expertise on brain activation of the action observation network during anticipation of tennis and volleyball serves

    PubMed Central

    Balser, Nils; Lorey, Britta; Pilgramm, Sebastian; Naumann, Tim; Kindermann, Stefan; Stark, Rudolf; Zentgraf, Karen; Williams, A. Mark; Munzert, Jörn

    2014-01-01

    In many daily activities, and especially in sport, it is necessary to predict the effects of others' actions in order to initiate appropriate responses. Recently, researchers have suggested that the action–observation network (AON) including the cerebellum plays an essential role during such anticipation, particularly in sport expert performers. In the present study, we examined the influence of task-specific expertise on the AON by investigating differences between two expert groups trained in different sports while anticipating action effects. Altogether, 15 tennis and 16 volleyball experts anticipated the direction of observed tennis and volleyball serves while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The expert group in each sport acted as novice controls in the other sport with which they had only little experience. When contrasting anticipation in both expertise conditions with the corresponding untrained sport, a stronger activation of AON areas (SPL, SMA), and particularly of cerebellar structures, was observed. Furthermore, the neural activation within the cerebellum and the SPL was linearly correlated with participant's anticipation performance, irrespective of the specific expertise. For the SPL, this relationship also holds when an expert performs a domain-specific anticipation task. Notably, the stronger activation of the cerebellum as well as of the SMA and the SPL in the expertise conditions suggests that experts rely on their more fine-tuned perceptual-motor representations that have improved during years of training when anticipating the effects of others' actions in their preferred sport. The association of activation within the SPL and the cerebellum with the task achievement suggests that these areas are the predominant brain sites involved in fast motor predictions. The SPL reflects the processing of domain-specific contextual information and the cerebellum the usage of a predictive internal model to solve the anticipation

  9. Science Inquiry as Knowledge Transformation: Investigating Metacognitive and Self-regulation Strategies to Assist Students in Writing about Scientific Inquiry Tasks

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Collins, Timothy A.

    2011-12-01

    Science inquiry is central to the science education reform efforts that began in the early 1990's. It is both a topic of instruction and a process to be experienced. Student engagement in the process of scientific inquiry was the focus of this study. The process of scientific inquiry can be conceived as a two-part task. In the initial part of the task, students identify a question or problem to study and then carry out an investigation to address the issue. In the second part of the task, students analyze their data to propose explanations and then report their findings. Knowing that students struggle with science inquiry tasks, this study sought to investigate ways to help students become more successful with the communication demands of science inquiry tasks. The study took place in a high school chemistry class. Students in this study completed a total of three inquiry tasks over the course of one school year. Students were split into four experimental groups in order to determine the effect of goal setting, metacognitive prompts, and sentence stems on student inquiry tasks. The quality of the student written work was assessed using a scoring rubric familiar to the students. In addition, students were asked at four different times in the school year to respond to a self-efficacy survey that measured student self-efficacy for chemistry content and science inquiry processes. Student self-efficacy for the process of scientific inquiry was positive and did not change over the course of the study while student scores on the science inquiry tasks rose significantly. The metacognitive prompts and instruction in goal setting did not have any effect on student inquiry scores. Results related to the effect of the sentence stems were mixed. An analysis of student work indicated that students who received high marks on their initial inquiry task in this study were the ones that adopted the use of the sentence stems. Students who received low marks on their initial inquiry

  10. Understanding Expertise from Elite Badminton Coaches

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Sheu, Feng-Ru

    2011-01-01

    Badminton is a growing sport with a limited amount of expertise both in players and coaches so attempts are being made to extend the expertise internationally. The purpose of this study is to gain an understanding of coaching expertise in badminton because such an understanding might have implications for a more general understanding of expertise,…

  11. Research on Expertise: Guideposts for Expertise and Teacher Education in Physical Education.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    O'Sullivan, Mary; Doutis, Panayiotis

    1994-01-01

    Presents guideposts for thinking about teaching and teacher education in light of recent research on expertise in teaching, particularly teaching in physical education. The paper critiques the concept of expertise, suggesting the term virtuoso as a more appropriate term for teaching expertly. Implications of the redefinition are presented. (SM)

  12. A Newcomer Gains Power: An Analysis of the Role of Rhetorical Expertise.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Katz, Susan M.

    1998-01-01

    Offers a case study describing how the rhetorical expertise of a young woman (at the lowest professional level in a male-dominated bureaucratic organization) gave her the power to revise the processes by which her organization did its work, to rewrite the job descriptions of the managers within the organization, and to create a unique role for…

  13. Expertise Effects in Face-Selective Areas are Robust to Clutter and Diverted Attention, but not to Competition

    PubMed Central

    McGugin, Rankin Williams; Van Gulick, Ana E.; Tamber-Rosenau, Benjamin J.; Ross, David A.; Gauthier, Isabel

    2015-01-01

    Expertise effects for nonface objects in face-selective brain areas may reflect stable aspects of neuronal selectivity that determine how observers perceive objects. However, bottom-up (e.g., clutter from irrelevant objects) and top-down manipulations (e.g., attentional selection) can influence activity, affecting the link between category selectivity and individual performance. We test the prediction that individual differences expressed as neural expertise effects for cars in face-selective areas are sufficiently stable to survive clutter and manipulations of attention. Additionally, behavioral work and work using event related potentials suggest that expertise effects may not survive competition; we investigate this using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Subjects varying in expertise with cars made 1-back decisions about cars, faces, and objects in displays containing one or 2 objects, with only one category attended. Univariate analyses suggest car expertise effects are robust to clutter, dampened by reducing attention to cars, but nonetheless more robust to manipulations of attention than competition. While univariate expertise effects are severely abolished by competition between cars and faces, multivariate analyses reveal new information related to car expertise. These results demonstrate that signals in face-selective areas predict expertise effects for nonface objects in a variety of conditions, although individual differences may be expressed in different dependent measures depending on task and instructions. PMID:24682187

  14. Postural trials: expertise in rhythmic gymnastics increases control in lateral directions.

    PubMed

    Calavalle, A R; Sisti, D; Rocchi, M B L; Panebianco, R; Del Sal, M; Stocchi, V

    2008-11-01

    The first aim of this paper was to investigate if expertise in rhythmic gymnastics influences postural performance even in an easy non-specific task such as bipedal posture. Rhythmic gymnastics is a unique female sport which encompasses aspects of both artistic gymnastics and ballet and includes the use of a small apparatus (rope, hoop, ball, clubs and ribbon). Most previous studies have shown that expertise achieved by artistic gymnasts and dancers improves postural steadiness only in the situations for which those athletes are trained. Literature has not yet compared rhythmic gymnasts to other athletes in terms of their postural strategies. Hence, the study presented herein tested a group of high level rhythmic gymnasts and a group of female university students, trained in other sports, in the bipedal posture under eyes open and closed conditions. A force platform was used to record body sway. (1) Distance from the centre of sway, (2) lateral and (3) antero-posterior displacements were analyzed in time and frequency domains. Comparing the two groups, it was found that rhythmic gymnasts had better strategies than students in simple postural tasks, especially in lateral directions and in the period from 0.05 to 2 s. The most interesting finding in this study is that rhythmic gymnastics training seems to have a direct effect on the ability to maintain bipedal posture, which may confirm the "transfer" hypothesis of rhythmic gymnastics expertise to bipedal postural sway, especially in medio-lateral displacements. This finding has never been reported in previous studies on artistic gymnasts and ballet dancers. Furthermore, the present study confirmed the visual dependence of all the athletes, irrespective of their disciplines, in their postural trials.

  15. A scientific assessment of a new technology orbital telescope

    NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

    1995-01-01

    As part of a program designed to test the Alpha chemical laser weapons system in space, the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) developed components of an agile, lightweight, 4-meter telescope, equipped with an advanced active-optics system. BMDO had proposed to make space available in the telescope's focal plane for instrumentation optimized for scientific applications in astrophysics and planetary astronomy for a potential flight mission. Such a flight mission could be undertaken if new or additional sponsorship can be found. Despite this uncertainty, BMDO requested assistance in defining the instrumentation and other design aspects necessary to enhance the scientific value of a pointing and tracking mission. In response to this request, the Space Studies Board established the Task Group on BMDO New Technology Orbital Observatory (TGBNTOO) and charged it to: (1) provide instrumentation, data management, and science-operations advice to BMDO to optimize the scientific value of a 4-meter mission; and (2) support a space studies board assessment of the relative scientific merit of the program. This report deals with the first of these tasks, assisting the Advanced Technology Demonstrator's (ATD's) program scientific potential. Given the potential scientific aspects of the 4-meter telescope, this project is referred to as the New Technology Orbital Telescope (NTOT), or as the ATD/NTOT, to emphasize its dual-use character. The task group's basic conclusion is that the ATD/NTOT mission does have the potential for contributing in a major way to astronomical goals.

  16. Are Cloud Environments Ready for Scientific Applications?

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Mehrotra, P.; Shackleford, K.

    2011-12-01

    Cloud computing environments are becoming widely available both in the commercial and government sectors. They provide flexibility to rapidly provision resources in order to meet dynamic and changing computational needs without the customers incurring capital expenses and/or requiring technical expertise. Clouds also provide reliable access to resources even though the end-user may not have in-house expertise for acquiring or operating such resources. Consolidation and pooling in a cloud environment allow organizations to achieve economies of scale in provisioning or procuring computing resources and services. Because of these and other benefits, many businesses and organizations are migrating their business applications (e.g., websites, social media, and business processes) to cloud environments-evidenced by the commercial success of offerings such as the Amazon EC2. In this paper, we focus on the feasibility of utilizing cloud environments for scientific workloads and workflows particularly of interest to NASA scientists and engineers. There is a wide spectrum of such technical computations. These applications range from small workstation-level computations to mid-range computing requiring small clusters to high-performance simulations requiring supercomputing systems with high bandwidth/low latency interconnects. Data-centric applications manage and manipulate large data sets such as satellite observational data and/or data previously produced by high-fidelity modeling and simulation computations. Most of the applications are run in batch mode with static resource requirements. However, there do exist situations that have dynamic demands, particularly ones with public-facing interfaces providing information to the general public, collaborators and partners, as well as to internal NASA users. In the last few months we have been studying the suitability of cloud environments for NASA's technical and scientific workloads. We have ported several applications to

  17. Scientific Misconduct in India: Causes and Perpetuation.

    PubMed

    Patnaik, Pratap R

    2016-08-01

    Along with economic strength, space technology and software expertise, India is also a leading nation in fraudulent scientific research. The problem is worsened by vested interests working in concert for their own benefits. These self-promoting cartels, together with biased evaluation methods and weak penal systems, combine to perpetuate scientific misconduct. Some of these issues are discussed in this commentary, with supporting examples and possible solutions.

  18. Using Information Expertise to Enhance Massive Open Online Courses

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Mahraj, Katy

    2012-01-01

    It is a truth not yet universally acknowledged that a venture based on information must be in want of a librarian. Librarians offer expertise in organizing and managing information, clarifying and supporting people's information needs, and enhancing people's information literacy skills. There are innumerable endeavors today in education, health,…

  19. Investigating the Role of Domain General Mechanisms in the Acquisition of Domain Specific Expertise

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kaufman, Scott Barry

    2007-01-01

    The expert performance approach championed by Ericsson et al. provides a scientific way forward for research on giftedness, and offers exciting new ways to further one's understanding of the determinants of high ability within a particular domain of expertise. While the methods the authors use are commendable and are likely to further one's…

  20. The Integration of Science and Education as Assessed by the Scientific Community: (Based on the Results of a Sociological Survey)

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Zubova, Larisa; Arzhanykh, Elena

    2009-01-01

    One of the main tasks of a survey by the Center for Science Research and Statistics was to assess the interaction between science and higher education from the standpoint of collaboration between scientific organizations and university science, as well as participation in the educational process by scientific organizations. This article presents a…

  1. The National "Expertise Gap"

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Hamilton, Kendra

    2005-01-01

    This article discusses the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation's report, "Diversity and the Ph.D.," released in May, which documents in troubling detail the exact dimensions of what the foundation's president, Dr. Robert Weisbuch, is calling the national "expertise gap." Weisbuch states that the expertise gap extends beyond the…

  2. Task control and cognitive abilities of self and spouse in collaboration in middle-aged and older couples.

    PubMed

    Berg, Cynthia A; Smith, Timothy W; Ko, Kelly J; Beveridge, Ryan M; Story, Nathan; Henry, Nancy J M; Florsheim, Paul; Pearce, Gale; Uchino, Bert N; Skinner, Michelle A; Glazer, Kelly

    2007-09-01

    Collaborative problem solving may be used by older couples to optimize cognitive functioning, with some suggestion that older couples exhibit greater collaborative expertise. The study explored age differences in 2 aspects of collaborative expertise: spouses' knowledge of their own and their spouse's cognitive abilities and the ability to fit task control to these cognitive abilities. The participants were 300 middle-aged and older couples who completed a hypothetical errand task. The interactions were coded for control asserted by husbands and wives. Fluid intelligence was assessed, and spouses rated their own and their spouse's cognitive abilities. The results revealed no age differences in couple expertise, either in the ability to predict their own and their spouse's cognitive abilities or in the ability to fit task control to abilities. However, gender differences were found. Women fit task control to their own and their spouse's cognitive abilities; men only fit task control to their spouse's cognitive abilities. For women only, the fit between control and abilities was associated with better performance. The results indicate no age differences in couple expertise but point to gender as a factor in optimal collaboration. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved).

  3. The Behavioral and Neural Mechanisms Underlying the Tracking of Expertise

    PubMed Central

    Boorman, Erie D.; O’Doherty, John P.; Adolphs, Ralph; Rangel, Antonio

    2013-01-01

    Summary Evaluating the abilities of others is fundamental for successful economic and social behavior. We investigated the computational and neurobiological basis of ability tracking by designing an fMRI task that required participants to use and update estimates of both people and algorithms’ expertise through observation of their predictions. Behaviorally, we find a model-based algorithm characterized subject predictions better than several alternative models. Notably, when the agent’s prediction was concordant rather than discordant with the subject’s own likely prediction, participants credited people more than algorithms for correct predictions and penalized them less for incorrect predictions. Neurally, many components of the mentalizing network—medial prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate gyrus, temporoparietal junction, and precuneus—represented or updated expertise beliefs about both people and algorithms. Moreover, activity in lateral orbitofrontal and medial prefrontal cortex reflected behavioral differences in learning about people and algorithms. These findings provide basic insights into the neural basis of social learning. PMID:24360551

  4. Expertise Effects in Face-Selective Areas are Robust to Clutter and Diverted Attention, but not to Competition.

    PubMed

    McGugin, Rankin Williams; Van Gulick, Ana E; Tamber-Rosenau, Benjamin J; Ross, David A; Gauthier, Isabel

    2015-09-01

    Expertise effects for nonface objects in face-selective brain areas may reflect stable aspects of neuronal selectivity that determine how observers perceive objects. However, bottom-up (e.g., clutter from irrelevant objects) and top-down manipulations (e.g., attentional selection) can influence activity, affecting the link between category selectivity and individual performance. We test the prediction that individual differences expressed as neural expertise effects for cars in face-selective areas are sufficiently stable to survive clutter and manipulations of attention. Additionally, behavioral work and work using event related potentials suggest that expertise effects may not survive competition; we investigate this using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Subjects varying in expertise with cars made 1-back decisions about cars, faces, and objects in displays containing one or 2 objects, with only one category attended. Univariate analyses suggest car expertise effects are robust to clutter, dampened by reducing attention to cars, but nonetheless more robust to manipulations of attention than competition. While univariate expertise effects are severely abolished by competition between cars and faces, multivariate analyses reveal new information related to car expertise. These results demonstrate that signals in face-selective areas predict expertise effects for nonface objects in a variety of conditions, although individual differences may be expressed in different dependent measures depending on task and instructions. © The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

  5. Dance expertise modulates visual sensitivity to complex biological movements.

    PubMed

    Orlandi, Andrea; Zani, Alberto; Proverbio, Alice Mado

    2017-09-01

    Motor resonance processes that occur when observing an individual perform an action may be modulated by acquired visuomotor expertise. We used the event-related potential (EEG/ERP) technique to investigate the ability to automatically recognize a subtle difference between very similar novel contemporary dance movements. Twelve professional dancers and twelve non-dancers were shown 212 pairs of videos of complex whole-body movements that lasted 3s. The second of each pair was the repetition of the previous movement or a slight variation of it (deviance). The participants were engaged in a secondary attentional task. Modulation of a larger centro-parietal N400 effect and a reduction of the Late Positivity amplitude (repetition suppression effect) were identified in response to deviant stimuli only in the dancers. Source reconstruction (swLORETA) showed activations in biological motion, body and face processing related areas, and fronto-parietal and limbic systems. The current findings provide evidence that acquired dance expertise modifies the ability to visually code whole-body complex movements. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  6. Expediting Scientific Data Analysis with Reorganization of Data

    DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

    Byna, Surendra; Wu, Kesheng

    2013-08-19

    Data producers typically optimize the layout of data files to minimize the write time. In most cases, data analysis tasks read these files in access patterns different from the write patterns causing poor read performance. In this paper, we introduce Scientific Data Services (SDS), a framework for bridging the performance gap between writing and reading scientific data. SDS reorganizes data to match the read patterns of analysis tasks and enables transparent data reads from the reorganized data. We implemented a HDF5 Virtual Object Layer (VOL) plugin to redirect the HDF5 dataset read calls to the reorganized data. To demonstrate themore » effectiveness of SDS, we applied two parallel data organization techniques: a sort-based organization on a plasma physics data and a transpose-based organization on mass spectrometry imaging data. We also extended the HDF5 data access API to allow selection of data based on their values through a query interface, called SDS Query. We evaluated the execution time in accessing various subsets of data through existing HDF5 Read API and SDS Query. We showed that reading the reorganized data using SDS is up to 55X faster than reading the original data.« less

  7. Integrated studies on the use of cognitive task analysis to capture surgical expertise for central venous catheter placement and open cricothyrotomy.

    PubMed

    Yates, Kenneth; Sullivan, Maura; Clark, Richard

    2012-01-01

    Cognitive task analysis (CTA) methods were used for 2 surgical procedures to determine (1) the extent that experts omitted critical information, (2) the number of experts required to capture the optimalamount of information, and (3) the effectiveness of a CTA-informed curriculum. Six expert physicians for both the central venous catheter placement and open cricothyrotomy were interviewed. The transcripts were coded, corrected, and aggregated as a "gold standard." The information captured for each surgeon was then analyzed against the gold standard. Experts omitted an average of 34% of the decisions for the central venous catheter and 77% of the decisions for the Cric. Three to 4 experts were required to capture the optimal amount of information. A significant positive effect on performance (t([21]) = 2.08, P = .050), and self-efficacy ratings (t([18]) = 2.38, P = .029) were found for the CTA-informed curriculum for cricothyrotomy. CTA is an effective method to capture expertise in surgery and a valuable component to improve surgical training. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  8. Cognitive Transformations and Extended Expertise

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Menary, Richard; Kirchhoff, Michael

    2014-01-01

    Expertise is extended by becoming immersed in cultural practices. We look at an example of mathematical expertise in which immersion in cognitive practices results in the transformation of expert performance.

  9. On the role of scientists and scientific organizations: A question of leadership

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Lynch, B. J.; Driver, S.

    2010-12-01

    The National Research Council (NRC) series of reports on climate change, published in May, 2010, represent the scientific establishment's response in the wake of Copenhagen. The popular sentiment among students, the environmental movement and the concerned public includes, understandably, a fair amount of confusion and a great deal of disillusionment and disappointment -- not just at the national and international political bodies and individual political leaders -- but with the ambivalence of the scientists and scientific organizations to waging a real fight for substantial and effective change. If the scientific community and the environmental movement learns anything from Copenhagen it is that the existing powers-that-be are incapable of even putting forward, let alone implementing, a sound and rational response to the climate change and environmental crisis. The prevalent (and all too passive) attitude is that the role of scientists and scientific organizations is merely to supply the policy makers, corporations, and governmental entities with the facts, the objective conditions, our best scientific understanding possible, and that's it. The scientific community must reject this attitude and this approach. Leaving the social, political and economic responses, regulation, and implementation in the hands of the politicians -- whom we are advising -- means we accomplish nothing and are accepting the patently false conclusion "there is nothing realistic that can be done". As is true for all political questions, the national and international response to climate change is a question of power and the relative balance of forces between people, governments, and corporations with competing and often directly counter-posed interests. The role scientists and scientific organizations must play is to weigh in on the side of the vast majority of the world's population, side with the countries and peoples of the developing world who are suffering and will continue to suffer

  10. Measuring Online Search Expertise

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Bailey, Earl

    2017-01-01

    Search expertise has long been studied and used extensively in information seeking behavior research, both as a fundamental concept and as a method of comparing groups of users. Unfortunately, while search expertise has been studied for some time, the conceptualization of it has lagged behind its use in categorizing users. This has led to users…

  11. How Well Do Computer-Generated Faces Tap Face Expertise?

    PubMed

    Crookes, Kate; Ewing, Louise; Gildenhuys, Ju-Dith; Kloth, Nadine; Hayward, William G; Oxner, Matt; Pond, Stephen; Rhodes, Gillian

    2015-01-01

    The use of computer-generated (CG) stimuli in face processing research is proliferating due to the ease with which faces can be generated, standardised and manipulated. However there has been surprisingly little research into whether CG faces are processed in the same way as photographs of real faces. The present study assessed how well CG faces tap face identity expertise by investigating whether two indicators of face expertise are reduced for CG faces when compared to face photographs. These indicators were accuracy for identification of own-race faces and the other-race effect (ORE)-the well-established finding that own-race faces are recognised more accurately than other-race faces. In Experiment 1 Caucasian and Asian participants completed a recognition memory task for own- and other-race real and CG faces. Overall accuracy for own-race faces was dramatically reduced for CG compared to real faces and the ORE was significantly and substantially attenuated for CG faces. Experiment 2 investigated perceptual discrimination for own- and other-race real and CG faces with Caucasian and Asian participants. Here again, accuracy for own-race faces was significantly reduced for CG compared to real faces. However the ORE was not affected by format. Together these results signal that CG faces of the type tested here do not fully tap face expertise. Technological advancement may, in the future, produce CG faces that are equivalent to real photographs. Until then caution is advised when interpreting results obtained using CG faces.

  12. Beyond Faces and Expertise

    PubMed Central

    Zhao, Mintao; Bülthoff, Heinrich H.; Bülthoff, Isabelle

    2016-01-01

    Holistic processing—the tendency to perceive objects as indecomposable wholes—has long been viewed as a process specific to faces or objects of expertise. Although current theories differ in what causes holistic processing, they share a fundamental constraint for its generalization: Nonface objects cannot elicit facelike holistic processing in the absence of expertise. Contrary to this prevailing view, here we show that line patterns with salient Gestalt information (i.e., connectedness, closure, and continuity between parts) can be processed as holistically as faces without any training. Moreover, weakening the saliency of Gestalt information in these patterns reduced holistic processing of them, which indicates that Gestalt information plays a crucial role in holistic processing. Therefore, holistic processing can be achieved not only via a top-down route based on expertise, but also via a bottom-up route relying merely on object-based information. The finding that facelike holistic processing can extend beyond the domains of faces and objects of expertise poses a challenge to current dominant theories. PMID:26674129

  13. The Grounded Expertise Components Approach in the Novel Area of Cryptic Crossword Solving.

    PubMed

    Friedlander, Kathryn J; Fine, Philip A

    2016-01-01

    This paper presents a relatively unexplored area of expertise research which focuses on the solving of British-style cryptic crossword puzzles. Unlike its American "straight-definition" counterparts, which are primarily semantically-cued retrieval tasks, the British cryptic crossword is an exercise in code-cracking detection work. Solvers learn to ignore the superficial "surface reading" of the clue, which is phrased to be deliberately misleading, and look instead for a grammatical set of coded instructions which, if executed precisely, will lead to the correct (and only) answer. Sample clues are set out to illustrate the task requirements and demands. Hypothesized aptitudes for the field might include high fluid intelligence, skill at quasi-algebraic puzzles, pattern matching, visuospatial manipulation, divergent thinking and breaking frame abilities. These skills are additional to the crystallized knowledge and word-retrieval demands which are also a feature of American crossword puzzles. The authors present results from an exploratory survey intended to identify the characteristics of the cryptic crossword solving population, and outline the impact of these results on the direction of their subsequent research. Survey results were strongly supportive of a number of hypothesized skill-sets and guided the selection of appropriate test content and research paradigms which formed the basis of an extensive research program to be reported elsewhere. The paper concludes by arguing the case for a more grounded approach to expertise studies, termed the Grounded Expertise Components Approach. In this, the design and scope of the empirical program flows from a detailed and objectively-based characterization of the research population at the very onset of the program.

  14. Serial or overlapping processing in multitasking as individual preference: Effects of stimulus preview on task switching and concurrent dual-task performance.

    PubMed

    Reissland, Jessika; Manzey, Dietrich

    2016-07-01

    Understanding the mechanisms and performance consequences of multitasking has long been in focus of scientific interest, but has been investigated by three research lines more or less isolated from each other. Studies in the fields of the psychological refractory period, task switching, and interruptions have scored with a high experimental control, but usually do not give participants many degrees of freedom to self-organize the processing of two concurrent tasks. Individual strategies as well as their impact on efficiency have mainly been neglected. Self-organized multitasking has been investigated in the field of human factors, but primarily with respect to overall performance without detailed investigation of how the tasks are processed. The current work attempts to link aspects of these research lines. All of them, explicitly or implicitly, provide hints about an individually preferred type of task organization, either more cautious trying to work strictly serially on only one task at a time or more daring with a focus on task interleaving and, if possible, also partially overlapping (parallel) processing. In two experiments we investigated different strategies of task organization and their impact on efficiency using a new measure of overall multitasking efficiency. Experiment 1 was based on a classical task switching paradigm with two classification tasks, but provided one group of participants with a stimulus preview of the task to switch to next, enabling at least partial overlapping processing. Indeed, this preview led to a reduction of switch costs and to an increase of dual-task efficiency, but only for a subgroup of participants. They obviously exploited the possibility of overlapping processing, while the others worked mainly serially. While task-sequence was externally guided in the first experiment, Experiment 2 extended the approach by giving the participants full freedom of task organization in concurrent performance of the same tasks. Fine

  15. Bureaucratic power in note-writing: authoritative expertise within the state.

    PubMed

    Mangset, Marte; Asdal, Kristin

    2018-02-24

    What produces the power of senior civil servants at ministries of finance, positioned at the top of the bureaucratic hierarchy? Max Weber has claimed that a hierarchical organization, meritocratic recruitment and procedural work provide bureaucracies with legitimacy. In particular he insisted on the role of Fachwissen (disciplinary knowledge) obtained through formal education. However, he also argued for the role of Dienstwissen, forms of knowledge and skills stemming from the experience of service in itself. Weber did not elaborate on this concept in detail, and few analysts of governmental expertise have examined this notion. We draw on the practice-turn in sociology, combining the study of governmental expertise with micro-sociological studies of administrative practices. By analysing interviews with 48 senior civil servants at the British, French and Norwegian ministries of finance about their daily practices, this article demonstrates that bureaucratic note-writing and the procedural evaluation of such notes constitute a key form of expertise that yields authority. The study provides an analytical framework for understanding what administrative expertise consists of, how it is integral to procedural work, the forms bureaucratic hierarchies take in practice and how these three dimensions provide authority. © London School of Economics and Political Science 2018.

  16. Exchanging expertise and constructing boundaries: The development of a transnational knowledge network around heroin-assisted treatment.

    PubMed

    Duke, Karen

    2016-05-01

    Over the last 20 years, supervised injectable and inhalable heroin prescribing has been developed, tested and in some cases introduced as a second line treatment for limited groups of entrenched heroin users in a number of European countries and Canada. Based on documentary analyses and eleven key informant interviews, this paper investigates the growth of 'expertise' and the sharing of knowledge between scientific stakeholders from different countries involved in researching and developing this area of treatment. Drawing on Stone's concept of the 'knowledge network' (Stone, 2013) and Gieryn's theory of 'boundary-work' (Gieryn, 1983), the analysis demonstrates the collective power of this group of scientists in producing a particular form of knowledge and expertise which has accrued and been exchanged over time. It also illustrates the ways in which this type of science has gained credibility and authority and become legitimised, reinforced and reproduced by those who employ it in both scientific and political debates. Boundaries were constructed by the knowledge network between different types of professions/disciplines, different forms of science and between the production of science and its consumption by non-scientists. The uniformity of the knowledge network in terms of their professional and disciplinary backgrounds, methodological expertise and ideological perspectives has meant that alternative forms of knowledge and perspectives have been neglected. This limits the nature and scope of the scientific evidence on which to base policy and practice decisions impacting on the work of policy makers and practitioners as well as the experiences of those in treatment who are most affected by this research and policy development. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  17. Relative expertise affects N170 during selective attention to superimposed face-character images.

    PubMed

    Ip, Chengteng; Wang, Hailing; Fu, Shimin

    2017-07-01

    It remains unclear whether the N170 of ERPs reflects domain-specific or domain-general visual object processing. In this study, we used superimposed images of a face and a Chinese character such that participants' relative expertise for the two object types was either similar (Experiment 1 and 2) or different (Experiment 3). Experiment 1 showed that N170 amplitude was larger when participants attended to the character instead of the face of a face-character combination. This result was unchanged in Experiment 2, in which task difficulty was selectively increased for the face component of the combined stimuli. Experiment 3 showed that, although this N170 enhancement for attending to characters relative to faces persisted for false characters with recognizable parts, it disappeared for unrecognizable characters. Therefore, N170 amplitude was significantly greater for Chinese characters than for faces presented within a combined image, independent of the relative task difficulty. This result strongly calls N170 face selectivity into question, demonstrating that, contrary to the expectations established by a domain-specific account, N170 is modulated by expertise. © 2017 Society for Psychophysiological Research.

  18. Assessment of Scientific Reasoning as an Institutional Outcome

    DTIC Science & Technology

    2016-04-01

    expertise in the outcome domain. Student achievement of the Scientific Reasoning and Principles of Science was assessed in the 2012- 13 academic year by...scientific reasoning assessment. Overall, students were weakest when answering questions related to (a) proportional reasoning , (b) isolation of...variables, and (c) if-then reasoning . These findings are being incorporates into redesign of the core curriculum to enhance continuity among science courses

  19. A Task Analysis for Teaching the Organization of an Informative Speech.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Parks, Arlie Muller

    The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate a task analysis of the objectives needed to organize an effective information-giving speech. A hierarchical structure of the behaviors needed to deliver a well-organized extemporaneous information-giving speech is presented, with some behaviors as subtasks for the unit objective and the others as…

  20. The Importance of Domain-Specific Expertise in Creativity

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Baer, John

    2015-01-01

    Although creativity and expertise are related, they are nonetheless very different things. Expertise does not usually require creativity, but creativity generally does require a certain level of expertise. There are similarities in the relationships of both expertise and creativity to domains, however. Research has shown that just as expertise in…

  1. Heuristic Task Analysis on E-Learning Course Development: A Formative Research Study

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Lee, Ji-Yeon; Reigeluth, Charles M.

    2009-01-01

    Utilizing heuristic task analysis (HTA), a method developed for eliciting, analyzing, and representing expertise in complex cognitive tasks, a formative research study was conducted on the task of e-learning course development to further improve the HTA process. Three instructional designers from three different post-secondary institutions in the…

  2. Reviewing the Role of Cognitive Load, Expertise Level, Motivation, and Unconscious Processing in Working Memory Performance

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kuldas, Seffetullah; Hashim, Shahabuddin; Ismail, Hairul Nizam; Abu Bakar, Zainudin

    2015-01-01

    Human cognitive capacity is unavailable for conscious processing of every amount of instructional messages. Aligning an instructional design with learner expertise level would allow better use of available working memory capacity in a cognitive learning task. Motivating students to learn consciously is also an essential determinant of the capacity…

  3. Musical Expertise Increases Top–Down Modulation Over Hippocampal Activation during Familiarity Decisions

    PubMed Central

    Gagnepain, Pierre; Fauvel, Baptiste; Desgranges, Béatrice; Gaubert, Malo; Viader, Fausto; Eustache, Francis; Groussard, Mathilde; Platel, Hervé

    2017-01-01

    The hippocampus has classically been associated with episodic memory, but is sometimes also recruited during semantic memory tasks, especially for the skilled exploration of familiar information. Cognitive control mechanisms guiding semantic memory search may benefit from the set of cognitive processes at stake during musical training. Here, we examined using functional magnetic resonance imaging, whether musical expertise would promote the top–down control of the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) over the generation of hippocampally based goal-directed thoughts mediating the familiarity judgment of proverbs and musical items. Analyses of behavioral data confirmed that musical experts more efficiently access familiar melodies than non-musicians although such increased ability did not transfer to verbal semantic memory. At the brain level, musical expertise specifically enhanced the recruitment of the hippocampus during semantic access to melodies, but not proverbs. Additionally, hippocampal activation contributed to speed of access to familiar melodies, but only in musicians. Critically, causal modeling of neural dynamics between LIFG and the hippocampus further showed that top–down excitatory regulation over the hippocampus during familiarity decision specifically increases with musical expertise – an effect that generalized across melodies and proverbs. At the local level, our data show that musical expertise modulates the online recruitment of hippocampal response to serve semantic memory retrieval of familiar melodies. The reconfiguration of memory network dynamics following musical training could constitute a promising framework to understand its ability to preserve brain functions. PMID:29033805

  4. Authority, Expertise, and Impression Management: Gendered Professionalization of Chemists in the Academy

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Hirshfield, Laura Ellen

    Women face more barriers to their success than their men counterparts in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines. While much of the research on women's experience in science has focused on their entry into or exit out of STEM fields (the "leaky pipeline"), less is known about the obstacles that women scientists face at work, due to the dearth of ethnographic work exploring gender and day-to-day experiences in the academic workplace. Using data from a qualitative study of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in chemistry involving over 120 hours of ethnographic observation and 40 semi-structured interviews, I focus specifically on the gendered nature of authority, expertise, and impression management to investigate several of the obstacles women scientists face at work. In the first chapter, I investigate men and women graduate students' and postdocs' expectations of expertise. I argue that overall, men are more likely than their women peers to be seen as experts in chemistry. As a result, men graduate students benefit from more practice with skills that are applicable to their future careers: applying scientific knowledge to relevant questions and communicating this information to others. In the second chapter, I focus on gender and graduate student socialization. I find that the link between men, science, and academia creates a context in which men do not need to work as hard to establish their claim to scientific authority. Therefore, men are able to perform masculinity in varied and complex ways, while women, who do not embody masculinity, feel more pressure to conform to strict norms of competition that are associated with traditional masculinity. In the last chapter, I discuss the impression management strategies that men and women chemists-in-training use to navigate authority and expertise. I find that men are more likely than women to employ interactional styles that feature their expertise when in group situations, while women

  5. Learning to write like a scientist: Coauthoring as an enculturation task

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Florence, Marilyn K.; Yore, Larry D.

    2004-08-01

    This multiple case study examined the coauthorship process in research laboratories of different university departments. The study focused on two cases comprising five writing teams, one in biochemistry and microbiology and four in earth and ocean sciences. The role of the research supervisor, the role of the student (graduate and postgraduate), the interaction of the supervisor and the student, the activities and processes inherent in the coauthorship process, and the student's beliefs, expertise, scientific writing, and entry into an academic discourse community were documented utilizing multiple sources of data and methods. Several activities and processes were found to be common across all coauthorship teams, including aspects of planning, drafting, and revising. Elements of scientific and writing expertise, facets of enculturation into scientific research and discourse communities, academic civility, and the dynamics of collaborative groups also were apparent. There was healthy tension and mutual respect in the research groups as they attempted to make sense of science, report their results clearly and persuasively, and share the responsibilities of expertise. The novice scientists came to appreciate that the writing, editing, and revising process influenced the quality of the science as well as the writing.

  6. The significance of levels of organization for scientific research: A heuristic approach.

    PubMed

    Brooks, Daniel S; Eronen, Markus I

    2018-04-10

    The concept of 'levels of organization' has come under fire recently as being useless for scientific and philosophical purposes. In this paper, we show that 'levels' is actually a remarkably resilient and constructive conceptual tool that can be, and in fact is, used for a variety of purposes. To this effect, we articulate an account of the importance of the levels concept seen in light of its status as a major organizing concept of biology. We argue that the usefulness of 'levels' is best seen in the heuristic contributions the concept makes to treating and structuring scientific problems. We illustrate this with two examples from biological research. Copyright © 2018. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

  7. Conference-EC-US Task Force Joint US-EU Workshop on Metabolomics and Environmental Biotechnology

    DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

    PI: Lily Y. Young

    2009-06-04

    Since 1990, the EC-US Task Force on Biotechnology Research has been coordinating transatlantic efforts to guide and exploit the ongoing revolution in biotechnology and the life sciences. The Task Force was established in June 1990 by the European Commission and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The Task Force has acted as an effective forum for discussion, coordination, and development of new ideas for the last 18 years. Task Force members are European Commission and US Government science and technology administrators who meet annually to enhance communication across the Atlantic, and to encourage collaborative research. Through sponsoringmore » workshops, and other activities, the Task Force also brings together scientific leaders and early career researchers from both sides of the Atlantic to forecast research challenges and opportunities and to promote better links between researchers. Over the years, by keeping a focus on the future of science, the Task Force has played a key role in establishing a diverse range of emerging scientific fields, including biodiversity research, neuroinformatics, genomics, nanobiotechnology, neonatal immunology, transkingdom molecular biology, biologically-based fuels, and environmental biotechnology. The EC-US Task Force has sponsored a number of Working Groups on topics of mutual transatlantic interest. The idea to create a Working Group on Environmental Biotechnology research was discussed in the Task Force meeting of October 1993. The EC-US Working Group on Environmental Biotechnology set as its mission 'To train the next generation of leaders in environmental biotechnology in the United States and the European Union to work collaboratively across the Atlantic.' Since 1995, the Working Group supported three kinds of activities, all of which focus one early career scientists: (1) Workshops on the use of molecular methods and genomics in environmental biotechnology; (2) Short courses with theoretical

  8. Are all types of expertise created equal? Car experts use different spatial frequency scales for subordinate categorization of cars and faces.

    PubMed

    Harel, Assaf; Bentin, Shlomo

    2013-01-01

    A much-debated question in object recognition is whether expertise for faces and expertise for non-face objects utilize common perceptual information. We investigated this issue by assessing the diagnostic information required for different types of expertise. Specifically, we asked whether face categorization and expert car categorization at the subordinate level relies on the same spatial frequency (SF) scales. Fifteen car experts and fifteen novices performed a category verification task with spatially filtered images of faces, cars, and airplanes. Images were categorized based on their basic (e.g. "car") and subordinate level (e.g. "Japanese car") identity. The effect of expertise was not evident when objects were categorized at the basic level. However, when the car experts categorized faces and cars at the subordinate level, the two types of expertise required different kinds of SF information. Subordinate categorization of faces relied on low SFs more than on high SFs, whereas subordinate expert car categorization relied on high SFs more than on low SFs. These findings suggest that expertise in the recognition of objects and faces do not utilize the same type of information. Rather, different types of expertise require different types of diagnostic visual information.

  9. Are All Types of Expertise Created Equal? Car Experts Use Different Spatial Frequency Scales for Subordinate Categorization of Cars and Faces

    PubMed Central

    Harel, Assaf; Bentin, Shlomo

    2013-01-01

    A much-debated question in object recognition is whether expertise for faces and expertise for non-face objects utilize common perceptual information. We investigated this issue by assessing the diagnostic information required for different types of expertise. Specifically, we asked whether face categorization and expert car categorization at the subordinate level relies on the same spatial frequency (SF) scales. Fifteen car experts and fifteen novices performed a category verification task with spatially filtered images of faces, cars, and airplanes. Images were categorized based on their basic (e.g. “car”) and subordinate level (e.g. “Japanese car”) identity. The effect of expertise was not evident when objects were categorized at the basic level. However, when the car experts categorized faces and cars at the subordinate level, the two types of expertise required different kinds of SF information. Subordinate categorization of faces relied on low SFs more than on high SFs, whereas subordinate expert car categorization relied on high SFs more than on low SFs. These findings suggest that expertise in the recognition of objects and faces do not utilize the same type of information. Rather, different types of expertise require different types of diagnostic visual information. PMID:23826188

  10. The Automation-by-Expertise-by-Training Interaction.

    PubMed

    Strauch, Barry

    2017-03-01

    I introduce the automation-by-expertise-by-training interaction in automated systems and discuss its influence on operator performance. Transportation accidents that, across a 30-year interval demonstrated identical automation-related operator errors, suggest a need to reexamine traditional views of automation. I review accident investigation reports, regulator studies, and literature on human computer interaction, expertise, and training and discuss how failing to attend to the interaction of automation, expertise level, and training has enabled operators to commit identical automation-related errors. Automated systems continue to provide capabilities exceeding operators' need for effective system operation and provide interfaces that can hinder, rather than enhance, operator automation-related situation awareness. Because of limitations in time and resources, training programs do not provide operators the expertise needed to effectively operate these automated systems, requiring them to obtain the expertise ad hoc during system operations. As a result, many do not acquire necessary automation-related system expertise. Integrating automation with expected operator expertise levels, and within training programs that provide operators the necessary automation expertise, can reduce opportunities for automation-related operator errors. Research to address the automation-by-expertise-by-training interaction is needed. However, such research must meet challenges inherent to examining realistic sociotechnical system automation features with representative samples of operators, perhaps by using observational and ethnographic research. Research in this domain should improve the integration of design and training and, it is hoped, enhance operator performance.

  11. Generality and specificity in the effects of musical expertise on perception and cognition.

    PubMed

    Carey, Daniel; Rosen, Stuart; Krishnan, Saloni; Pearce, Marcus T; Shepherd, Alex; Aydelott, Jennifer; Dick, Frederic

    2015-04-01

    Performing musicians invest thousands of hours becoming experts in a range of perceptual, attentional, and cognitive skills. The duration and intensity of musicians' training - far greater than that of most educational or rehabilitation programs - provides a useful model to test the extent to which skills acquired in one particular context (music) generalize to different domains. Here, we asked whether the instrument-specific and more instrument-general skills acquired during professional violinists' and pianists' training would generalize to superior performance on a wide range of analogous (largely non-musical) skills, when compared to closely matched non-musicians. Violinists and pianists outperformed non-musicians on fine-grained auditory psychophysical measures, but surprisingly did not differ from each other, despite the different demands of their instruments. Musician groups did differ on a tuning system perception task: violinists showed clearest biases towards the tuning system specific to their instrument, suggesting that long-term experience leads to selective perceptual benefits given a training-relevant context. However, we found only weak evidence of group differences in non-musical skills, with musicians differing marginally in one measure of sustained auditory attention, but not significantly on auditory scene analysis or multi-modal sequencing measures. Further, regression analyses showed that this sustained auditory attention metric predicted more variance in one auditory psychophysical measure than did musical expertise. Our findings suggest that specific musical expertise may yield distinct perceptual outcomes within contexts close to the area of training. Generalization of expertise to relevant cognitive domains may be less clear, particularly where the task context is non-musical. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  12. The Grounded Expertise Components Approach in the Novel Area of Cryptic Crossword Solving

    PubMed Central

    Friedlander, Kathryn J.; Fine, Philip A.

    2016-01-01

    This paper presents a relatively unexplored area of expertise research which focuses on the solving of British-style cryptic crossword puzzles. Unlike its American “straight-definition” counterparts, which are primarily semantically-cued retrieval tasks, the British cryptic crossword is an exercise in code-cracking detection work. Solvers learn to ignore the superficial “surface reading” of the clue, which is phrased to be deliberately misleading, and look instead for a grammatical set of coded instructions which, if executed precisely, will lead to the correct (and only) answer. Sample clues are set out to illustrate the task requirements and demands. Hypothesized aptitudes for the field might include high fluid intelligence, skill at quasi-algebraic puzzles, pattern matching, visuospatial manipulation, divergent thinking and breaking frame abilities. These skills are additional to the crystallized knowledge and word-retrieval demands which are also a feature of American crossword puzzles. The authors present results from an exploratory survey intended to identify the characteristics of the cryptic crossword solving population, and outline the impact of these results on the direction of their subsequent research. Survey results were strongly supportive of a number of hypothesized skill-sets and guided the selection of appropriate test content and research paradigms which formed the basis of an extensive research program to be reported elsewhere. The paper concludes by arguing the case for a more grounded approach to expertise studies, termed the Grounded Expertise Components Approach. In this, the design and scope of the empirical program flows from a detailed and objectively-based characterization of the research population at the very onset of the program. PMID:27199805

  13. The size and shape of the attentional "spotlight" varies with differences in sports expertise.

    PubMed

    Hüttermann, Stefanie; Memmert, Daniel; Simons, Daniel J

    2014-06-01

    Focused attention enhances processing of some aspects of the world at the expense of unattended items. Although focused attention has been studied for decades, few studies have measured individual and group differences in how people distribute attention. In three studies, we explored differences in the breadth and distribution of attention as a function of athletic expertise. Study 1 found 25% greater attention breadth in expert athletes than in novices. Study 2 found that the distribution of focused attention for experts varied as a function of the type of athletic expertise: Experts in sports that demand greater horizontal distribution of attention (e.g., soccer) showed greater horizontal breadth of attention than did those whose sports demand more vertical attention (e.g., volleyball), and vice versa. Study 3 used a slightly modified design to replicate the results of Studies 1 and 2. Overall, the findings reveal a systematic association between the measured "shape" of focused attention in a laboratory task and expertise in a real-world skill. PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.

  14. Management of the Potential Organ Donor in the ICU: Society of Critical Care Medicine/American College of Chest Physicians/Association of Organ Procurement Organizations Consensus Statement.

    PubMed

    Kotloff, Robert M; Blosser, Sandralee; Fulda, Gerard J; Malinoski, Darren; Ahya, Vivek N; Angel, Luis; Byrnes, Matthew C; DeVita, Michael A; Grissom, Thomas E; Halpern, Scott D; Nakagawa, Thomas A; Stock, Peter G; Sudan, Debra L; Wood, Kenneth E; Anillo, Sergio J; Bleck, Thomas P; Eidbo, Elling E; Fowler, Richard A; Glazier, Alexandra K; Gries, Cynthia; Hasz, Richard; Herr, Dan; Khan, Akhtar; Landsberg, David; Lebovitz, Daniel J; Levine, Deborah Jo; Mathur, Mudit; Naik, Priyumvada; Niemann, Claus U; Nunley, David R; O'Connor, Kevin J; Pelletier, Shawn J; Rahman, Omar; Ranjan, Dinesh; Salim, Ali; Sawyer, Robert G; Shafer, Teresa; Sonneti, David; Spiro, Peter; Valapour, Maryam; Vikraman-Sushama, Deepak; Whelan, Timothy P M

    2015-06-01

    This document was developed through the collaborative efforts of the Society of Critical Care Medicine, the American College of Chest Physicians, and the Association of Organ Procurement Organizations. Under the auspices of these societies, a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional task force was convened, incorporating expertise in critical care medicine, organ donor management, and transplantation. Members of the task force were divided into 13 subcommittees, each focused on one of the following general or organ-specific areas: death determination using neurologic criteria, donation after circulatory death determination, authorization process, general contraindications to donation, hemodynamic management, endocrine dysfunction and hormone replacement therapy, pediatric donor management, cardiac donation, lung donation, liver donation, kidney donation, small bowel donation, and pancreas donation. Subcommittees were charged with generating a series of management-related questions related to their topic. For each question, subcommittees provided a summary of relevant literature and specific recommendations. The specific recommendations were approved by all members of the task force and then assembled into a complete document. Because the available literature was overwhelmingly comprised of observational studies and case series, representing low-quality evidence, a decision was made that the document would assume the form of a consensus statement rather than a formally graded guideline. The goal of this document is to provide critical care practitioners with essential information and practical recommendations related to management of the potential organ donor, based on the available literature and expert consensus.

  15. How Chunks, Long-Term Working Memory and Templates Offer a Cognitive Explanation for Neuroimaging Data on Expertise Acquisition: A Two-Stage Framework

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Guida, Alessandro; Gobet, Fernand; Tardieu, Hubert; Nicolas, Serge

    2012-01-01

    Our review of research on PET and fMRI neuroimaging of experts and expertise acquisition reveals two apparently discordant patterns in working-memory-related tasks. When experts are involved, studies show activations in brain regions typically activated during long-term memory tasks that are not observed with novices, a result that is compatible…

  16. Influence of musical expertise on segmental and tonal processing in Mandarin Chinese.

    PubMed

    Marie, Céline; Delogu, Franco; Lampis, Giulia; Belardinelli, Marta Olivetti; Besson, Mireille

    2011-10-01

    A same-different task was used to test the hypothesis that musical expertise improves the discrimination of tonal and segmental (consonant, vowel) variations in a tone language, Mandarin Chinese. Two four-word sequences (prime and target) were presented to French musicians and nonmusicians unfamiliar with Mandarin, and event-related brain potentials were recorded. Musicians detected both tonal and segmental variations more accurately than nonmusicians. Moreover, tonal variations were associated with higher error rate than segmental variations and elicited an increased N2/N3 component that developed 100 msec earlier in musicians than in nonmusicians. Finally, musicians also showed enhanced P3b components to both tonal and segmental variations. These results clearly show that musical expertise influenced the perceptual processing as well as the categorization of linguistic contrasts in a foreign language. They show positive music-to-language transfer effects and open new perspectives for the learning of tone languages.

  17. Visual prediction and perceptual expertise

    PubMed Central

    Cheung, Olivia S.; Bar, Moshe

    2012-01-01

    Making accurate predictions about what may happen in the environment requires analogies between perceptual input and associations in memory. These elements of predictions are based on cortical representations, but little is known about how these processes can be enhanced by experience and training. On the other hand, studies on perceptual expertise have revealed that the acquisition of expertise leads to strengthened associative processing among features or objects, suggesting that predictions and expertise may be tightly connected. Here we review the behavioral and neural findings regarding the mechanisms involving prediction and expert processing, and highlight important possible overlaps between them. Future investigation should examine the relations among perception, memory and prediction skills as a function of expertise. The knowledge gained by this line of research will have implications for visual cognition research, and will advance our understanding of how the human brain can improve its ability to predict by learning from experience. PMID:22123523

  18. Sibling dynamics and sport expertise.

    PubMed

    Hopwood, M J; Farrow, D; MacMahon, C; Baker, J

    2015-10-01

    Family members are known to be highly influential in the development of sport expertise. To date, much of the research in this area has focused on parents, with less known about sibling influences on expertise. This investigation explored associations between sport expertise, sibling characteristics, and sibling participation in sport and physical activity. Athletes representing three skill levels provided details of sibling characteristics and participation in sport and physical activity via the Developmental History of Athletes Questionnaire. Elite athletes were more likely to be later-born children, while pre-elite and non-elite athletes were more likely to be first-born. Compared with siblings of non-elite athletes, siblings of elite athletes were more likely to have participated in regular physical activity and were more likely to have participated in sport at the pre-elite and elite levels. These results suggest siblings may play a key role in sport expertise development. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons A/S. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

  19. Investigating Assessment Bias for Constructed Response Explanation Tasks: Implications for Evaluating Performance Expectations for Scientific Practice

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Federer, Meghan Rector

    frequently incorporate multivalent concepts into explanations of change, resulting in explanatory practices that were scientifically non-normative. However, use of follow-up question approaches was found to resolve this source of bias and thereby increase the validity of inferences about student understanding. The second study focused on issues of item and instrument structure, specifically item feature effects and item position effects, which have been shown to influence measures of student performance across assessment tasks. Results indicated that, along the instrument item sequence, items with similar surface features produced greater sequencing effects than sequences of items with dissimilar surface features. This bias could be addressed by use of a counterbalanced design (i.e., Latin Square) at the population level of analysis. Explanation scores were also highly correlated with student verbosity, despite verbosity being an intrinsically trivial aspect of explanation quality. Attempting to standardize student response length was one proposed solution to the verbosity bias. The third study explored gender differences in students' performance on constructed-response explanation tasks using impact (i.e., mean raw scores) and differential item function (i.e., item difficulties) patterns. While prior research in science education has suggested that females tend to perform better on constructed-response items, the results of this study revealed no overall differences in gender achievement. However, evaluation of specific item features patterns suggested that female respondents have a slight advantage on unfamiliar explanation tasks. That is, male students tended to incorporate fewer scientifically normative concepts (i.e., key concepts) than females for unfamiliar taxa. Conversely, females tended to incorporate more scientifically non-normative ideas (i.e., naive ideas) than males for familiar taxa. Together these results indicate that gender achievement differences for this

  20. Persistent bias in expert judgments about free will and moral responsibility: a test of the expertise defense.

    PubMed

    Schulz, Eric; Cokely, Edward T; Feltz, Adam

    2011-12-01

    Many philosophers appeal to intuitions to support some philosophical views. However, there is reason to be concerned about this practice as scientific evidence has documented systematic bias in philosophically relevant intuitions as a function of seemingly irrelevant features (e.g., personality). One popular defense used to insulate philosophers from these concerns holds that philosophical expertise eliminates the influence of these extraneous factors. Here, we test this assumption. We present data suggesting that verifiable philosophical expertise in the free will debate-as measured by a reliable and validated test of expert knowledge-does not eliminate the influence of one important extraneous feature (i.e., the heritable personality trait extraversion) on judgments concerning freedom and moral responsibility. These results suggest that, in at least some important cases, the expertise defense fails. Implications for the practice of philosophy, experimental philosophy, and applied ethics are discussed. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  1. Self-organization of chaos in mythology from a scientific point of view

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Melker, Alexander I.

    2007-04-01

    In this contribution ancient Greek myths describing world's creation are analyzed as if they were a scientific paper. The 'paper' divided into the following parts: initial and boundary conditions, self-organization of chaos, world lines of self-organization, conclusion. It is shown that the self-organization of chaos consists of several stages during which two motive forces (attractive and repulsive) are generated, and totally disordered chaos transforms into partially ordered. It is found that there are five world lines of self-organization: water, light, cosmos-weather, water-fire, and State evolution.

  2. The Expertise Reversal Effect Concerning Instructional Explanations

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Rey, Gunter Daniel; Fischer, Andreas

    2013-01-01

    The expertise reversal effect occurs when learner's expertise moderates design principles derived from cognitive load theory. Although this effect is supported by numerous empirical studies, indicating an overall large effect size, the effect was never tested by inducing expertise experimentally and using instructional explanations in a…

  3. Cognition and Expertise in Sport.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Garland, Daniel J.; Barry, John R.

    The influence cognitive components have on expertise in sport is receiving a great deal of attention. Recent research indicates that levels of expertise in sport can be differentiated with cognitive components. This suggests that skilled athletes do not necessarily have superior physiological and biomechanical systems, but have the same type of…

  4. 75 FR 51239 - Census Scientific Advisory Committee; Notice of Public Meeting

    Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

    2010-08-19

    ... Advisory Committee (C-SAC). The Committee will address policy, research, and technical issues relating to a.... The Committee provides scientific and technical expertise, as appropriate, to address Census Bureau...

  5. The roles of deliberate practice and innate ability in developing expertise: evidence and implications.

    PubMed

    Kulasegaram, Kulamakan M; Grierson, Lawrence E M; Norman, Geoffrey R

    2013-10-01

    Medical education research focuses extensively on experience and deliberate practice (DP) as key factors in the development of expert performance. The research on DP minimises the role of individual ability in expert performance. This claim ignores a large body of research supporting the importance of innate individual cognitive differences. We review the relationship between DP and an innate individual ability, working memory (WM) capacity, to illustrate how both DP and individual ability predict expert performance. This narrative review examines the relationship between DP and WM in accounting for expert performance. Studies examining DP, WM and individual differences were identified through a targeted search. Although all studies support extensive DP as a factor in explaining expertise, much research suggests individual cognitive differences, such as WM capacity, predict expert performance after controlling for DP. The extent to which this occurs may be influenced by the nature of the task under study and the cognitive processes used by experts. The importance of WM capacity is greater for tasks that are non-routine or functionally complex. Clinical reasoning displays evidence of this task-dependent importance of individual ability. No single factor is both necessary and sufficient in explaining expertise, and individual abilities such as WM can be important. These individual abilities are likely to contribute to expert performance in clinical settings. Medical education research and practice should identify the individual differences in novices and experts that are important to clinical performance. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

  6. Development of Design Expertise by Architecture Students

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Oluwatayo, Adedapo Adewunmi; Ezema, Isidore; Opoko, Akunnaya

    2017-01-01

    What constitutes design ability and design expertise in architecture? Which categories of design expertise can be identified amongst architecture students? And which input factors differentiate one level of expertise from another? These questions were addressed in a survey of architecture students in Nigeria. Based on the results, students were…

  7. An Expertise Recommender using Web Mining

    NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

    Joshi, Anupam; Chandrasekaran, Purnima; ShuYang, Michelle; Ramakrishnan, Ramya

    2001-01-01

    This report explored techniques to mine web pages of scientists to extract information regarding their expertise, build expertise chains and referral webs, and semi automatically combine this information with directory information services to create a recommender system that permits query by expertise. The approach included experimenting with existing techniques that have been reported in research literature in recent past , and adapted them as needed. In addition, software tools were developed to capture and use this information.

  8. The Problem of Expertise in Knowledge Societies

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Grundmann, Reiner

    2017-01-01

    This paper puts forward a theoretical framework for the analysis of expertise and experts in contemporary societies. It argues that while prevailing approaches have come to see expertise in various forms and functions, they tend to neglect the broader historical and societal context, and importantly the relational aspect of expertise. This will be…

  9. Scientific expertise and the Athlete Biological Passport: 3 years of experience.

    PubMed

    Schumacher, Yorck Olaf; d'Onofrio, Giuseppe

    2012-06-01

    Expert evaluation of biological data is a key component of the Athlete Biological Passport approach in the fight against doping. The evaluation consists of a longitudinal assessment of biological variables to determine the probability of the data being physiological on the basis of the athlete's on own previous values (performed by an automated software system using a Bayesian model) and a subjective evaluation of the results in view of possible causes (performed by experts). The role of the expert is therefore a key component in the process. Experts should be qualified to evaluate the data regarding possible explanations related to the influence of doping products and methods, analytical issues, and the influence of exercise or pathological conditions. The evaluation provides a scientific basis for the decision taken by a disciplinary panel. This evaluation should therefore encompass and balance all possible causes for a given blood profile and provide a likelihood for potential scenarios (pathology, normal variation, doping) that might have caused the pattern. It should comply with the standards for the evaluation of scientific evidence in forensics. On the basis of their evaluation of profiles, experts might provide assistance in planning appropriate target testing schemes.

  10. A design space of visualization tasks.

    PubMed

    Schulz, Hans-Jörg; Nocke, Thomas; Heitzler, Magnus; Schumann, Heidrun

    2013-12-01

    Knowledge about visualization tasks plays an important role in choosing or building suitable visual representations to pursue them. Yet, tasks are a multi-faceted concept and it is thus not surprising that the many existing task taxonomies and models all describe different aspects of tasks, depending on what these task descriptions aim to capture. This results in a clear need to bring these different aspects together under the common hood of a general design space of visualization tasks, which we propose in this paper. Our design space consists of five design dimensions that characterize the main aspects of tasks and that have so far been distributed across different task descriptions. We exemplify its concrete use by applying our design space in the domain of climate impact research. To this end, we propose interfaces to our design space for different user roles (developers, authors, and end users) that allow users of different levels of expertise to work with it.

  11. The Building of Weak Expertise: The Work of Global University Rankers

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Lim, Miguel Antonio

    2018-01-01

    University rankers are the subject of much criticism, and yet they remain influential in the field of higher education. Drawing from a two-year field study of university ranking organizations, interviews with key correspondents in the sector, and an analysis of related documents, I introduce the concept of "weak expertise." This kind of…

  12. Using Heuristic Task Analysis to Create Web-Based Instructional Design Theory

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Fiester, Herbert R.

    2010-01-01

    The first purpose of this study was to identify procedural and heuristic knowledge used when creating web-based instruction. The second purpose of this study was to develop suggestions for improving the Heuristic Task Analysis process, a technique for eliciting, analyzing, and representing expertise in cognitively complex tasks. Three expert…

  13. Beyond Faces and Expertise: Facelike Holistic Processing of Nonface Objects in the Absence of Expertise.

    PubMed

    Zhao, Mintao; Bülthoff, Heinrich H; Bülthoff, Isabelle

    2016-02-01

    Holistic processing-the tendency to perceive objects as indecomposable wholes-has long been viewed as a process specific to faces or objects of expertise. Although current theories differ in what causes holistic processing, they share a fundamental constraint for its generalization: Nonface objects cannot elicit facelike holistic processing in the absence of expertise. Contrary to this prevailing view, here we show that line patterns with salient Gestalt information (i.e., connectedness, closure, and continuity between parts) can be processed as holistically as faces without any training. Moreover, weakening the saliency of Gestalt information in these patterns reduced holistic processing of them, which indicates that Gestalt information plays a crucial role in holistic processing. Therefore, holistic processing can be achieved not only via a top-down route based on expertise, but also via a bottom-up route relying merely on object-based information. The finding that facelike holistic processing can extend beyond the domains of faces and objects of expertise poses a challenge to current dominant theories. © The Author(s) 2015.

  14. Task switching in a hierarchical task structure: evidence for the fragility of the task repetition benefit.

    PubMed

    Lien, Mei-Ching; Ruthruff, Eric

    2004-05-01

    This study examined how task switching is affected by hierarchical task organization. Traditional task-switching studies, which use a constant temporal and spatial distance between each task element (defined as a stimulus requiring a response), promote a flat task structure. Using this approach, Experiment 1 revealed a large switch cost of 238 ms. In Experiments 2-5, adjacent task elements were grouped temporally and/or spatially (forming an ensemble) to create a hierarchical task organization. Results indicate that the effect of switching at the ensemble level dominated the effect of switching at the element level. Experiments 6 and 7, using an ensemble of 3 task elements, revealed that the element-level switch cost was virtually absent between ensembles but was large within an ensemble. The authors conclude that the element-level task repetition benefit is fragile and can be eliminated in a hierarchical task organization.

  15. Task switching in a hierarchical task structure: evidence for the fragility of the task repetition benefit

    NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

    Lien, Mei-Ching; Ruthruff, Eric

    2004-01-01

    This study examined how task switching is affected by hierarchical task organization. Traditional task-switching studies, which use a constant temporal and spatial distance between each task element (defined as a stimulus requiring a response), promote a flat task structure. Using this approach, Experiment 1 revealed a large switch cost of 238 ms. In Experiments 2-5, adjacent task elements were grouped temporally and/or spatially (forming an ensemble) to create a hierarchical task organization. Results indicate that the effect of switching at the ensemble level dominated the effect of switching at the element level. Experiments 6 and 7, using an ensemble of 3 task elements, revealed that the element-level switch cost was virtually absent between ensembles but was large within an ensemble. The authors conclude that the element-level task repetition benefit is fragile and can be eliminated in a hierarchical task organization.

  16. Reciprocal learning with task cards for teaching Basic Life Support (BLS): investigating effectiveness and the effect of instructor expertise on learning outcomes. A randomized controlled trial.

    PubMed

    Iserbyt, Peter; Mols, Liesbet; Charlier, Nathalie; De Meester, Sophie

    2014-01-01

    Basic Life Support (BLS) education in secondary schools and universities is often neglected or outsourced because teachers indicate not feeling competent to teach this content. Investigate reciprocal learning with task cards as instructional model for teaching BLS and the effect of instructor expertise in BLS on learning outcomes. There were 175 students (mean age = 18.9 years) randomized across a reciprocal/BLS instructor (RBI) group, a reciprocal/non-BLS instructor (RNI) group, and a traditional/BLS instructor group (TBI). In the RBI and RNI group, students were taught BLS through reciprocal learning with task cards. The instructor in the RBI group was certified in BLS by the European Resuscitation Council. In the TBI, students were taught BLS by a certified instructor according to the Belgian Red Cross instructional model. Student performance was assessed 1 day (intervention) and 3 weeks after intervention (retention). At retention, significantly higher BLS performances were found in the RBI group (M = 78%), p = 0.007, ES = 0.25, and the RNI group (M = 80%), p < 0.001, Effect Size (ES) = .36, compared to the TBI (M = 73%). Significantly more students remembered and performed all BLS skills in the experimental groups at intervention and retention. No differences in BLS performance were found between the reciprocal groups. Ventilation volumes and flow rates were significantly better in the TBI at intervention and retention. Reciprocal learning with task cards is a valuable model for teaching BLS when instructors are not experienced or skilled in BLS. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  17. Hemodynamic Response Alteration As a Function of Task Complexity and Expertise—An fNIRS Study in Jugglers

    PubMed Central

    Carius, Daniel; Andrä, Christian; Clauß, Martina; Ragert, Patrick; Bunk, Michael; Mehnert, Jan

    2016-01-01

    Detailed knowledge about online brain processing during the execution of complex motor tasks with a high motion range still remains elusive. The aim of the present study was to investigate the hemodynamic responses within sensorimotor networks as well as in visual motion area during the execution of a complex visuomotor task such as juggling. More specifically, we were interested in how far the hemodynamic response as measured with functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) adapts as a function of task complexity and the level of the juggling expertise. We asked expert jugglers to perform different juggling tasks with different levels of complexity such as a 2-ball juggling, 3- and 5-ball juggling cascades. We here demonstrate that expert jugglers show an altered neurovascular response with increasing task complexity, since a 5-ball juggling cascade showed enhanced hemodynamic responses for oxygenated hemoglobin as compared to less complex tasks such as a 3- or 2-ball juggling pattern. Moreover, correlations between the hemodynamic response and the level of the juggling expertise during the 5-ball juggling cascade, acquired by cinematographic video analysis, revealed only a non-significant trend in primary motor cortex, indicating that a higher level of expertise might be associated with lower hemodynamic responses. PMID:27064925

  18. Elementary Students' Laboratory Record Keeping during Scientific Inquiry

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Garcia-Mila, Merce; Andersen, Christopher; Rojo, Nubia E.

    2011-01-01

    The present study examines the mutual interaction between students' writing and scientific reasoning among sixth-grade students (age 11-12 years) engaged in scientific inquiry. The experimental task was designed to promote spontaneous record keeping compared to previous task designs by increasing the saliency of task requirements, with the design…

  19. Toward Theory-Based Instruction in Scientific Problem Solving.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Heller, Joan I.; And Others

    Several empirical and theoretical analyses related to scientific problem-solving are reviewed, including: detailed studies of individuals at different levels of expertise, and computer models simulating some aspects of human information processing during problem solving. Analysis of these studies has revealed many facets about the nature of the…

  20. Integrating gender medicine into the workplace health and safety policy in the scientific research institutions: a mandatory task.

    PubMed

    Giammarioli, Anna Maria; Siracusano, Alessandra; Sorrentino, Eugenio; Bettoni, Monica; Malorni, Walter

    2012-01-01

    Gender medicine is a multi-faceted field of investigation integrating various aspects of psycho-social and biological sciences but it mainly deals with the impact of the gender on human physiology, pathophysiology, and clinical features of diseases. In Italy, the Decree Law 81/2008 recently introduced the gender issue in the risk assessment at the workplaces. This review briefly describes our current knowledge on gender medicine and on the Italian legislation in risk management. Public or private scientific institutions should be the first to pay attention to the safety of their workers, who are simultaneously subjected to biological, chemical and physical agents. Main tasks of risk management in scientific research institutions are here analyzed and discussed in a gender perspective.

  1. Teaching Metacognitive Knowledge and Developing Expertise

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    van Velzen, Joke H.

    2012-01-01

    Teacher educators' knowledge about metacognitive knowledge and developing expertise can provide for insights about teaching these "difficult" constructs. In this explorative study, six teacher educators' remarks regarding metacognitive knowledge and developing expertise were examined. The teacher educators filled in closed-ended and…

  2. When music and long-term memory interact: effects of musical expertise on functional and structural plasticity in the hippocampus.

    PubMed

    Groussard, Mathilde; La Joie, Renaud; Rauchs, Géraldine; Landeau, Brigitte; Chételat, Gaël; Viader, Fausto; Desgranges, Béatrice; Eustache, Francis; Platel, Hervé

    2010-10-05

    The development of musical skills by musicians results in specific structural and functional modifications in the brain. Surprisingly, no functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study has investigated the impact of musical training on brain function during long-term memory retrieval, a faculty particularly important in music. Thus, using fMRI, we examined for the first time this process during a musical familiarity task (i.e., semantic memory for music). Musical expertise induced supplementary activations in the hippocampus, medial frontal gyrus, and superior temporal areas on both sides, suggesting a constant interaction between episodic and semantic memory during this task in musicians. In addition, a voxel-based morphometry (VBM) investigation was performed within these areas and revealed that gray matter density of the hippocampus was higher in musicians than in nonmusicians. Our data indicate that musical expertise critically modifies long-term memory processes and induces structural and functional plasticity in the hippocampus.

  3. Similar ventral occipito-temporal cortex activations in literate and illiterate adults during the Chinese character matching task: an fMRI study.

    PubMed

    Qi, Geqi; Li, Xiujun; Yan, Tianyi; Wang, Bin; Yang, Jiajia; Wu, Jinglong; Guo, Qiyong

    2014-04-30

    Visual word expertise is typically associated with enhanced ventral occipito-temporal (vOT) cortex activation in response to written words. Previous study utilized a passive viewing task and found that vOT response to written words was significantly stronger in literate compared to the illiterate subjects. However, recent neuroimaging findings have suggested that vOT response properties are highly dependent upon the task demand. Thus, it is unknown whether literate adults would show stronger vOT response to written words compared to illiterate adults during other cognitive tasks, such as perceptual matching. We addressed this issue by comparing vOT activations between literate and illiterate adults during a Chinese character and simple figure matching task. Unlike passive viewing, a perceptual matching task requires active shape comparison, therefore minimizing automatic word processing bias. We found that although the literate group performed better at Chinese character matching task, the two subject groups showed similar strong vOT responses during this task. Overall, the findings indicate that the vOT response to written words is not affected by expertise during a perceptual matching task, suggesting that the association between visual word expertise and vOT response may depend on the task demand. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

  4. Novice Explanations of Hurricane Formation Offer Insights into Scientific Literacy and the Development of Expert-Like Conceptions

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Arthurs, Leilani A.; Van Den Broeke, Matthew S.

    2016-01-01

    The ability to explain scientific phenomena is a key feature of scientific literacy, and engaging students' prior knowledge, especially their alternate conceptions, is an effective strategy for enhancing scientific literacy and developing expertise. The gap in knowledge about the alternate conceptions that novices have about many of Earth's…

  5. Development of professional expertise in optometry.

    PubMed

    Faucher, Caroline

    2011-04-01

    Development of professional expertise is the gradual transition from novice to expert within a profession. Studies on expertise in the profession of optometry have never been published. However, many studies have been performed in other health professions (e.g., nursing, medicine, physical therapy, occupational therapy). This report is an overview of the development of professional expertise that will highlight some applications for optometry. A 5-level scale of professional expertise development, divided into 2 parts, is described. The first part is the progression of students during their professional studies (novice, intermediate, competent). The second part is the professional development occurring during the practice years (advanced, expert). Personal and collective efforts are required to foster the progression toward expertise. Great interest for the profession, motivation, and deliberate practice are individual attitudes that help this progression. The "optometric community of practice," by means of university (professional) training, continuing education, and collaboration between colleagues, also contributes to this process. Professional development is an integral part of the Optometric Oath. Each clinical case is a potential learning experience contributing to one's professional development. Optometrists' attitudes are predominant factors in the progression from one level to another. Copyright © 2011 American Optometric Association. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  6. A study of performance assessment task organization in high school optics

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Zawicki, Joseph Leo

    2002-01-01

    This investigation was undertaken to validate three performance assessment tasks in high school physics. The tasks that were studied were developed around three organizational models of performance assessments: integrated, independent and surrogate. The integrated model required students to answer questions, make observations and demonstrate skills related to the index of refraction of a particular material. All of the questions and activities the students completed were related to a sample of a particular plastic sample that was the focus of this task. The independent model is analogous to the station model that is currently used on three New York State assessments: the Grade 4 - Elementary Science Program Evaluation Test, the Intermediate Level Science (ILS) Test, and the Physical Setting: Earth Science Regents Exam. Students took measurements related to the index of refraction of a plastic sample that was the focus of the initial portion of this task; the remaining questions on the assessment were generally related to the concept of the index of refraction but did not refer back to the initial sample. The final task organization followed the surrogate model. In this model, students reviewed data that was collected and analyzed by other (fictitious) students. The students completing this task were asked to review the work presented on this assessment for errors; they evaluated the conclusions and statements presented on the assessment. Students were also asked to determine if the student work was acceptable or if this investigation should be repeated. Approximately 300 students from urban, suburban and rural districts across Western New York State participated in the study. The tasks were administered during the spring semester of the 2000--2001 school year. The participating schools had at least covered the topic of refraction, both in classroom lectures and in laboratory activities. Each student completed only one form of the task---either the integrated, the

  7. Laparoscopic Common Bile Duct Exploration Four-Task Training Model: Construct Validity

    PubMed Central

    Otaño, Natalia; Rodríguez, Omaira; Sánchez, Renata; Benítez, Gustavo; Schweitzer, Michael

    2012-01-01

    Background: Training models in laparoscopic surgery allow the surgical team to practice procedures in a safe environment. We have proposed the use of a 4-task, low-cost inert model to practice critical steps of laparoscopic common bile duct exploration. Methods: The performance of 3 groups with different levels of expertise in laparoscopic surgery, novices (A), intermediates (B), and experts (C), was evaluated using a low-cost inert model in the following tasks: (1) intraoperative cholangiography catheter insertion, (2) transcystic exploration, (3) T-tube placement, and (4) choledochoscope management. Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney tests were used to identify differences among the groups. Results: A total of 14 individuals were evaluated: 5 novices (A), 5 intermediates (B), and 4 experts (C). The results involving intraoperative cholangiography catheter insertion were similar among the 3 groups. As for the other tasks, the expert had better results than the other 2, in which no significant differences occurred. The proposed model is able to discriminate among individuals with different levels of expertise, indicating that the abilities that the model evaluates are relevant in the surgeon's performance in CBD exploration. Conclusions: Construct validity for tasks 2 and 3 was demonstrated. However, task 1 was no capable of distinguishing between groups, and task 4 was not statistically validated. PMID:22906323

  8. Emergent Expertise?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    McGivern, Patrick

    2014-01-01

    The concept of emergence appears in various places within the literature on expertise and expert practice. Here, I examine some of these applications of emergence in the light of two prominent accounts of emergence from the philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. I evaluate these accounts with respect to several specific contexts in which…

  9. The Effects of Teacher-Introduced Multimodal Representations and Discourse on Students' Task Engagement and Scientific Language during Cooperative, Inquiry-Based Science

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Gillies, Robyn M.; Baffour, Bernard

    2017-01-01

    The study sought to determine the effects of teacher-introduced multimodal representations and discourse on students' task engagement and scientific language during cooperative, inquiry-based science. The study involved eight Year 6 teachers in two conditions (four very effective teachers and four effective teachers) who taught two units of…

  10. Forensic entomology: implementing quality assurance for expertise work.

    PubMed

    Gaudry, Emmanuel; Dourel, Laurent

    2013-09-01

    The Department of Forensic Entomology (Institut de Recherche Criminelle de la Gendarmerie Nationale, France) was accredited by the French Committee of Accreditation (Cofrac's Healthcare section) in October 2007 on the basis of NF EN ISO/CEI 17025 standard. It was the first accreditation in this specific field of forensic sciences in France and in Europe. The present paper introduces the accreditation process in forensic entomology (FE) through the experience of the Department of Forensic Entomology. Based upon the identification of necrophagous insects and the study of their biology, FE must, as any other expertise work in forensic sciences, demonstrate integrity and good working practice to satisfy both the courts and the scientific community. FE does not, strictly speaking, follow an analytical method. This could explain why, to make up for a lack of appropriate quality reference, a specific documentation was drafted and written by the staff of the Department of Forensic Entomology in order to define working methods complying with quality standards (testing methods). A quality assurance system is laborious to set up and maintain and can be perceived as complex, time-consuming and never-ending. However, a survey performed in 2011 revealed that the accreditation process in the frame of expertise work has led to new well-defined working habits, based on an effort at transparency. It also requires constant questioning and a proactive approach, both profitable for customers (magistrates, investigators) and analysts (forensic entomologists).

  11. Making Scientific Data Usable and Useful

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Satwicz, T.; Bharadwaj, A.; Evans, J.; Dirks, J.; Clark Cole, K.

    2017-12-01

    Transforming geological data into information that has broad scientific and societal impact is a process fraught with barriers. Data sets and tools are often reported to have poor user experiences (UX) that make scientific work more challenging than it needs be. While many other technical fields have benefited from ongoing improvements to the UX of their tools (e.g., healthcare and financial services) scientists are faced with using tools that are labor intensive and not intuitive. Our research team has been involved in a multi-year effort to understand and improve the UX of scientific tools and data sets. We use a User-Centered Design (UCD) process that involves naturalistic behavioral observation and other qualitative research methods adopted from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and related fields. Behavioral observation involves having users complete common tasks on data sets, tools, and websites to identify usability issues and understand the severity of the issues. We measure how successfully they complete tasks and diagnosis the cause of any failures. Behavioral observation is paired with in-depth interviews where users describe their process for generating results (from initial inquiry to final results). By asking detailed questions we unpack common patterns and challenges scientists experience while working with data. We've found that tools built using the UCD process can have a large impact on scientist work flows and greatly reduce the time it takes to process data before analysis. It is often challenging to understand the organization and nuances of data across scientific fields. By better understanding how scientists work we can create tools that make routine tasks less-labor intensive, data easier to find, and solve common issues with discovering new data sets and engaging in interdisciplinary research. There is a tremendous opportunity for advancing scientific knowledge and helping the public benefit from that work by creating intuitive, interactive

  12. Fostering Social Expertise in Early Childhood

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Porath, Marion

    2009-01-01

    Social competence is an essential capability to bring to school because of its relationship to academic success. Development and consolidation of social understanding in early childhood ensures that young children have a solid foundation of social expertise when they begin formal schooling. Social expertise, conceptualized within the framework of…

  13. [Traumatic brain injuries--forensic and expertise aspects].

    PubMed

    Vuleković, Petar; Simić, Milan; Misić-Pavkov, Gordana; Cigić, Tomislav; Kojadinović, Zeljko; Dilvesi, Dula

    2008-01-01

    Traumatic brain injuries have major socio-economic importance due to their frequency, high mortality and serious consequences. According to their nature the consequences of these injuries may be classified as neurological, psychiatric and esthetic. Various lesions of brain structures cause neurological consequences such as disturbance of motor functions, sensibility, coordination or involuntary movements, speech disturbances and other deviations, as well as epilepsy. Psychiatric consequences include cognitive deficit, emotional disturbances and behavior disturbances. CRIMINAL-LEGAL ASPECT OF TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURIES AND LITIGATION: Criminal-legal aspect of traumatic brain injuries expertise understands the qualification of these injuries as mild, serious and qualified serious body injuries as well as the expertise about the mechanisms of their occurrence. Litigation expertise includes the estimation of pain, fear, diminished, i.e. lost vital activity and disability, esthetic marring, and psychological suffer based on the diminished general vital activity and esthetic marring. Evaluation of consequences of traumatic brain injuries should be performed only when it can be positively confirmed that they are permanent, i.e. at least one year after the injury. Expertise of these injuries is interdisciplinary. Among clinical doctors the most competent medical expert is the one who is in charge for diagnostics and injury treatment, with the recommendation to avoid, if possible, the doctor who conducted treatment. For the estimation of general vital activity, the neurological consequences, pain and esthetic marring expertise, the most competent doctors are neurosurgeon and neurologist. Psychological psychiatric consequences and fear expertise have to be performed by the psychiatrist. Specialists of forensic medicine contribute with knowledge of criminal low and legal expertise.

  14. A scale-based approach to interdisciplinary research and expertise in sports.

    PubMed

    Ibáñez-Gijón, Jorge; Buekers, Martinus; Morice, Antoine; Rao, Guillaume; Mascret, Nicolas; Laurin, Jérome; Montagne, Gilles

    2017-02-01

    After more than 20 years since the introduction of ecological and dynamical approaches in sports research, their promising opportunity for interdisciplinary research has not been fulfilled yet. The complexity of the research process and the theoretical and empirical difficulties associated with an integrated ecological-dynamical approach have been the major factors hindering the generalisation of interdisciplinary projects in sports sciences. To facilitate this generalisation, we integrate the major concepts from the ecological and dynamical approaches to study behaviour as a multi-scale process. Our integration gravitates around the distinction between functional (ecological) and execution (organic) scales, and their reciprocal intra- and inter-scale constraints. We propose an (epistemological) scale-based definition of constraints that accounts for the concept of synergies as emergent coordinative structures. To illustrate how we can operationalise the notion of multi-scale synergies we use an interdisciplinary model of locomotor pointing. To conclude, we show the value of this approach for interdisciplinary research in sport sciences, as we discuss two examples of task-specific dimensionality reduction techniques in the context of an ongoing project that aims to unveil the determinants of expertise in basketball free throw shooting. These techniques provide relevant empirical evidence to help bootstrap the challenging modelling efforts required in sport sciences.

  15. An embodied perspective on expertise in solving the problem of making a geologic map

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Callahan, Caitlin Norah

    The task of constructing a geologic map is a cognitively and physically demanding field-based problem. The map produced is understood to be an individual's two-dimensional interpretation or mental model of the three-dimensional underlying geology. A popular view within the geoscience community is that teaching students how to make a geologic map is valuable for preparing them to deal with disparate and incomplete data sets, for helping them develop problem-solving skills, and for acquiring expertise in geology. Few previous studies have focused specifically on expertise in geologic mapping. Drawing from literature related to expertise, to problem solving, and to mental models, two overarching research questions were identified: How do geologists of different levels of expertise constrain and solve an ill-structured problem such as making a geologic map? How do geologists address the uncertainties inherent to the processes and interpretations involved in solving a geologic mapping problem? These questions were answered using a methodology that captured the physical actions, expressed thoughts, and navigation paths of geologists as they made a geologic map. Eight geologists, from novice to expert, wore a head-mounted video camera with an attached microphone to record those actions and thoughts, creating "video logs" while in the field. The video logs were also time-stamped, which allowed the visual and audio data to be synchronized with the GPS data that tracked participants' movements in the field. Analysis of the video logs yielded evidence that all eight participants expressed thoughts that reflected the process of becoming mentally situated in the mapping task (e.g. relating between distance on a map and distance in three-dimensional space); the prominence of several of these early thoughts waned in the expressed thoughts later in the day. All participants collected several types of data while in the field; novices, however, did so more continuously throughout

  16. Re-defining nursing expertise in the United kingdom.

    PubMed

    Hardy, Sally; Titchen, Angie; Manley, Kim; McCormack, Brendan

    2006-07-01

    There is now international recognition of the importance of practice expertise in modern and effective health services. The Expertise in Practice Project in the United Kingdom began in May 1998 and continued to 2004. It included nurses working in all four countries of the United Kingdom, and it covered clinical specialists from pediatrics to palliative care. The project added to the current understanding of what nursing practice expertise is, through the identification and verification of attributes and factors which enable expert practice. The proposed framework offers a language for sharing what constitutes practice expertise and offers insight into what occurs between the expert practitioner and the people that experience their care. The Expertise in Practice Project demonstrates that nurses affect change and facilitate performance and organizational development.

  17. Using the Biology Card Sorting Task to Measure Changes in Conceptual Expertise during Postsecondary Biology Education

    PubMed Central

    Bissonnette, Sarah A.; Combs, Elijah D.; Nagami, Paul H.; Byers, Victor; Fernandez, Juliana; Le, Dinh; Realin, Jared; Woodham, Selina; Smith, Julia I.; Tanner, Kimberly D.

    2017-01-01

    While there have been concerted efforts to reform undergraduate biology toward teaching students to organize their conceptual knowledge like experts, there are few tools that attempt to measure this. We previously developed the Biology Card Sorting Task (BCST), designed to probe how individuals organize their conceptual biological knowledge. Previous results showed the BCST could differentiate between different populations, namely non–biology majors (NBM) and biology faculty (BF). In this study, we administered the BCST to three additional populations, using a cross-sectional design: entering biology majors (EBM), advanced biology majors (ABM), and biology graduate students (BGS). Intriguingly, ABM did not initially sort like experts any more frequently than EBM. However, once the deep-feature framework was revealed, ABM were able to sort like experts more readily than did EBM. These results are consistent with the conclusion that biology education enables advanced biology students to use an expert-like conceptual framework. However, these results are also consistent with a process of “selection,” wherein students who persist in the major may have already had an expert-like conceptual framework to begin with. These results demonstrate the utility of the BCST in measuring differences between groups of students over the course of their undergraduate education. PMID:28213584

  18. Designing Education for Professional Expertise Development

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Elvira, Quincy; Imants, Jeroen; Dankbaar, Ben; Segers, Mien

    2017-01-01

    How to facilitate learning by novices (students) on their road to expertise has attracted the attention of a vast number of researchers in cognitive and educational psychology as well in the field of learning and instruction. Although many studies have investigated the phenomenon of expertise development, the implications of the findings for…

  19. Expertise in physiological breech birth: A mixed-methods study.

    PubMed

    Walker, Shawn; Parker, Pam; Scamell, Mandie

    2018-06-01

    The safety of vaginal breech birth depends on the expertise of birth attendants, yet the meaning of "expertise" remains unclear and subjectively defined. The objective of this study was to define expertise and the roles experts may play in expanding access to this service. We performed an integrative analysis of two strands of data concerning expertise in physiological breech birth, including the following: survey data from a Delphi study involving 26 very experienced clinicians (mean experience = 135 breech births) and 2 service user representatives, and interviews from a grounded theory study of 14 clinicians more moderately experienced with physiological methods (5-30 upright breech births). Data were pooled and analyzed using constant comparative methods. Expertise is defined by its ongoing function, the generation of comparatively good outcomes, and confidence and competence among colleagues. Although clinical experience is important, expertise is developed and expressed in social clinical roles, which expand as experience grows: clinician, mentor, specialist, and expert. To develop expertise within a service, clinicians who have an interest in breech birth should be supported to perform these roles within specialist teams. Specialist breech teams may facilitate the development of expertise within maternity care settings. Evaluation of expertise based on enablement of women and colleagues, as well as outcomes, will potentially avoid the pitfalls of alienation produced by some forms of specialist authority. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

  20. Developing Teaching Expertise in Dental Education

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Lyon, Lucinda J.

    2009-01-01

    This exploratory study was designed to develop a baseline model of expertise in dental education utilizing the Dreyfus and Dreyfus continuum of skill acquisition. The goal was the development of a baseline model of expertise, which will contribute to the body of knowledge about dental faculty skill acquisition and may enable dental schools to…

  1. The Vanderbilt Expertise Test Reveals Domain-General and Domain-Specific Sex Effects in Object Recognition

    PubMed Central

    McGugin, Rankin W.; Richler, Jennifer J.; Herzmann, Grit; Speegle, Magen; Gauthier, Isabel

    2012-01-01

    Individual differences in face recognition are often contrasted with differences in object recognition using a single object category. Likewise, individual differences in perceptual expertise for a given object domain have typically been measured relative to only a single category baseline. In Experiment 1, we present a new test of object recognition, the Vanderbilt Expertise Test (VET), which is comparable in methods to the Cambridge Face Memory Task (CFMT) but uses eight different object categories. Principal component analysis reveals that the underlying structure of the VET can be largely explained by two independent factors, which demonstrate good reliability and capture interesting sex differences inherent in the VET structure. In Experiment 2, we show how the VET can be used to separate domain-specific from domain-general contributions to a standard measure of perceptual expertise. While domain-specific contributions are found for car matching for both men and women and for plane matching in men, women in this sample appear to use more domain-general strategies to match planes. In Experiment 3, we use the VET to demonstrate that holistic processing of faces predicts face recognition independently of general object recognition ability, which has a sex-specific contribution to face recognition. Overall, the results suggest that the VET is a reliable and valid measure of object recognition abilities and can measure both domain-general skills and domain-specific expertise, which were both found to depend on the sex of observers. PMID:22877929

  2. Behavioral and subcortical signatures of musical expertise in Mandarin Chinese speakers

    PubMed Central

    Tervaniemi, Mari; Aalto, Daniel

    2018-01-01

    Both musical training and native language have been shown to have experience-based plastic effects on auditory processing. However, the combined effects within individuals are unclear. Recent research suggests that musical training and tone language speaking are not clearly additive in their effects on processing of auditory features and that there may be a disconnect between perceptual and neural signatures of auditory feature processing. The literature has only recently begun to investigate the effects of musical expertise on basic auditory processing for different linguistic groups. This work provides a profile of primary auditory feature discrimination for Mandarin speaking musicians and nonmusicians. The musicians showed enhanced perceptual discrimination for both frequency and duration as well as enhanced duration discrimination in a multifeature discrimination task, compared to nonmusicians. However, there were no differences between the groups in duration processing of nonspeech sounds at a subcortical level or in subcortical frequency representation of a nonnative tone contour, for fo or for the first or second formant region. The results indicate that musical expertise provides a cognitive, but not subcortical, advantage in a population of Mandarin speakers. PMID:29300756

  3. The role of space related non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in capacity building

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Lukaszczyk, A.; Williamson, R.

    2010-02-01

    Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play a unique role in international affairs, providing access to resources, expertise, and assistance to supplement State resources. Sometimes the diplomatic skills and unofficial access of NGOs to policymakers through Track Two diplomacy can move a previously stalled critical issue forward and assist policymakers from different countries to find common ground outside official channels. Because they work outside of official channels, they are not bound by State policy that may inhibit negotiations between States. Some also have a convening power that sometimes makes it possible for State representatives to meet discipline experts and each other for informal discussions on issues of mutual interest. Finally, NGOs can draw attention to issues that may be overlooked or avoided by State organizations. This paper examines the ways in which NGOs can assist in building scientific, technical, educational, and legal and policy expertise related to space and Earth science, technology and governance of space activities. In particular, it will explore and analyze the ways in which organizations such as the Space Generation Advisory Council, EURISY, the Planetary Society and Secure World Foundation contribute to building capacity in developing countries.

  4. Accelerating scientific discovery : 2007 annual report.

    DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

    Beckman, P.; Dave, P.; Drugan, C.

    2008-11-14

    As a gateway for scientific discovery, the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) works hand in hand with the world's best computational scientists to advance research in a diverse span of scientific domains, ranging from chemistry, applied mathematics, and materials science to engineering physics and life sciences. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science, researchers are using the IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer at the ALCF to study and explore key scientific problems that underlie important challenges facing our society. For instance, a research team at the University of California-San Diego/ SDSC is studying the molecular basis ofmore » Parkinson's disease. The researchers plan to use the knowledge they gain to discover new drugs to treat the disease and to identify risk factors for other diseases that are equally prevalent. Likewise, scientists from Pratt & Whitney are using the Blue Gene to understand the complex processes within aircraft engines. Expanding our understanding of jet engine combustors is the secret to improved fuel efficiency and reduced emissions. Lessons learned from the scientific simulations of jet engine combustors have already led Pratt & Whitney to newer designs with unprecedented reductions in emissions, noise, and cost of ownership. ALCF staff members provide in-depth expertise and assistance to those using the Blue Gene/L and optimizing user applications. Both the Catalyst and Applications Performance Engineering and Data Analytics (APEDA) teams support the users projects. In addition to working with scientists running experiments on the Blue Gene/L, we have become a nexus for the broader global community. In partnership with the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, we have created an environment where the world's most challenging computational science problems can be addressed. Our expertise in high-end scientific computing enables us to provide guidance for

  5. Contextual information and perceptual-cognitive expertise in a dynamic, temporally-constrained task.

    PubMed

    Murphy, Colm P; Jackson, Robin C; Cooke, Karl; Roca, André; Benguigui, Nicolas; Williams, A Mark

    2016-12-01

    Skilled performers extract and process postural information from an opponent during anticipation more effectively than their less-skilled counterparts. In contrast, the role and importance of contextual information in anticipation has received only minimal attention. We evaluate the importance of contextual information in anticipation and examine the underlying perceptual-cognitive processes. We present skilled and less-skilled tennis players with normal video or animated footage of the same rallies. In the animated condition, sequences were created using player movement and ball trajectory data, and postural information from the players was removed, constraining participants to anticipate based on contextual information alone. Participants judged ball bounce location of the opponent's final occluded shot. The 2 groups were more accurate than chance in both display conditions with skilled being more accurate than less-skilled (Exp. 1) participants. When anticipating based on contextual information alone, skilled participants employed different gaze behaviors to less-skilled counterparts and provided verbal reports of thoughts which were indicative of more thorough evaluation of contextual information (Exp. 2). Findings highlight the importance of both postural and contextual information in anticipation and indicate that perceptual-cognitive expertise is underpinned by processes that facilitate more effective processing of contextual information, in the absence of postural information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

  6. Using multi-disciplinary strategic master facilities planning for organizations experiencing programmatic re-direction

    DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

    Heubach, J.G.; Weimer, W.C.; Bruce, W.A.

    Facility master planning is critical to the future productivity of a laboratory and the quality of worklife for the laboratory staff. For organizations undergoing programmatic re-direction, a master facility planning approach linked to the organization`s strategic planning process is even more important. Major changes in an organization such as programmatic re-direction can significantly impact a broad range of variables which exceed the expertise of traditional planning teams, e.g., capacity variability, work team organization, organizational culture, and work process simplification. By expanding the diversity of the participants of the planning team, there is a greater likelihood that a research organization`s scientific,more » organizational, economic, and employees` needs can be meshed in the strategic plan and facility plan. Recent recommendations from facility planners suggest drawing from diverse fields in building multi-disciplinary planning teams: Architecture, engineering, natural science, social psychology, and strategic planning (Gibson,1993). For organizations undergoing significant operational or culture change, the master facility planning team should also include members with expertise in organizational effectiveness, industrial engineering, human resources, and environmental psychology. A recent planning and design project provides an example which illustrates the use of an expanded multi-disciplinary team engaged in planning laboratory renovations for a research organization undergoing programmatic re-direction. The purpose of the proposed poster session is to present a multi-disciplinary master facility planning process linked to an organization`s strategic planning process or organizational strategies.« less

  7. Neural Correlates of Expert Behavior During a Domain-Specific Attentional Cueing Task in Badminton Players.

    PubMed

    Wang, Chun-Hao; Tu, Kuo-Cheng

    2017-06-01

    The present study aimed to investigate the neural correlates associated with sports expertise during a domain-specific task in badminton players. We compared event-related potentials activity from collegiate male badminton players and a set of matched athletic controls when they performed a badminton-specific attentional cueing task in which the uncertainty and validity were manipulated. The data showed that, regardless of cue type, the badminton players had faster responses along with greater P3 amplitudes than the athletic controls on the task. Specifically, the contingent negative variation amplitude was smaller for the players than for the controls in the condition involving higher uncertainty. Such an effect, however, was absent in the condition with lower uncertainty. We conclude that expertise in sports is associated with proficient modulation of brain activity during cognitive and motor preparation, as well as response execution, when performing a task related to an individual's specific sport domain.

  8. Perception of recorded singing voice quality and expertise: cognitive linguistics and acoustic approaches.

    PubMed

    Morange, Séverine; Dubois, Danièle; Fontaine, Jean-Marc

    2010-07-01

    The objective of the present pluridisciplinary study was to contribute to determine how a diversity of audience differently appreciates several versions resulting from different "restoration" treatments of one single original lyrical recording. We present here a joint analysis coupling psychological and linguistic analyses with acoustic descriptions on a unique research object: a Caruso's piece of song diversely remastered on commercial CDs. Thirty-two subjects were selected contrasted on age ("younger than 30 years" and "older than 60 years") related with their different experience of earlier technical recording devices (rendering through devices such as radio, 78rpm records, CD...) and on expertise concerning musical acoustics (acousticians and/or musicians vs ordinary music lovers). Eleven excerpts of reediting of an opera record interpreted by Caruso were selected from what could found on the market. The listening protocol involved a free categorization task and the selection of excerpts on preference judgments. Each task involved subjects' free commentaries about their choices as a joint output from psychological processing. A cluster analysis scaffold by a psycholinguistic processing of the verbal comments of the categories allowed to identify both commonalities and differences in groupings excerpts by the different groups of the subjects, along a diversity of criteria, varying according to age and expertise. Each excerpt can therefore be characterized both according to psychological and to acoustic criteria. This study has enabled us to develop the idea that a lyric voice is a multifaced object (cultural, esthetic, technical, physical), acoustic parameters being linked to the various sensory experiences and expertises of appraisers. Such pluridisciplinary research and the coupling of the correlated multiplicity of methodologies we developed acknowledge for a better understanding of listening practices and music-lover assessments here concerned with a

  9. Assessing Neurophysiologic Markers for Training and Simulation to Develop Expertise in Complex Cognitive Tasks

    DTIC Science & Technology

    2010-09-01

    analysis process is to categorize the goal according to (Gagné, 2005) domains of learning . These domains are: verbal information, intellectual...to terrain features. The ability to provide a clear verbal description of a unique feature is a learned task that may be separate from the...and experts differently. The process of verbally encoding information on location and providing this description may detract from the primary task of

  10. Looking Across and Looking Beyond the Knowledge Frontier: Intellectual Distance, Novelty, and Resource Allocation in Science

    PubMed Central

    Boudreau, Kevin J.; Guinan, Eva C.; Lakhani, Karim R.; Riedl, Christoph

    2016-01-01

    Selecting among alternative projects is a core management task in all innovating organizations. In this paper, we focus on the evaluation of frontier scientific research projects. We argue that the “intellectual distance” between the knowledge embodied in research proposals and an evaluator’s own expertise systematically relates to the evaluations given. To estimate relationships, we designed and executed a grant proposal process at a leading research university in which we randomized the assignment of evaluators and proposals to generate 2,130 evaluator–proposal pairs. We find that evaluators systematically give lower scores to research proposals that are closer to their own areas of expertise and to those that are highly novel. The patterns are consistent with biases associated with boundedly rational evaluation of new ideas. The patterns are inconsistent with intellectual distance simply contributing “noise” or being associated with private interests of evaluators. We discuss implications for policy, managerial intervention, and allocation of resources in the ongoing accumulation of scientific knowledge. PMID:27746512

  11. Looking Across and Looking Beyond the Knowledge Frontier: Intellectual Distance, Novelty, and Resource Allocation in Science.

    PubMed

    Boudreau, Kevin J; Guinan, Eva C; Lakhani, Karim R; Riedl, Christoph

    2016-10-01

    Selecting among alternative projects is a core management task in all innovating organizations. In this paper, we focus on the evaluation of frontier scientific research projects. We argue that the "intellectual distance" between the knowledge embodied in research proposals and an evaluator's own expertise systematically relates to the evaluations given. To estimate relationships, we designed and executed a grant proposal process at a leading research university in which we randomized the assignment of evaluators and proposals to generate 2,130 evaluator-proposal pairs. We find that evaluators systematically give lower scores to research proposals that are closer to their own areas of expertise and to those that are highly novel. The patterns are consistent with biases associated with boundedly rational evaluation of new ideas. The patterns are inconsistent with intellectual distance simply contributing "noise" or being associated with private interests of evaluators. We discuss implications for policy, managerial intervention, and allocation of resources in the ongoing accumulation of scientific knowledge.

  12. 27 CFR 22.104 - Educational organizations, colleges of learning, and scientific universities.

    Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

    2010-04-01

    ..., colleges of learning, and scientific universities. 22.104 Section 22.104 Alcohol, Tobacco Products and... OF TAX-FREE ALCOHOL Use of Tax-Free Alcohol § 22.104 Educational organizations, colleges of learning... income tax under 26 U.S.C. 501(a). (b) Colleges of learning. Colleges of learning, for the purposes of...

  13. 27 CFR 22.104 - Educational organizations, colleges of learning, and scientific universities.

    Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

    2011-04-01

    ..., colleges of learning, and scientific universities. 22.104 Section 22.104 Alcohol, Tobacco Products and... OF TAX-FREE ALCOHOL Use of Tax-Free Alcohol § 22.104 Educational organizations, colleges of learning... income tax under 26 U.S.C. 501(a). (b) Colleges of learning. Colleges of learning, for the purposes of...

  14. Expertise Increases the Functional Overlap between Face and Object Perception

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    McKeeff, Thomas J.; McGugin, Rankin W.; Tong, Frank; Gauthier, Isabel

    2010-01-01

    Recent studies indicate that expertise with objects can interfere with face processing. Although competition occurs between faces and objects of expertise, it remains unclear whether this reflects an expertise-specific bottleneck or the fact that objects of expertise grab attention and thereby consume more central resources. We investigated the…

  15. Using Explanatory Item Response Models to Evaluate Complex Scientific Tasks Designed for the Next Generation Science Standards

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Chiu, Tina

    This dissertation includes three studies that analyze a new set of assessment tasks developed by the Learning Progressions in Middle School Science (LPS) Project. These assessment tasks were designed to measure science content knowledge on the structure of matter domain and scientific argumentation, while following the goals from the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). The three studies focus on the evidence available for the success of this design and its implementation, generally labelled as "validity" evidence. I use explanatory item response models (EIRMs) as the overarching framework to investigate these assessment tasks. These models can be useful when gathering validity evidence for assessments as they can help explain student learning and group differences. In the first study, I explore the dimensionality of the LPS assessment by comparing the fit of unidimensional, between-item multidimensional, and Rasch testlet models to see which is most appropriate for this data. By applying multidimensional item response models, multiple relationships can be investigated, and in turn, allow for a more substantive look into the assessment tasks. The second study focuses on person predictors through latent regression and differential item functioning (DIF) models. Latent regression models show the influence of certain person characteristics on item responses, while DIF models test whether one group is differentially affected by specific assessment items, after conditioning on latent ability. Finally, the last study applies the linear logistic test model (LLTM) to investigate whether item features can help explain differences in item difficulties.

  16. Founding editorial--forensics and TheScientificWorld.

    PubMed

    Rowe, W

    2001-10-30

    At the beginning of a new millennium it seems a good idea to stop for a moment and take stock of the current state of forensic science. As a field of scientific research and scientific application, forensic science is a little more than a century old. Forensic science may be said to have begun in 1887 with the simultaneous publication of A. Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet and Hans Gross's Handbuch f1/4r Untersuchungsrichter. Conan Doyle's novel introduced to the world the character of Sherlock Holmes, whose literary career would popularize the use of physical evidence in criminal investigations. Gross's manual for examining magistrates suggests ways in which the expertise of chemists, biologists, geologists, and other natural scientists could contribute to investigations. Gross's book was translated into a number of languages and went through various updated editions during the course of the century. The intervening century saw the development and application of fingerprinting, firearm and tool mark identification, forensic chemistry, forensic biology, forensic toxicology, forensic odontology, forensic pathology, and forensic engineering. Increasingly, the judicial systems of the industrial nations of the world have come to rely upon the expertise of scientists in a variety of disciplines. In most advanced countries, virtually all criminal prosecutions now involve the presentation of scientific testimony. This has had the beneficial effect of diminishing the reliance of courts on eyewitness testimony and defendant confessions.

  17. Effects of expertise on football betting.

    PubMed

    Khazaal, Yasser; Chatton, Anne; Billieux, Joël; Bizzini, Lucio; Monney, Grégoire; Fresard, Emmanuelle; Thorens, Gabriel; Bondolfi, Guido; El-Guebaly, Nady; Zullino, Daniele; Khan, Riaz

    2012-05-11

    Football (soccer) is one of the most popular sports in the world, including Europe. It is associated with important betting activities. A common belief, widely spread among those who participate in gambling activities, is that knowledge and expertise on football lead to better prediction skills for match outcomes. If unfounded, however, this belief should be considered as a form of "illusion of control." The aim of this study was to examine whether football experts are better than nonexperts at predicting football match scores. Two hundred and fifty-eight persons took part in the study: 21.3% as football experts, 54.3% as laypersons (non-initiated to football), and 24.4% as football amateurs. They predicted the scores of the first 10 matches of the 2008 UEFA European Football Championship. Logistic regressions were carried out to assess the link between the accuracy of the forecasted scores and the expertise of the participants (expert, amateur, layperson), controlling for age and gender. The variables assessed did not predict the accuracy of scoring prognosis (R2 ranged from 1% to 6%). Expertise, age, and gender did not appear to have an impact on the accuracy of the football match prognoses. Therefore, the belief that football expertise improves betting skills is no more than a cognitive distortion called the "illusion of control." Gamblers may benefit from psychological interventions that target the illusion of control related to their believed links between betting skills and football expertise. Public health policies may need to consider the phenomenon in order to prevent problem gambling related to football betting.

  18. Supervisor Expertise, Teacher Autonomy and Environmental Robustness.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Street, Sue; Licata, Joseph W.

    This study examines the collective perspective that teachers in schools have about the relationship between the supervisory expertise of the principal, teacher work autonomy, and school environmental robustness. Supervisory expertise, and teachers' satisfaction with the supervisory process, is measured with the "Fidelity of Supervision…

  19. Expertise and age-related changes in components of intelligence.

    PubMed

    Masunaga, H; Horn, J

    2001-06-01

    In a sample of 263 male GO players at 48 levels of expertise and ranging from 18 to 78 years of age, it was found that factors of expertise deductive reasoning (EDR) and expertise working memory (EWM) were independent of factors of fluid reasoning (Gf) and short-term working memory (STWM) that, along with cognitive speed (Gs), have been found to characterize decline of intelligence in adulthood. The main effects of analyses of cross-sectional age differences indicated age-related decline in EDR and EWM as well as in Gf, STWM, and Gs. However, interaction and partialing analyses indicated that decline in EDR and EWM decreased to no decline with increase in level of expertise. The results thus suggest that with increase in factors known to raise the level of expertise--particularly, intensive, well-designed practice--there may be no age-related decline in the intelligence that is measured in the abilities of expertise.

  20. Perceptual-cognitive expertise of handball coaches in their young and middle adult years.

    PubMed

    Fischer, Lennart; Baker, Joseph; Rienhoff, Rebecca; Strauß, Bernd; Tirp, Judith; Büsch, Dirk; Schorer, Jörg

    2016-09-01

    There is little research investigating the maintenance of perceptual-cognitive expertise in general and even less comparing coaches of different ages. The aim of this study was to test for perceptual-cognitive differences between age groups, licence levels, and their interaction. This study investigated differences in skilled performance between young and middle-aged coaches of three different skill levels. Participants performed an accuracy-oriented pattern recall (mean distance in pixel) and a time-oriented flicker test (mean detection time in ms). There were some significant differences between age groups and between skill groups for both tests, but no interactions. For the pattern recall test, the effect sizes were larger for skill level differences, while for the flicker test effects were larger for ageing. These results suggest coaches are able to maintain accuracy skills better than reaction timed tasks. This is in line with findings on speeded performance in general populations, which show declines with age. Moreover, results also support findings on perceptual expertise in skills where accuracy was important.

  1. Maximally Expressive Modeling of Operations Tasks

    NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

    Jaap, John; Richardson, Lea; Davis, Elizabeth

    2002-01-01

    Planning and scheduling systems organize "tasks" into a timeline or schedule. The tasks are defined within the scheduling system in logical containers called models. The dictionary might define a model of this type as "a system of things and relations satisfying a set of rules that, when applied to the things and relations, produce certainty about the tasks that are being modeled." One challenging domain for a planning and scheduling system is the operation of on-board experiments for the International Space Station. In these experiments, the equipment used is among the most complex hardware ever developed, the information sought is at the cutting edge of scientific endeavor, and the procedures are intricate and exacting. Scheduling is made more difficult by a scarcity of station resources. The models to be fed into the scheduler must describe both the complexity of the experiments and procedures (to ensure a valid schedule) and the flexibilities of the procedures and the equipment (to effectively utilize available resources). Clearly, scheduling International Space Station experiment operations calls for a "maximally expressive" modeling schema.

  2. A Joint Gaussian Process Model for Active Visual Recognition with Expertise Estimation in Crowdsourcing

    PubMed Central

    Long, Chengjiang; Hua, Gang; Kapoor, Ashish

    2015-01-01

    We present a noise resilient probabilistic model for active learning of a Gaussian process classifier from crowds, i.e., a set of noisy labelers. It explicitly models both the overall label noise and the expertise level of each individual labeler with two levels of flip models. Expectation propagation is adopted for efficient approximate Bayesian inference of our probabilistic model for classification, based on which, a generalized EM algorithm is derived to estimate both the global label noise and the expertise of each individual labeler. The probabilistic nature of our model immediately allows the adoption of the prediction entropy for active selection of data samples to be labeled, and active selection of high quality labelers based on their estimated expertise to label the data. We apply the proposed model for four visual recognition tasks, i.e., object category recognition, multi-modal activity recognition, gender recognition, and fine-grained classification, on four datasets with real crowd-sourced labels from the Amazon Mechanical Turk. The experiments clearly demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed model. In addition, we extend the proposed model with the Predictive Active Set Selection Method to speed up the active learning system, whose efficacy is verified by conducting experiments on the first three datasets. The results show our extended model can not only preserve a higher accuracy, but also achieve a higher efficiency. PMID:26924892

  3. The roles of COMT val158met status and aviation expertise in flight simulator performance and cognitive ability.

    PubMed

    Kennedy, Q; Taylor, J L; Noda, A; Adamson, M; Murphy, G M; Zeitzer, J M; Yesavage, J A

    2011-09-01

    The polymorphic variation in the val158met position of the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene is associated with differences in executive performance, processing speed, and attention. The purpose of this study is: (1) replicate previous COMT val158met findings on cognitive performance; (2) determine whether COMT val158met effects extend to a real-world task, aircraft navigation performance in a flight simulator; and (3) determine if aviation expertise moderates any effect of COMT val158met status on flight simulator performance. One hundred seventy two pilots aged 41-69 years, who varied in level of aviation training and experience, completed flight simulator, cognitive, and genetic assessments. Results indicate that although no COMT effect was found for an overall measure of flight performance, a positive effect of the met allele was detected for two aspects of cognitive ability: executive functioning and working memory performance. Pilots with the met/met genotype benefited more from increased levels of expertise than other participants on a traffic avoidance measure, which is a component of flight simulator performance. These preliminary results indicate that COMT val158met polymorphic variation can affect a real-world task.

  4. The Roles of COMT val158met Status and Aviation Expertise in Flight Simulator Performance and Cognitive Ability

    PubMed Central

    Taylor, J. L.; Noda, A.; Adamson, M.; Murphy, G. M.; Zeitzer, J. M.; Yesavage, J. A.

    2011-01-01

    The polymorphic variation in the val158met position of the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene is associated with differences in executive performance, processing speed, and attention. The purpose of this study is: (1) replicate previous COMT val158met findings on cognitive performance; (2) determine whether COMT val158met effects extend to a real-world task, aircraft navigation performance in a flight simulator; and (3) determine if aviation expertise moderates any effect of COMT val158met status on flight simulator performance. One hundred seventy two pilots aged 41–69 years, who varied in level of aviation training and experience, completed flight simulator, cognitive, and genetic assessments. Results indicate that although no COMT effect was found for an overall measure of flight performance, a positive effect of the met allele was detected for two aspects of cognitive ability: executive functioning and working memory performance. Pilots with the met/met genotype benefited more from increased levels of expertise than other participants on a traffic avoidance measure, which is a component of flight simulator performance. These preliminary results indicate that COMT val158met polymorphic variation can affect a real-world task. PMID:21193954

  5. The Development of Adaptive Expertise in Biotransport

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Martin, Taylor; Petrosino, Anthony J.; Rivale, Stephanie; Diller, Kenneth R.

    2006-01-01

    This chapter describes a model for continuous development of adaptive expertise, including growth along the dimensions of innovation and knowledge, examined in the context of a biotransport course in biomedical engineering. Students improved on both knowledge and innovation, moving along a continuum toward adaptive expertise. (Contains 5 figures.)

  6. CORDEX.be: COmbining Regional climate Downscaling EXpertise in Belgium

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Termonia, P.

    2015-12-01

    The main objective of the ongoing project CORDEX.be, "COmbining Regional Downscaling EXpertise in Belgium: CORDEX and Beyond", is to gather existing and ongoing Belgian research activities in the domain of climate modelling to create a coherent scientific basis for future climate services in Belgium. The project regroups 8 Belgian Institutes under a single research program of the Belgian Science Policy (BELSPO). The project involves three regional climate models: the ALARO model, the COSMO-CLM model and the MAR model running according to the guidelines of the CORDEX project and at convection permitting resolution on small domains over Belgium. The project creates a framework to address four objectives/challenges. First, this projects aims to contribute to the EURO-CORDEX project. Secondly, RCP simulations are executed at convection-permitting resolutions (3 to 5 km) on small domains. Thirdly, the output of the atmospheric models is used to drive land surface models (the SURFEX model and the Urbclim model) with urban modules, a crop model (REGCROP), a tides and storm model (COHERENS) and the MEGAN-MOHYCAN model that simulates the fluxes emitted by vegetation. Finally, one work package will translate the uncertainty present in the CORDEX database to the high-resolution output of the CORDEX.be project. The organization of the project will be presented and first results will be shown, demonstrating that convection-permitting models can add extra skill to the mesoscale version of the regional climate models, in particular regarding the extreme value statistics and the diurnal cycle.

  7. CORDEX.be: COmbining Regional climate Downscaling EXpertise in Belgium

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Termonia, Piet; Van Schaeybroeck, Bert; De Ridder, Koen; Fettweis, Xavier; Gobin, Anne; Luyten, Patrick; Marbaix, Philippe; Pottiaux, Eric; Stavrakou, Trissevgeni; Van Lipzig, Nicole; van Ypersele, Jean-Pascal; Willems, Patrick

    2016-04-01

    The main objective of the ongoing project CORDEX.be, "COmbining Regional Downscaling EXpertise in Belgium: CORDEX and Beyond" is to gather existing and ongoing Belgian research activities in the domain of climate modelling to create a coherent scientific basis for future climate services in Belgium. The project regroups eight Belgian Institutes under a single research program of the Belgian Science Policy (BELSPO). The project involves three regional climate models: the ALARO model, the COSMO-CLM model and the MAR model running according to the guidelines of the CORDEX project and at convection permitting resolution on small domains over Belgium. The project creates a framework to address four objectives/challenges. First, this projects aims to contribute to the EURO-CORDEX project. Secondly, RCP simulations are executed at convection-permitting resolutions (3 to 5 km) on small domains. Thirdly, the output of the atmospheric models is used to drive land surface models (the SURFEX model and the Urbclim model) with urban modules, a crop model (REGCROP), a tides and storm model (COHERENS) and the MEGAN-MOHYCAN model that simulates the fluxes emitted by vegetation. Finally, one work package will translate the uncertainty present in the CORDEX database to the high-resolution output of the CORDEX.be project. The organization of the project will be presented and first results will be shown, demonstrating that convection-permitting models can add extra skill to the mesoscale version of the regional climate models, in particular regarding the extreme value statistics and the diurnal cycle.

  8. Scientific names of organisms: attribution, rights, and licensing

    PubMed Central

    2014-01-01

    Background As biological disciplines extend into the ‘big data’ world, they will need a names-based infrastructure to index and interconnect distributed data. The infrastructure must have access to all names of all organisms if it is to manage all information. Those who compile lists of species hold different views as to the intellectual property rights that apply to the lists. This creates uncertainty that impedes the development of a much-needed infrastructure for sharing biological data in the digital world. Findings The laws in the United States of America and European Union are consistent with the position that scientific names of organisms and their compilation in checklists, classifications or taxonomic revisions are not subject to copyright. Compilations of names, such as classifications or checklists, are not creative in the sense of copyright law. Many content providers desire credit for their efforts. Conclusions A ‘blue list’ identifies elements of checklists, classifications and monographs to which intellectual property rights do not apply. To promote sharing, authors of taxonomic content, compilers, intermediaries, and aggregators should receive citable recognition for their contributions, with the greatest recognition being given to the originating authors. Mechanisms for achieving this are discussed. PMID:24495358

  9. Toward a multifactorial model of expertise: beyond born versus made.

    PubMed

    Hambrick, David Z; Burgoyne, Alexander P; Macnamara, Brooke N; Ullén, Fredrik

    2018-02-15

    The debate over the origins of individual differences in expertise has raged for over a century in psychology. The "nature" view holds that expertise reflects "innate talent"-that is, genetically determined abilities. The "nurture" view counters that, if talent even exists, its effects on ultimate performance are negligible. While no scientist takes seriously a strict nature-only view of expertise, the nurture view has gained tremendous popularity over the past several decades. This environmentalist view holds that individual differences in expertise reflect training history, with no important contribution to ultimate performance by innate ability ("talent"). Here, we argue that, despite its popularity, this view is inadequate to account for the evidence concerning the origins of expertise that has accumulated since the view was first proposed. More generally, we argue that the nature versus nurture debate in research on expertise is over-or certainly should be, as it has been in other areas of psychological research for decades. We describe a multifactorial model for research on the nature and nurture of expertise, which we believe will provide a progressive direction for future research on expertise. © 2018 New York Academy of Sciences.

  10. Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Quality of Life.

    DTIC Science & Technology

    1995-10-15

    The Quality of Life Task Force is deeply grateful to those distinguished Americans who served as Counselors to the Task Force. Although they did not... Quality of Life issues to the readiness and well being of our Armed Forces. Their willingness to offer suggestions and advice on topics within their...respective expertise was most helpful The recommendations of the Report are those of the Quality of Life Task Force; and Counselors may, or may not, concur in whole or in part with them.

  11. [Organization of scientific-methodological work in Central Military Clinical Hospital named after A.A. Vishnevskiĭ].

    PubMed

    Beliakin, S A; Fokin, Iu N; Kokhan, E P; Frolkin, M N

    2009-09-01

    There was congested a wide experience of organization and management of scientific work in the 3rd CMCH by Vishnevsky A.A. for a term of more than 40 years. This experience is subjected to generalization, analyze for the purpose of determination of it's priority orientations of improvement. Scientific-methods work in hospital is rated as a complex of measures, organisationaly-planed and coordinated by purpose and reinforcement of scientific schools of the 3rd CMCH by Vishnevsky A.A., as a basis of effective delivery of specialized medical aid. The vector of scientific researches is directed, generally, to solving questions of military and field medicine.

  12. Learning task affects ERP-correlates of the own-race bias, but not recognition memory performance.

    PubMed

    Stahl, Johanna; Wiese, Holger; Schweinberger, Stefan R

    2010-06-01

    People are generally better in recognizing faces from their own ethnic group as opposed to faces from another ethnic group, a finding which has been interpreted in the context of two opposing theories. Whereas perceptual expertise theories stress the role of long-term experience with one's own ethnic group, race feature theories assume that the processing of an other-race-defining feature triggers inferior coding and recognition of faces. The present study tested these hypotheses by manipulating the learning task in a recognition memory test. At learning, one group of participants categorized faces according to ethnicity, whereas another group rated facial attractiveness. Subsequent recognition tests indicated clear and similar own-race biases for both groups. However, ERPs from learning and test phases demonstrated an influence of learning task on neurophysiological processing of own- and other-race faces. While both groups exhibited larger N170 responses to Asian as compared to Caucasian faces, task-dependent differences were seen in a subsequent P2 ERP component. Whereas the P2 was more pronounced for Caucasian faces in the categorization group, this difference was absent in the attractiveness rating group. The learning task thus influences early face encoding. Moreover, comparison with recent research suggests that this attractiveness rating task influences the processes reflected in the P2 in a similar manner as perceptual expertise for other-race faces does. By contrast, the behavioural own-race bias suggests that long-term expertise is required to increase other-race face recognition and hence attenuate the own-race bias. Copyright 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  13. Acquiring Expertise.

    DTIC Science & Technology

    1983-01-31

    LaBerge and Samuels, 1974): The reading process is too complex to operate completely at the declarative processing level. It can only work well when...1978, 85, 363-394. 44 The Acquisition of Expertise Lesgold Laberge , P. , & Samuels, S. J. Toward a theory of automatic information k - processing in...Menlo Park, CA 94025 Box 11A. Yale Station * New Haven, CT 06520 1 William B. Whitten Bell Laboratories 1 Dr. Albert Stevens 2D-610 Bolt Beranek

  14. Toward using alpha and theta brain waves to quantify programmer expertise.

    PubMed

    Crk, Igor; Kluthe, Timothy

    2014-01-01

    Empirical studies of programming language learnability and usability have thus far depended on indirect measures of human cognitive performance, attempting to capture what is at its essence a purely cognitive exercise through various indicators of comprehension, such as the correctness of coding tasks or the time spent working out the meaning of code and producing acceptable solutions. Understanding program comprehension is essential to understanding the inherent complexity of programming languages, and ultimately, having a measure of mental effort based on direct observation of the brain at work will illuminate the nature of the work of programming. We provide evidence of direct observation of the cognitive effort associated with programming tasks, through a carefully constructed empirical study using a cross-section of undergraduate computer science students and an inexpensive, off-the-shelf brain-computer interface device. This study presents a link between expertise and programming language comprehension, draws conclusions about the observed indicators of cognitive effort using recent cognitive theories, and proposes directions for future work that is now possible.

  15. Task Switching in a Hierarchical Task Structure: Evidence for the Fragility of the Task Repetition Benefit

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Lien, Mei-Ching; Ruthruff, Eric

    2004-01-01

    This study examined how task switching is affected by hierarchical task organization. Traditional task-switching studies, which use a constant temporal and spatial distance between each task element (defined as a stimulus requiring a response), promote a flat task structure. Using this approach, Experiment 1 revealed a large switch cost of 238 ms.…

  16. Collecting and validating experiential expertise is doable but poses methodological challenges.

    PubMed

    Burda, Marika H F; van den Akker, Marjan; van der Horst, Frans; Lemmens, Paul; Knottnerus, J André

    2016-04-01

    To give an overview of important methodological challenges in collecting, validating, and further processing experiential expertise and how to address these challenges. Based on our own experiences in studying the concept, operationalization, and contents of experiential expertise, we have formulated methodological issues regarding the inventory and application of experiential expertise. The methodological challenges can be categorized in six developmental research stages, comprising the conceptualization of experiential expertise, methods to harvest experiential expertise, the validation of experiential expertise, evaluation of the effectiveness, how to translate experiential expertise into acceptable guidelines, and how to implement these. The description of methodological challenges and ways to handle those are illustrated using diabetes mellitus as an example. Experiential expertise can be defined and operationalized in terms of successful illness-related behaviors and translated into recommendations regarding life domains. Pathways have been identified to bridge the gaps between the world of patients' daily lives and the medical world. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  17. Cognitive Task Analysis of Prioritization in Air Traffic Control.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Redding, Richard E.; And Others

    A cognitive task analysis was performed to analyze the key cognitive components of the en route air traffic controllers' jobs. The goals were to ascertain expert mental models and decision-making strategies and to identify important differences in controller knowledge, skills, and mental models as a function of expertise. Four groups of…

  18. The temporal advantage for individuating objects of expertise: perceptual expertise is an early riser.

    PubMed

    Curby, Kim M; Gauthier, Isabel

    2009-06-10

    The identification of faces has a temporal advantage over that of other object categories. The orientation-specific nature of this advantage suggests that it stems from our extensive experience and resulting expertise with upright faces. While experts can identify objects faster than novices, it is unclear exactly how the temporal dynamics of identification are changed by expertise and whether the nature of this temporal advantage is similar for face and non-face objects of expertise. Here, we titrated encoding time using a backward-masking paradigm with variable stimulus-mask onset-asynchronies and mapped the resulting effect on recognition for upright and inverted faces (Experiment 1) and for cars among car experts and car novices (Experiment 2). Performance for upright faces and cars among car experts rose above chance between 33 and 70 ms before that for inverted faces or cars among car novices. A shifted exponential function fitted to these data suggested that performance started to rise earlier for experts than for novices, but that additional encoding time increased performance at a similar rate. Experience influences the availability of information early in processing, possibly through the recruitment of more category-selective neurons, while the rate of perceptual processing may be less flexible and limited by inherent physiological constraints.

  19. Sharing Expertise: Consulting

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Graves, Bill

    2011-01-01

    A special breed of superintendents who have developed expertise in a particular area find ways of sharing it in other venues as outside consultants. They pull extra duty to put their special skills into practice, to give back to their communities, to stay current and grounded in the field, or to enhance their professional reputations. They teach…

  20. Nature, nurture, and expertise

    PubMed Central

    Plomin, Robert; Shakeshaft, Nicholas G.; McMillan, Andrew; Trzaskowski, Maciej

    2014-01-01

    Rather than investigating the extent to which training can improve performance under experimental conditions (‘what could be’), we ask about the origins of expertise as it exists in the world (‘what is’). We used the twin method to investigate the genetic and environmental origins of exceptional performance in reading, a skill that is a major focus of educational training in the early school years. Selecting reading experts as the top 5% from a sample of 10,000 12-year-old twins assessed on a battery of reading tests, three findings stand out. First, we found that genetic factors account for more than half of the difference in performance between expert and normal readers. Second, our results suggest that reading expertise is the quantitative extreme of the same genetic and environmental factors that affect reading performance for normal readers. Third, growing up in the same family and attending the same schools account for less than a fifth of the difference between expert and normal readers. We discuss implications and interpretations (‘what is inherited is DNA sequence variation’; ‘the abnormal is normal’). Finally, although there is no necessary relationship between ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’, the most far-reaching issues about the acquisition of expertise lie at the interface between them (‘the nature of nurture: from a passive model of imposed environments to an active model of shaped experience’). PMID:24948844

  1. Competence, Expertise, and Accountability: Classical Foundations of the Cult of Expertise.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Schwartzman, Roy

    Rhetoricians since Plato's day have been concerned with how much knowledge speakers should possess in order to speak effectively as well as ethically. The expert, like anyone, can err, but the chance of factual error decreases when speakers have a thorough grasp of their subject matter. However, the expertise position can potentially become a…

  2. Individual differences in chess expertise: a psychometric investigation.

    PubMed

    Grabner, Roland H; Stern, Elsbeth; Neubauer, Aljoscha C

    2007-03-01

    Starting from controversies over the role of general individual characteristics (especially intelligence) for the attainment of expert performance levels, a comprehensive psychometric investigation of individual differences in chess expertise is presented. A sample of 90 adult tournament chess players of varying playing strengths (1311-2387 ELO) was screened with tests on intelligence and personality variables; in addition, experience in chess play, tournament participation, and practice activities were assessed. Correlation and regression analyses revealed a clear-cut moderate relationship between general (and in particular numerical) intelligence and the participants' playing strengths, suggesting that expert chess play does not stand in isolation from superior mental abilities. The strongest predictor of the attained expertise level, however, was the participants' chess experience which highlights the relevance of long-term engagement for the development of expertise. Among all analysed personality dimensions, only domain-specific performance motivation and emotion expression control incrementally contributed to the prediction of playing strength. In total, measures of chess experience, current tournament activity, intelligence, and personality accounted for about 55% of variance in chess expertise. The present results suggest that individual differences in chess expertise are multifaceted and cannot be reduced to differences in domain experience.

  3. Working memory, reasoning, and expertise in medicine-insights into their relationship using functional neuroimaging.

    PubMed

    Hruska, Pam; Krigolson, Olav; Coderre, Sylvain; McLaughlin, Kevin; Cortese, Filomeno; Doig, Christopher; Beran, Tanya; Wright, Bruce; Hecker, Kent G

    2016-12-01

    Clinical reasoning is dependent upon working memory (WM). More precisely, during the clinical reasoning process stored information within long-term memory is brought into WM to facilitate the internal deliberation that affords a clinician the ability to reason through a case. In the present study, we examined the relationship between clinical reasoning and WM while participants read clinical cases with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). More specifically, we examined the impact of clinical case difficulty (easy, hard) and clinician level of expertise (2nd year medical students, senior gastroenterologists) on neural activity within regions of cortex associated with WM (i.e., the prefrontal cortex) during the reasoning process. fMRI was used to scan ten second-year medical students and ten practicing gastroenterologists while they reasoned through sixteen clinical cases [eight straight forward (easy) and eight complex (hard)] during a single 1-h scanning session. Within-group analyses contrasted the easy and hard cases which were then subsequently utilized for a between-group analysis to examine effects of expertise (novice > expert, expert > novice). Reading clinical cases evoked multiple neural activations in occipital, prefrontal, parietal, and temporal cortical regions in both groups. Importantly, increased activation in the prefrontal cortex in novices for both easy and hard clinical cases suggests novices utilize WM more so than experts during clinical reasoning. We found that clinician level of expertise elicited differential activation of regions of the human prefrontal cortex associated with WM during clinical reasoning. This suggests there is an important relationship between clinical reasoning and human WM. As such, we suggest future models of clinical reasoning take into account that the use of WM is not consistent throughout all clinical reasoning tasks, and that memory structure may be utilized differently based on level of expertise.

  4. Word reading and translation in bilinguals: the impact of formal and informal translation expertise

    PubMed Central

    García, Adolfo M.; Ibáñez, Agustín; Huepe, David; Houck, Alexander L.; Michon, Maëva; Lezama, Carlos G.; Chadha, Sumeer; Rivera-Rei, Álvaro

    2014-01-01

    Studies on bilingual word reading and translation have examined the effects of lexical variables (e.g., concreteness, cognate status) by comparing groups of non-translators with varying levels of L2 proficiency. However, little attention has been paid to another relevant factor: translation expertise (TI). To explore this issue, we administered word reading and translation tasks to two groups of non-translators possessing different levels of informal TI (Experiment 1), and to three groups of bilinguals possessing different levels of translation training (Experiment 2). Reaction-time recordings showed that in all groups reading was faster than translation and unaffected by concreteness and cognate effects. Conversely, in both experiments, all groups translated concrete and cognate words faster than abstract and non-cognate words, respectively. Notably, an advantage of backward over forward translation was observed only for low-proficiency non-translators (in Experiment 1). Also, in Experiment 2, the modifications induced by translation expertise were more marked in the early than in the late stages of training and practice. The results suggest that TI contributes to modulating inter-equivalent connections in bilingual memory. PMID:25429279

  5. Multi-level meta-workflows: new concept for regularly occurring tasks in quantum chemistry.

    PubMed

    Arshad, Junaid; Hoffmann, Alexander; Gesing, Sandra; Grunzke, Richard; Krüger, Jens; Kiss, Tamas; Herres-Pawlis, Sonja; Terstyanszky, Gabor

    2016-01-01

    In Quantum Chemistry, many tasks are reoccurring frequently, e.g. geometry optimizations, benchmarking series etc. Here, workflows can help to reduce the time of manual job definition and output extraction. These workflows are executed on computing infrastructures and may require large computing and data resources. Scientific workflows hide these infrastructures and the resources needed to run them. It requires significant efforts and specific expertise to design, implement and test these workflows. Many of these workflows are complex and monolithic entities that can be used for particular scientific experiments. Hence, their modification is not straightforward and it makes almost impossible to share them. To address these issues we propose developing atomic workflows and embedding them in meta-workflows. Atomic workflows deliver a well-defined research domain specific function. Publishing workflows in repositories enables workflow sharing inside and/or among scientific communities. We formally specify atomic and meta-workflows in order to define data structures to be used in repositories for uploading and sharing them. Additionally, we present a formal description focused at orchestration of atomic workflows into meta-workflows. We investigated the operations that represent basic functionalities in Quantum Chemistry, developed the relevant atomic workflows and combined them into meta-workflows. Having these workflows we defined the structure of the Quantum Chemistry workflow library and uploaded these workflows in the SHIWA Workflow Repository.Graphical AbstractMeta-workflows and embedded workflows in the template representation.

  6. Center for Center for Technology for Advanced Scientific Component Software (TASCS)

    DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

    Kostadin, Damevski

    A resounding success of the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program is that high-performance computational science is now universally recognized as a critical aspect of scientific discovery [71], complementing both theoretical and experimental research. As scientific communities prepare to exploit unprecedented computing capabilities of emerging leadership-class machines for multi-model simulations at the extreme scale [72], it is more important than ever to address the technical and social challenges of geographically distributed teams that combine expertise in domain science, applied mathematics, and computer science to build robust and flexible codes that can incorporate changes over time. The Center for Technologymore » for Advanced Scientific Component Software (TASCS)1 tackles these these issues by exploiting component-based software development to facilitate collaborative high-performance scientific computing.« less

  7. Cognitive and Behavioral Components of Expertise in Teaching Physical Education.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Dodds, Patt

    1994-01-01

    Synthesizes research on teaching expertise from physical education and other fields, offering two examples of expertise-related topics in physical education (the importance of personal performance skills and observational skills). The paper discusses cognitive, behavioral, and mixed indicators of expertise. Methodological problems in undertaking…

  8. A new rejection of moral expertise.

    PubMed

    Cowley, Christopher

    2005-01-01

    There seem to be two clearly-defined camps in the debate over the problem of moral expertise. On the one hand are the "Professionals", who reject the possibility entirely, usually because of the intractable diversity of ethical beliefs. On the other hand are the "Ethicists", who criticise the Professionals for merely stipulating science as the most appropriate paradigm for discussions of expertise. While the subject matter and methodology of good ethical thinking is certainly different from that of good clinical thinking, they argue, this is no reason for rejecting the possibility of a distinctive kind of expertise in ethics, usually based on the idea of good justification. I want to argue that both are incorrect, partly because of the reasons given by one group against the other, but more importantly because both neglect what is most distinctive about ethics: that it is personal in a very specific way, without collapsing into relativism.

  9. Health Disparities in Endocrine Disorders: Biological, Clinical, and Nonclinical Factors—An Endocrine Society Scientific Statement

    PubMed Central

    Brown, Arleen; Cauley, Jane A.; Chin, Marshall H.; Gary-Webb, Tiffany L.; Kim, Catherine; Sosa, Julie Ann; Sumner, Anne E.; Anton, Blair

    2012-01-01

    Objective: The aim was to provide a scholarly review of the published literature on biological, clinical, and nonclinical contributors to race/ethnic and sex disparities in endocrine disorders and to identify current gaps in knowledge as a focus for future research needs. Participants in Development of Scientific Statement: The Endocrine Society's Scientific Statement Task Force (SSTF) selected the leader of the statement development group (S.H.G.). She selected an eight-member writing group with expertise in endocrinology and health disparities, which was approved by the Society. All discussions regarding the scientific statement content occurred via teleconference or written correspondence. No funding was provided to any expert or peer reviewer, and all participants volunteered their time to prepare this Scientific Statement. Evidence: The primary sources of data on global disease prevalence are from the World Health Organization. A comprehensive literature search of PubMed identified U.S. population-based studies. Search strategies combining Medical Subject Headings terms and keyword terms and phrases defined two concepts: 1) racial, ethnic, and sex differences including specific populations; and 2) the specific endocrine disorder or condition. The search identified systematic reviews, meta-analyses, large cohort and population-based studies, and original studies focusing on the prevalence and determinants of disparities in endocrine disorders. Consensus Process: The writing group focused on population differences in the highly prevalent endocrine diseases of type 2 diabetes mellitus and related conditions (prediabetes and diabetic complications), gestational diabetes, metabolic syndrome with a focus on obesity and dyslipidemia, thyroid disorders, osteoporosis, and vitamin D deficiency. Authors reviewed and synthesized evidence in their areas of expertise. The final statement incorporated responses to several levels of review: 1) comments of the SSTF and the

  10. [The treatment of scientific knowledge in the framework of CITES].

    PubMed

    Lanfranchi, Marie-Pierre

    2014-03-01

    Access to scientific knowledge in the context of CITES is a crucial issue. The effectiveness of the text is indeed largely based on adequate scientific knowledge of CITES species. This is a major challenge: more than 30,000 species and 178 member states are involved. The issue of expertise, however, is not really addressed by the Convention. The question was left to the consideration of the COP. Therefore, the COP has created two ad hoc scientific committees: the Plants Committee and the Animals Committee, conferring upon them an ambitious mandate. The article addresses some important issues at stake which are linked to institutional questions, as well as the mixed record after twenty-five years of practice.

  11. Visual strategies underpinning the development of visual-motor expertise when hitting a ball.

    PubMed

    Sarpeshkar, Vishnu; Abernethy, Bruce; Mann, David L

    2017-10-01

    It is well known that skilled batters in fast-ball sports do not align their gaze with the ball throughout ball-flight, but instead adopt a unique sequence of eye and head movements that contribute toward their skill. However, much of what we know about visual-motor behavior in hitting is based on studies that have employed case study designs, and/or used simplified tasks that fall short of replicating the spatiotemporal demands experienced in the natural environment. The aim of this study was to provide a comprehensive examination of the eye and head movement strategies that underpin the development of visual-motor expertise when intercepting a fast-moving target. Eye and head movements were examined in situ for 4 groups of cricket batters, who were crossed for playing level (elite or club) and age (U19 or adult), when hitting balls that followed either straight or curving ('swinging') trajectories. The results provide support for some widely cited markers of expertise in batting, while questioning the legitimacy of others. Swinging trajectories alter the visual-motor behavior of all batters, though in large part because of the uncertainty generated by the possibility of a variation in trajectory rather than any actual change in trajectory per se. Moreover, curving trajectories influence visual-motor behavior in a nonlinear fashion, with targets that curve away from the observer influencing behavior more than those that curve inward. The findings provide a more comprehensive understanding of the development of visual-motor expertise in interception. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

  12. Hello World! - Experiencing Usability Methods without Usability Expertise

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Eriksson, Elina; Cajander, Åsa; Gulliksen, Jan

    How do you do usability work when no usability expertise is available? What happens in an organization when system developers, with no previous HCI knowledge, after a 3-day course, start applying usability methods, and particularly field studies? In order to answer these questions qualitative data were gathered through participatory observations, a feed back survey, field study documentation and interviews from 47 system developers from a public authority. Our results suggest that field studies enhance the developer’s understanding of the user perspective, and provide a more holistic overview of the use situation, but that some developers were unable to interpret their observations and see solutions to the users’ problems. The field study method was very much appreciated and has now become standard operating procedure within the organization. However, although field studies may be useful, it does not replace the need for usability pro fes sion als, as their knowledge is essential for more complex observations, analysis and for keeping the focus on usability.

  13. Understanding Clinical Expertise: Nurse Education, Experience, and the Hospital Context

    PubMed Central

    McHugh, Matthew D.; Lake, Eileen T.

    2010-01-01

    Clinical nursing expertise is central to quality patient care. Research on factors that contribute to expertise has focused largely on individual nurse characteristics to the exclusion of contextual factors. To address this, we examined effects of hospital contextual factors and individual nurse education and experience on clinical nursing expertise in a cross-sectional analysis of data from 8,611 registered nurses. In a generalized ordered logistic regression analysis, the composition of the hospital staff, particularly the proportion of nurses with at least a bachelor of science in nursing degree, was associated with significantly greater odds of a nurse reporting a more advanced expertise level. Our findings suggest that, controlling for individual characteristics, the hospital context significantly influences clinical nursing expertise. PMID:20645420

  14. Cognition at Work: The Development of Vocational Expertise.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Stevenson, J., Ed.

    This book contains eight papers examining vocational expertise and how best to develop it. The first paper, "Vocational Expertise" (John Stevenson), presents five approaches to developing it. The role of context in patterning cognition is considered in "Authenticity in Workplace Learning Settings" (Stephen Billett). In…

  15. Left-lateralized N170 Effects of Visual Expertise in Reading: Evidence from Japanese Syllabic and Logographic Scripts

    PubMed Central

    Maurer, Urs; Zevin, Jason D.; McCandliss, Bruce D.

    2015-01-01

    The N170 component of the event-related potential (ERP) reflects experience-dependent neural changes in several forms of visual expertise, including expertise for visual words. Readers skilled in writing systems that link characters to phonemes (i.e., alphabetic writing) typically produce a left-lateralized N170 to visual word forms. This study examined the N170 in three Japanese scripts that link characters to larger phonological units. Participants were monolingual English speakers (EL1) and native Japanese speakers (JL1) who were also proficient in English. ERPs were collected using a 129-channel array, as participants performed a series of experiments viewing words or novel control stimuli in a repetition detection task. The N170 was strongly left-lateralized for all three Japanese scripts (including logographic Kanji characters) in JL1 participants, but bilateral in EL1 participants viewing these same stimuli. This demonstrates that left-lateralization of the N170 is dependent on specific reading expertise and is not limited to alphabetic scripts. Additional contrasts within the moraic Katakana script revealed equivalent N170 responses in JL1 speakers for familiar Katakana words and for Kanji words transcribed into novel Katakana words, suggesting that the N170 expertise effect is driven by script familiarity rather than familiarity with particular visual word forms. Finally, for English words and novel symbol string stimuli, both EL1 and JL1 subjects produced equivalent responses for the novel symbols, and more left-lateralized N170 responses for the English words, indicating that such effects are not limited to the first language. Taken together, these cross-linguistic results suggest that similar neural processes underlie visual expertise for print in very different writing systems. PMID:18370600

  16. Development of the Biology Card Sorting Task to Measure Conceptual Expertise in Biology

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Smith, Julia I.; Combs, Elijah D.; Nagami, Paul H.; Alto, Valerie M.; Goh, Henry G.; Gourdet, Muryam A. A.; Hough, Christina M.; Nickell, Ashley E.; Peer, Adrian G.; Coley, John D.; Tanner, Kimberly D.

    2013-01-01

    There are widespread aspirations to focus undergraduate biology education on teaching students to think conceptually like biologists; however, there is a dearth of assessment tools designed to measure progress from novice to expert biological conceptual thinking. We present the development of a novel assessment tool, the Biology Card Sorting Task,…

  17. General Aviation Task Force report

    NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

    1993-01-01

    General aviation is officially defined as all aviation except scheduled airlines and the military. It is the only air transportation to many communities throughout the world. In order to reverse the recent decline in general aviation aircraft produced in the United States, the Task Force recommends that NASA provide the expertise and facilities such as wind tunnels and computer codes for aircraft design. General aviation manufacturers are receptive to NASA's innovations and technological leadership and are expected to be effective users of NASA-generated technologies.

  18. The impact of expertise in olfaction

    PubMed Central

    Royet, Jean-Pierre; Plailly, Jane; Saive, Anne-Lise; Veyrac, Alexandra; Delon-Martin, Chantal

    2013-01-01

    Olfactory expertise remains poorly understood, most likely because experts in odor, such as perfumers, sommeliers, and oenologists, are much rarer than experts in other modalities, such as musicians or sportsmen. In this review, we address the specificities of odor expertise in both odor experts and in a priori untrained individuals who have undergone specific olfactory training in the frame of an experiment, such as repeated exposure to odors or associative learning. Until the 21st century, only the behavioral effects of olfactory training of untrained control individuals had been reported, revealing an improvement of olfactory performance in terms of sensitivity, discrimination, memory, and identification. Behavioral studies of odor experts have been scarce, with inconsistent or inconclusive results. Recently, the development of cerebral imaging techniques has enabled the identification of brain areas and neural networks involved in odor processing, revealing functional and structural modifications as a function of experience. The behavioral approach to odor expertise has also evolved. Researchers have particularly focused on odor mental imagery, which is characteristic of odor experts, because this ability is absent in the average person but is part of a perfumer’s professional practice. This review summarizes behavioral, functional, and structural findings on odor expertise. These data are compared with those obtained using animals subjected to prolonged olfactory exposure or to olfactory-enriched environments and are discussed in the context of functional and structural plasticity. PMID:24379793

  19. Expertise in Clinical Pathology: Combining the Visual and Cognitive Perspective

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Jaarsma, Thomas; Jarodzka, Halszka; Nap, Marius; van Merriënboer, Jeroen J. G.; Boshuizen, Henny P. A.

    2015-01-01

    Expertise studies in the medical domain often focus on either visual or cognitive aspects of expertise. As a result, characteristics of expert behaviour are often described as either cognitive or visual abilities. This study focuses on both aspects of expertise and analyses them along three overarching constructs: (1) encapsulations, (2)…

  20. Perceptual load in sport and the heuristic value of the perceptual load paradigm in examining expertise-related perceptual-cognitive adaptations.

    PubMed

    Furley, Philip; Memmert, Daniel; Schmid, Simone

    2013-03-01

    In two experiments, we transferred perceptual load theory to the dynamic field of team sports and tested the predictions derived from the theory using a novel task and stimuli. We tested a group of college students (N = 33) and a group of expert team sport players (N = 32) on a general perceptual load task and a complex, soccer-specific perceptual load task in order to extend the understanding of the applicability of perceptual load theory and further investigate whether distractor interference may differ between the groups, as the sport-specific processing task may not exhaust the processing capacity of the expert participants. In both, the general and the specific task, the pattern of results supported perceptual load theory and demonstrates that the predictions of the theory also transfer to more complex, unstructured situations. Further, perceptual load was the only determinant of distractor processing, as we neither found expertise effects in the general perceptual load task nor the sport-specific task. We discuss the heuristic utility of using response-competition paradigms for studying both general and domain-specific perceptual-cognitive adaptations.

  1. Expertise-related deactivation of the right temporoparietal junction during musical improvisation.

    PubMed

    Berkowitz, Aaron L; Ansari, Daniel

    2010-01-01

    Musical training has been associated with structural changes in the brain as well as functional differences in brain activity when musicians are compared to nonmusicians on both perceptual and motor tasks. Previous neuroimaging comparisons of musicians and nonmusicians in the motor domain have used tasks involving prelearned motor sequences or synchronization with an auditorily presented sequence during the experiment. Here we use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine expertise-related differences in brain activity between musicians and nonmusicians during improvisation--the generation of novel musical-motor sequences--using a paradigm that we previously used in musicians alone. Despite behaviorally matched performance, the two groups showed significant differences in functional brain activity during improvisation. Specifically, musicians deactivated the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) during melodic improvisation, while nonmusicians showed no change in activity in this region. The rTPJ is thought to be part of a ventral attentional network for bottom-up stimulus-driven processing, and it has been postulated that deactivation of this region occurs in order to inhibit attentional shifts toward task-irrelevant stimuli during top-down, goal-driven behavior. We propose that the musicians' deactivation of the rTPJ during melodic improvisation may represent a training-induced shift toward inhibition of stimulus-driven attention, allowing for a more goal-directed performance state that aids in creative thought.

  2. Memory processes of flight situation awareness: interactive roles of working memory capacity, long-term working memory, and expertise.

    PubMed

    Sohn, Young Woo; Doane, Stephanie M

    2004-01-01

    This research examined the role of working memory (WM) capacity and long-term working memory (LT-WM) in flight situation awareness (SA). We developed spatial and verbal measures of WM capacity and LT-WM skill and then determined the ability of these measures to predict pilot performance on SA tasks. Although both spatial measures of WM capacity and LT-WM skills were important predictors of SA performance, their importance varied as a function of pilot expertise. Spatial WM capacity was most predictive of SA performance for novices, whereas spatial LT-WM skill based on configurations of control flight elements (attitude and power) was most predictive for experts. Furthermore, evidence for an interactive role of WM and LT-WM mechanisms was indicated. Actual or potential applications of this research include cognitive analysis of pilot expertise and aviation training.

  3. Scientific integrity resource guide: Efforts by federal agencies, foundations, nonprofit organizations, professional societies, and academia in the United States

    PubMed Central

    Kretser, Alison; Murphy, Delia; Dwyer, Johanna

    2017-01-01

    ABSTRACT Scientific integrity is at the forefront of the scientific research enterprise. This paper provides an overview of key existing efforts on scientific integrity by federal agencies, foundations, nonprofit organizations, professional societies, and academia from 1989 to April 2016. It serves as a resource for the scientific community on scientific integrity work and helps to identify areas in which more action is needed. Overall, there is tremendous activity in this area and there are clear linkages among the efforts of the five sectors. All the same, scientific integrity needs to remain visible in the scientific community and evolve along with new research paradigms. High priority in instilling these values falls upon all stakeholders. PMID:27748637

  4. An Investigation of Expertise: Implications for Adult Educators.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Mandernach, Janice B.

    To examine the characteristics of expertise, a study at the University of Minnesota cardiac clinic compared differences in diagnostic ability and strategies between novices (fourth year medical students) and experts (specialists in pediatric cardiology). The investigator presented a model for expertise based on knowledge of subject matter content…

  5. [The analysis of publications in the journal "Sudebno-meditsinskaya ekspertiza (Forensic Medical Expertise)" for the period from 2000 till 2014].

    PubMed

    Fetisov, V A; Gusarov, A A; Khabova, Z S

    2015-01-01

    This paper presents the result of the analysis of the scientometric characteristics of the materials concerning the main aspects of research carried out in the framework of the speciality 14.03.05 (Forensic medicine published in the journal "Sudebno-meditsinskaya ekspertiza (Forensic Medical Expertise)" during a long period. The objective of the analysis was to establish the priorities in this field, reveal the lines of research of the highest interest for domestic and foreign authors, and estimate the value of the relevant scientific publications. It is concluded that the scientometric analysis of the scientific literature on the problems of forensic medical examination is indispensable for the further improvement of its quality.

  6. Using the Biology Card Sorting Task to Measure Changes in Conceptual Expertise during Postsecondary Biology Education.

    PubMed

    Bissonnette, Sarah A; Combs, Elijah D; Nagami, Paul H; Byers, Victor; Fernandez, Juliana; Le, Dinh; Realin, Jared; Woodham, Selina; Smith, Julia I; Tanner, Kimberly D

    2017-01-01

    While there have been concerted efforts to reform undergraduate biology toward teaching students to organize their conceptual knowledge like experts, there are few tools that attempt to measure this. We previously developed the Biology Card Sorting Task (BCST), designed to probe how individuals organize their conceptual biological knowledge. Previous results showed the BCST could differentiate between different populations, namely non-biology majors (NBM) and biology faculty (BF). In this study, we administered the BCST to three additional populations, using a cross-sectional design: entering biology majors (EBM), advanced biology majors (ABM), and biology graduate students (BGS). Intriguingly, ABM did not initially sort like experts any more frequently than EBM. However, once the deep-feature framework was revealed, ABM were able to sort like experts more readily than did EBM. These results are consistent with the conclusion that biology education enables advanced biology students to use an expert-like conceptual framework. However, these results are also consistent with a process of "selection," wherein students who persist in the major may have already had an expert-like conceptual framework to begin with. These results demonstrate the utility of the BCST in measuring differences between groups of students over the course of their undergraduate education. © 2017 S. A. Bissonnette et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2017 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).

  7. Contributions of visual and embodied expertise to body perception.

    PubMed

    Reed, Catherine L; Nyberg, Andrew A; Grubb, Jefferson D

    2012-01-01

    Recent research has demonstrated that our perception of the human body differs from that of inanimate objects. This study investigated whether the visual perception of the human body differs from that of other animate bodies and, if so, whether that difference could be attributed to visual experience and/or embodied experience. To dissociate differential effects of these two types of expertise, inversion effects (recognition of inverted stimuli is slower and less accurate than recognition of upright stimuli) were compared for two types of bodies in postures that varied in typicality: humans in human postures (human-typical), humans in dog postures (human-atypical), dogs in dog postures (dog-typical), and dogs in human postures (dog-atypical). Inversion disrupts global configural processing. Relative changes in the size and presence of inversion effects reflect changes in visual processing. Both visual and embodiment expertise predict larger inversion effects for human over dog postures because we see humans more and we have experience producing human postures. However, our design that crosses body type and typicality leads to distinct predictions for visual and embodied experience. Visual expertise predicts an interaction between typicality and orientation: greater inversion effects should be found for typical over atypical postures regardless of body type. Alternatively, embodiment expertise predicts a body, typicality, and orientation interaction: larger inversion effects should be found for all human postures but only for atypical dog postures because humans can map their bodily experience onto these postures. Accuracy data supported embodiment expertise with the three-way interaction. However, response-time data supported contributions of visual expertise with larger inversion effects for typical over atypical postures. Thus, both types of expertise affect the visual perception of bodies.

  8. Nursing expertise: a course of ambiguity and evolution in a concept.

    PubMed

    Hutchinson, Marie; Higson, Mary; Cleary, Michelle; Jackson, Debra

    2016-12-01

    In this article, we clarify and describe the nature of nursing expertise and provide a framework to guide its identification and further development. To have utility and rigour, concept-driven research and theories of practice require underlying concepts that are robust, valid and reliable. Advancing understanding of a concept requires careful attention to explicating its knowledge, metaphors and conceptual meaning. Examining the concepts and metaphors of nursing expertise, and how they have been interpreted into the nursing discourse, we aimed to synthesise definitions and similarities between concepts and elicit the defining characteristics and properties of nursing expertise. In clarifying the concept, we sought to move beyond the ambiguity that currently surrounds expertise in nursing and unravel it to make explicit the characteristics of nursing expertise from published peer-reviewed studies and structured literature synthesis. Findings indicate a lack of clarity surrounding the use of the term expertise. Traditional reliance upon intuition as a way of explaining expert performance is slowly evolving. Emerging from the analysis is a picture of expertise as the relationship between networks of contextual reasoning, understanding and practice. Striking absences in the discourse include limited explication of ethical reasoning and theorising a broader interpretation of expertise reflective of contemporary forms of nursing. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

  9. Medical expertise, existential suffering and ending life.

    PubMed

    Varelius, Jukka

    2014-02-01

    In this article, I assess the position that voluntary euthanasia (VE) and physician-assisted suicide (PAS) ought not to be accepted in the cases of persons who suffer existentially but who have no medical condition, because existential questions do not fall within the domain of physicians' professional expertise. I maintain that VE and PAS based on suffering arising from medical conditions involves existential issues relevantly similar to those confronted in connection with existential suffering. On that basis I conclude that if VE and PAS based on suffering arising from medical conditions is taken to fall within the domain of medical expertise, it is not consistent to use the view that physicians' professional expertise does not extend to existential questions as a reason for denying requests for VE and PAS from persons who suffer existentially but have no medical condition.

  10. Knowledge Building Expertise: Nanomodellers' Education as an Example

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Tala, Suvi

    2013-01-01

    The content of the expertise which young natural scientists try to gain by doing science in research groups is a relatively little-explored subject. What makes learning in such settings challenging is that a central part of the expertise is tacit. This study employs empirical methods together with a contextualized approach and interdisciplinary…

  11. Golden rice: scientific, regulatory and public information processes of a genetically modified organism.

    PubMed

    Moghissi, A Alan; Pei, Shiqian; Liu, Yinzuo

    2016-01-01

    Historically, agricultural development evolved in three phases. During the first phase the plants were selected on the basis of the availability of a plant with desirable properties at a specific location. The second phase provided the agricultural community with crossbreeding plants to achieve improvement in agricultural production. The evolution of biological knowledge has provided the ability to genetically engineer (GE) crops, one of the key processes within genetically modified organisms (GMO). This article uses golden rice, a species of transgenic Asian rice which contains a precursor of vitamin A in the edible part of the plant as an example of GE/GMO emphasizing Chinese experience in agricultural evolution. It includes a brief review of agricultural evolution to be followed by a description of golden rice development. Golden rice was created as a humanitarian project and has received positive comments by the scientific community and negative voices from certain environmental groups. In this article, we use the Best Available Science (BAS) Concept and Metrics for Evaluation of Scientific Claims (MESC) derived from it to evaluate claims and counter claims on scientific aspects of golden rice. This article concludes that opposition to golden rice is based on belief rather than any of its scientifically derived nutritional, safety or environmental properties.

  12. A few of my favorite things: circumscribed interests in autism are not accompanied by increased attentional salience on a personalized selective attention task.

    PubMed

    Parsons, Owen E; Bayliss, Andrew P; Remington, Anna

    2017-01-01

    Autistic individuals commonly show circumscribed or "special" interests: areas of obsessive interest in a specific category. The present study investigated what impact these interests have on attention, an aspect of autistic cognition often reported as altered. In neurotypical individuals, interest and expertise have been shown to result in an automatic attentional priority for related items. Here, we examine whether this change in salience is also seen in autism. Adolescents and young adults with and without autism performed a personalized selective attention task assessing the level of attentional priority afforded to images related to the participant's specific interests. In addition, participants performed a similar task with generic images in order to isolate any effects of interest and expertise. Crucially, all autistic and non-autistic individuals recruited for this study held a strong passion or interest. As such, any differences in attention could not be solely attributed to differing prevalence of interests in the two groups. In both tasks, participants were asked to perform a central target-detection task while ignoring irrelevant distractors (related or unrelated to their interests). The level of distractor interference under various task conditions was taken as an indication of attentional priority. Neurotypical individuals showed the predicted attentional priority for the circumscribed interest images but not generic items, reflecting the impact of their interest and expertise. Contrary to predictions, autistic individuals did not show this priority: processing the interest-related stimuli only when task demands were low. Attention to images unrelated to circumscribed interests was equivalent in the two groups. These results suggest that despite autistic individuals holding an intense interest in a particular class of stimuli, there may be a reduced impact of this prior experience and expertise on attentional processing. The implications of this

  13. Aperture Averaging of Scintillation for Space-to-Ground Optical Communication Applications.

    DTIC Science & Technology

    1983-08-15

    SCINTILLATION FOR SPACE-TO-GROUND OPTICAL COMUNICATION APPLICATIONS ........................ 5 REFERENCES...theoretical investigations necessary for the evaluation and applica- tion of scientific advances to now military space systems. Versatility and flexibility...systems. Expertise in the latest scientific developments is vital to the accomplishment of tasks related to these problems. The laboratories that con

  14. Teaching for adaptive expertise in biomedical engineering ethics.

    PubMed

    Martin, Taylor; Rayne, Karen; Kemp, Nate J; Hart, Jack; Diller, Kenneth R

    2005-04-01

    This paper considers an approach to teaching ethics in bioengineering based on the How People Learn (HPL) framework. Curricula based on this framework have been effective in mathematics and science instruction from the kindergarten to the college levels. This framework is well suited to teaching bioengineering ethics because it helps learners develop "adaptive expertise". Adaptive expertise refers to the ability to use knowledge and experience in a domain to learn in unanticipated situations. It differs from routine expertise, which requires using knowledge appropriately to solve routine problems. Adaptive expertise is an important educational objective for bioengineers because the regulations and knowledge base in the discipline are likely to change significantly over the course of their careers. This study compares the performance of undergraduate bioengineering students who learned about ethics for stem cell research using the HPL method of instruction to the performance of students who learned following a standard lecture sequence. Both groups learned the factual material equally well, but the HPL group was more prepared to act adaptively when presented with a novel situation.

  15. The Relative Efficiency of Two Strategies for Conducting Cognitive Task Analysis

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Flynn, Catherine L.

    2012-01-01

    Cognitive task analysis (CTA) has evolved over the past half century to capture the mental decisions and analysis that experts have learned to implement when solving complex problems. Since expertise is largely automated and nonconscious, a variety of observation and interview strategies have been developed to identify the most critical cognitive…

  16. [New forms of scientific communication of medical societies: thoughts on scientific collections and museums for urology].

    PubMed

    Moll, F H; Rathert, P; Skopec, M; Engel, R M; Fangerau, H

    2011-02-01

    Collections from medical societies which are not connected with a university or another public institution cannot be legitimized on the basis of the argument of conserving historical heritage. Even the museum itself with its many tasks and classical site of scientific communication comes into public view and becomes a topic of scientific interest.

  17. AGENDA: A task organizer and scheduler

    NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

    Fratter, Isabelle

    1993-01-01

    AGENDA will be the main tool used in running the SPOT 4 Earth Observation Satellite's Operational Control Center. It will reduce the operator's work load and make the task easier. AGENDA sets up the work plan for a day of operations, automatically puts the day's tasks into sequence and monitors their progress in real time. Monitoring is centralized, and the tasks are run on different computers in the Center. Once informed of any problems, the operator can intervene at any time while an activity is taking place. To carry out the various functions, the operator has an advanced, efficient, ergonomic graphic interface based on X11 and OSF/MOTIF. Since AGENDA is the heart of the Center, it has to satisfy several constraints that have been taken into account during the various development phases. AGENDA is currently in its final development stages.

  18. What is an expert? A systems perspective on expertise.

    PubMed

    Caley, Michael Julian; O'Leary, Rebecca A; Fisher, Rebecca; Low-Choy, Samantha; Johnson, Sandra; Mengersen, Kerrie

    2014-02-01

    Expert knowledge is a valuable source of information with a wide range of research applications. Despite the recent advances in defining expert knowledge, little attention has been given to how to view expertise as a system of interacting contributory factors for quantifying an individual's expertise. We present a systems approach to expertise that accounts for many contributing factors and their inter-relationships and allows quantification of an individual's expertise. A Bayesian network (BN) was chosen for this purpose. For illustration, we focused on taxonomic expertise. The model structure was developed in consultation with taxonomists. The relative importance of the factors within the network was determined by a second set of taxonomists (supra-experts) who also provided validation of the model structure. Model performance was assessed by applying the model to hypothetical career states of taxonomists designed to incorporate known differences in career states for model testing. The resulting BN model consisted of 18 primary nodes feeding through one to three higher-order nodes before converging on the target node (Taxonomic Expert). There was strong consistency among node weights provided by the supra-experts for some nodes, but not others. The higher-order nodes, "Quality of work" and "Total productivity", had the greatest weights. Sensitivity analysis indicated that although some factors had stronger influence in the outer nodes of the network, there was relatively equal influence of the factors leading directly into the target node. Despite the differences in the node weights provided by our supra-experts, there was good agreement among assessments of our hypothetical experts that accurately reflected differences we had specified. This systems approach provides a way of assessing the overall level of expertise of individuals, accounting for multiple contributory factors, and their interactions. Our approach is adaptable to other situations where it is

  19. Scientific Research for Integrated Solutions to Community Challenges: The Thriving Earth Exchange (TEX) Approach

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Udu-gama, N.; Pandya, R.

    2015-12-01

    There is tremendous unmet and sometimes unrealized need for Earth and space science (ESS) expertise as part of civic decisions and local planning for climate change, natural hazards and natural resources. The Thriving Earth Exchange (TEX) helps AGU contribute that expertise to humanity in respectful, integrated ways. TEX brings ESS scientists together with local communities tackling issues of climate change, natural hazards and natural resources to co-design solutions that equitably integrate both scientific and community knowledge. To achieve this ambitious goal, TEX is partnering with organizations that are respected by and knowledgeable about communities both in the United States and internationally. Such partnerships include Rockefeller's 100 Resilient Cities Initiative, ICLEI USA, MIT's Climate Colab, among others. TEX works with these partners to approach communities who are ready to or already addressing ESS related issues. With partners, we help the communities define their goals, develop specific projects, and connect with relevant and helpful ESS scientists. We will also show how we help scientists and community leaders work productively together, and the tools we bring to support their innovation. It will highlight international examples, such as in the Pamir Mountains of Afghanistan-Tajikistan, Sri Lanka, and Ethiopia, and provide concrete examples of how these initiatives are helping TEX further expand the frontiers of collaborative research.

  20. Art Expertise and the Processing of Titled Abstract Art.

    PubMed

    Mullennix, John W; Robinet, Julien

    2018-04-01

    The effect of art expertise on viewers' processing of titled visual artwork was examined. The study extended the research of Leder, Carbon, and Ripsas by explicitly selecting art novices and art experts. The study was designed to test assumptions about how expertise modulates context in the form of titles for artworks. Viewers rated a set of abstract paintings for liking and understanding. The type of title accompanying the artwork (descriptive or elaborative) was manipulated. Viewers were allotted as much time as they wished to view each artwork. For judgments of liking, novices and experts both liked artworks with elaborative titles better, with overall rated liking similar for both groups. For judgments of understanding, type of title had no effect on ratings for both novices and experts. However, experts' rated understanding was higher than novices, with experts making their decisions faster than novices. An analysis of viewers' art expertise revealed that expertise was correlated with understanding, but not liking. Overall, the results suggest that both novices and experts integrate title with visual image in similar manner. However, expertise differentially affected liking and understanding. The results differ from those obtained by Leder et al. The differences between studies are discussed.

  1. Adults' and Children's Understanding of How Expertise Influences Learning.

    PubMed

    Danovitch, Judith H; Shenouda, Christine K

    2018-01-01

    Adults and children use information about expertise to infer what a person is likely to know, but it is unclear whether they realize that expertise also has implications for learning. We explore adults' and children's understanding that expertise in a particular category supports learning about a closely related category. In four experiments, 5-year-olds and adults (n = 160) judged which of two people would be better at learning about a new category. When faced with an expert and a nonexpert, adults consistently indicated that expertise supports learning in a closely related category; however, children's judgments were inconsistent and were strongly influenced by the description of the nonexpert. The results suggest that although children understand what it means to be an expert, they may judge an individual's learning capacity based on different considerations than adults.

  2. The effects of alphabet and expertise on letter perception

    PubMed Central

    Wiley, Robert W.; Wilson, Colin; Rapp, Brenda

    2016-01-01

    Long-standing questions in human perception concern the nature of the visual features that underlie letter recognition and the extent to which the visual processing of letters is affected by differences in alphabets and levels of viewer expertise. We examined these issues in a novel approach using a same-different judgment task on pairs of letters from the Arabic alphabet with two participant groups—one with no prior exposure to Arabic and one with reading proficiency. Hierarchical clustering and linear mixed-effects modeling of reaction times and accuracy provide evidence that both the specific characteristics of the alphabet and observers’ previous experience with it affect how letters are perceived and visually processed. The findings of this research further our understanding of the multiple factors that affect letter perception and support the view of a visual system that dynamically adjusts its weighting of visual features as expert readers come to more efficiently and effectively discriminate the letters of the specific alphabet they are viewing. PMID:26913778

  3. The Energy Forum of Sri Lanka: Working toward appropriate expertise

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Nieusma, Dean

    Taking my cue from the knowledge base and practices comprising appropriate technology development, and building on politics of expertise scholarship, this dissertation develops the concept of appropriate expertise: the combination of social and technical competences required to address marginalization through technological interventions. The dissertation asks what appropriate expertise looks like "on the ground" in the context of development as practiced by an exceptional group of technology designers from the Energy Forum of Sri Lanka: What design goals did they strive toward? What challenges did they face? What strategies did they employ? In an effort to answer these questions, the dissertation looks at how these designers interacted across a range of contexts with a broad spectrum of people and institutions, each with its own expertise to draw upon. In particular, it looks at how they situated their work in a highly contoured field of social power, where different types of expertise were used as resources for reinforcing or resisting existing power relations. I use the concept relations of expertise to denote the structure of expert interactions across multiple contexts of activity. Although this concept links to broad political-economic conditions that order varied expert practices, my analytic focus is at a different level: the situated experiences of expert practitioners. By starting with ground-level practices and understandings, I argue that creating new relations of expertise---that is, changing the nature of the interactions among experts and between experts and those they work with---is the key way my informants worked to legitimate marginalized perspectives and thereby empower marginalized social groups around technology-development practices. Appropriate expertise enables the creation of appropriate technologies, but it does more. It enables the creation of new relations of expertise, both through inspiring new forms of interpersonal interaction

  4. Pilot expertise and hippocampal size: associations with longitudinal flight simulator performance.

    PubMed

    Adamson, Maheen M; Bayley, Peter J; Scanlon, Blake K; Farrell, Michelle E; Hernandez, Beatriz; Weiner, Michael W; Yesavage, Jerome A; Taylor, Joy L

    2012-09-01

    Previous research suggests that the size of the hippocampus can vary in response to intensive training (e.g., during the acquisition of expert knowledge). However, the role of the hippocampus in maintenance of skilled performance is not well understood. The Stanford/Veterans Affairs Aviation MRI Study offers a unique opportunity to observe the interaction of brain structure and multiple levels of expertise on longitudinal flight simulator performance. The current study examined the relationship between hippocampal volume and three levels of aviation expertise, defined by pilot proficiency ratings issued by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (11). At 3 annual time points, 60 pilots who varied in their level of aviation expertise (ages ranging from 45 to 69 yr) were tested. At baseline, higher expertise was associated with better flight simulator performance, but not with hippocampal volume. Longitudinally, there was an Expertise x Hippocampal volume interaction, in the direction that a larger hippocampus was associated with better performance at higher levels of expertise. These results are consistent with the notion that expertise in a cognitively demanding domain involves the interplay of acquired knowledge ('mental schemas') and basic hippocampal-dependent processes.

  5. Expertise in Problem Solving.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Chi, Michelene T. H.; And Others

    Based on the premise that the quality of domain-specific knowledge is the main determinant of expertise in that domain, an examination was made of the shift from considering general, domain-independent skills and procedures, in both cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence, to the study of the knowledge base. Empirical findings and…

  6. Development of Legal Expertise

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Glöckner, Andreas; Towfigh, Emanuel; Traxler, Christian

    2013-01-01

    In a comprehensive empirical investigation (N = 71,405) we analyzed the development of legal expertise in a critical 1-year period of academic legal training in which advanced law students start practicing to solve complex cases. We were particularly interested in the functional form of the learning curve and inter-individual differences in…

  7. A study on expertise of agents and its effects on cooperative Q-learning.

    PubMed

    Araabi, Babak Nadjar; Mastoureshgh, Sahar; Ahmadabadi, Majid Nili

    2007-04-01

    Cooperation in learning (CL) can be realized in a multiagent system, if agents are capable of learning from both their own experiments and other agents' knowledge and expertise. Extra resources are exploited into higher efficiency and faster learning in CL as compared to that of individual learning (IL). In the real world, however, implementation of CL is not a straightforward task, in part due to possible differences in area of expertise (AOE). In this paper, reinforcement-learning homogenous agents are considered in an environment with multiple goals or tasks. As a result, they become expert in different domains with different amounts of expertness. Each agent uses a one-step Q-learning algorithm and is capable of exchanging its Q-table with those of its teammates. Two crucial questions are addressed in this paper: "How the AOE of an agent can be extracted?" and "How agents can improve their performance in CL by knowing their AOEs?" An algorithm is developed to extract the AOE based on state transitions as a gold standard from a behavioral point of view. Moreover, it is discussed that the AOE can be implicitly obtained through agents' expertness in the state level. Three new methods for CL through the combination of Q-tables are developed and examined for overall performance after CL. The performances of developed methods are compared with that of IL, strategy sharing (SS), and weighted SS (WSS). Obtained results show the superior performance of AOE-based methods as compared to that of existing CL methods, which do not use the notion of AOE. These results are very encouraging in support of the idea that "cooperation based on the AOE" performs better than the general CL methods.

  8. Scientific Reasoning: Theory Evidence Coordination in Physics-Based and Non-Physics-Based Tasks

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Ibrahim, Bashirah; Ding, Lin; Mollohan, Katherine N.; Stammen, Andria

    2016-01-01

    Scientific reasoning is crucial to any scientific discipline. One sub-skill particularly relevant to the scientific enterprise is theory evidence coordination. This study, underpinned by Kuhn's framework for scientific reasoning, investigates how university students coordinate their self-generated theory and evidence in a physics topic (energy)…

  9. Re-inscribing Gender in New Modes of Medical Expertise: The Investigator–Coordinator Relationship in the Clinical Trials Industry

    PubMed Central

    Fisher, Jill A.

    2011-01-01

    This article analyses the ways in which research coordinators forge professional identities in the highly gendered organizational context of the clinic. Drawing upon qualitative research on the organization of the clinical trials industry (that is, the private sector, for profit auxiliary companies that support pharmaceutical drug studies), this article explores the relationships between predominantly male physician-investigators and female research coordinators and the constitution of medical expertise in pharmaceutical drug development. One finding is that coordinators actively seek to establish relationships with investigators that mirror traditional doctor–nurse relationships, in which the feminized role is subordinated and devalued. Another finding is that the coordinators do, in fact, have profound research expertise that is frequently greater than that of the investigators. The coordinators develop expertise on pharmaceutical products and diseases through their observations of the patterns that occur in patient–participants’ responses to investigational drugs. The article argues, however, that the nature of the relationships between coordinators and investigators renders invisible the coordinators’ expertise. In this context, gender acts as a persistent social structure shaping both coordinators’ and investigators’ perceptions of who can be recognized as having authority and power in the workplace. PMID:21394219

  10. The Development of Sport Expertise: Mapping the Tactical Domain.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    McPherson, Sue L.

    1994-01-01

    Explores issues and research relevant to sport tactical knowledge development and expertise. The paper discusses controversies concerning methodological tools, possible levels of analysis in sport research, sport tactical knowledge and expertise, a protocol structure model for sport, and expert-novice sport research. (SM)

  11. Primary care physicians' use of an electronic medical record system: a cognitive task analysis.

    PubMed

    Shachak, Aviv; Hadas-Dayagi, Michal; Ziv, Amitai; Reis, Shmuel

    2009-03-01

    To describe physicians' patterns of using an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system; to reveal the underlying cognitive elements involved in EMR use, possible resulting errors, and influences on patient-doctor communication; to gain insight into the role of expertise in incorporating EMRs into clinical practice in general and communicative behavior in particular. Cognitive task analysis using semi-structured interviews and field observations. Twenty-five primary care physicians from the northern district of the largest health maintenance organization (HMO) in Israel. The comprehensiveness, organization, and readability of data in the EMR system reduced physicians' need to recall information from memory and the difficulty of reading handwriting. Physicians perceived EMR use as reducing the cognitive load associated with clinical tasks. Automaticity of EMR use contributed to efficiency, but sometimes resulted in errors, such as the selection of incorrect medication or the input of data into the wrong patient's chart. EMR use interfered with patient-doctor communication. The main strategy for overcoming this problem involved separating EMR use from time spent communicating with patients. Computer mastery and enhanced physicians' communication skills also helped. There is a fine balance between the benefits and risks of EMR use. Automaticity, especially in combination with interruptions, emerged as the main cognitive factor contributing to errors. EMR use had a negative influence on communication, a problem that can be partially addressed by improving the spatial organization of physicians' offices and by enhancing physicians' computer and communication skills.

  12. Primary Care Physicians’ Use of an Electronic Medical Record System: A Cognitive Task Analysis

    PubMed Central

    Hadas-Dayagi, Michal; Ziv, Amitai; Reis, Shmuel

    2009-01-01

    OBJECTIVE To describe physicians’ patterns of using an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system; to reveal the underlying cognitive elements involved in EMR use, possible resulting errors, and influences on patient–doctor communication; to gain insight into the role of expertise in incorporating EMRs into clinical practice in general and communicative behavior in particular. DESIGN Cognitive task analysis using semi-structured interviews and field observations. PARTICIPANTS Twenty-five primary care physicians from the northern district of the largest health maintenance organization (HMO) in Israel. RESULTS The comprehensiveness, organization, and readability of data in the EMR system reduced physicians’ need to recall information from memory and the difficulty of reading handwriting. Physicians perceived EMR use as reducing the cognitive load associated with clinical tasks. Automaticity of EMR use contributed to efficiency, but sometimes resulted in errors, such as the selection of incorrect medication or the input of data into the wrong patient’s chart. EMR use interfered with patient–doctor communication. The main strategy for overcoming this problem involved separating EMR use from time spent communicating with patients. Computer mastery and enhanced physicians’ communication skills also helped. CONCLUSIONS There is a fine balance between the benefits and risks of EMR use. Automaticity, especially in combination with interruptions, emerged as the main cognitive factor contributing to errors. EMR use had a negative influence on communication, a problem that can be partially addressed by improving the spatial organization of physicians’ offices and by enhancing physicians’ computer and communication skills. PMID:19130148

  13. Developing the experts we need: Fostering adaptive expertise through education.

    PubMed

    Mylopoulos, Maria; Kulasegaram, Kulamakan; Woods, Nicole N

    2018-06-01

    In this era of increasing complexity, there is a growing gap between what we need our medical experts to do and the training we provide them. While medical education has a long history of being guided by theories of expertise to inform curriculum design and implementation, the theories that currently underpin our educational programs do not account for the expertise necessary for excellence in the changing health care context. The more comprehensive view of expertise gained by research on both clinical reasoning and adaptive expertise provides a useful framing for re-shaping physician education, placing emphasis on the training of clinicians who will be adaptive experts. That is, have both the ability to apply their extensive knowledge base as well as create new knowledge as dictated by patient needs and context. Three key educational approaches have been shown to foster the development of adaptive expertise: learning that emphasizes understanding, providing students with opportunities to embrace struggle and discovery in their learning, and maximizing variation in the teaching of clinical concepts. There is solid evidence that a commitment to these educational approaches can help medical educators to set trainees on the path towards adaptive expertise. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

  14. Specialist public health capacity in England: working in the new primary care organizations.

    PubMed

    Chapman, J; Shaw, S; Congdon, P; Carter, Y H; Abbott, S; Petchey, R

    2005-01-01

    To determine the capacity and development needs, in relation to key areas of competency and skills, of the specialist public health workforce based in primary care organizations following the 2001 restructuring of the UK National Health Service. Questionnaire survey to all consultants and specialists in public health (including directors of public health) based in primary care trusts (PCTs) and strategic health authorities (SHAs) in England. Participants reported a high degree of competency. However, skill gaps were evident in some areas of public health practice, most notably "developing quality and risk management" and in relation to media communication, computing, management and leadership. In general, medically qualified individuals were weaker on community development than non-medically qualified specialists, and non-medically qualified specialists were less able to perform tasks that require epidemiological or clinical expertise than medically qualified specialists. Less than 50% of specialists felt that their links to external organizations, including public health networks, were strong. Twenty-nine percent of respondents felt professionally isolated and 22% reported inadequate team working within their PCT or SHA. Approximately 21% of respondents expressed concerns that they did not have access to enough expertise to fulfil their tasks and that their skills were not being adequately utilized. Some important skill gaps are evident among the specialist public health workforce although, in general, a high degree of competency was reported. This suggests that the capacity deficit is a problem of numbers of specialists rather than an overall lack of appropriate skills. Professional isolation must be addressed by encouraging greater partnership working across teams.

  15. Scientific and non-scientific challenges for Operational Earthquake Forecasting

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Marzocchi, W.

    2015-12-01

    Tracking the time evolution of seismic hazard in time windows shorter than the usual 50-years of long-term hazard models may offer additional opportunities to reduce the seismic risk. This is the target of operational earthquake forecasting (OEF). During the OEF development in Italy we identify several challenges that range from pure science to the more practical interface of science with society. From a scientific point of view, although earthquake clustering is the clearest empirical evidence about earthquake occurrence, and OEF clustering models are the most (successfully) tested hazard models in seismology, we note that some seismologists are still reluctant to accept their scientific reliability. After exploring the motivations of these scientific doubts, we also look into an issue that is often overlooked in this discussion, i.e., in any kind of hazard analysis, we do not use a model because it is the true one, but because it is the better than anything else we can think of. The non-scientific aspects are mostly related to the fact that OEF usually provides weekly probabilities of large eartquakes smaller than 1%. These probabilities are considered by some seismologists too small to be of interest or useful. However, in a recent collaboration with engineers we show that such earthquake probabilities may lead to intolerable individual risk of death. Interestingly, this debate calls for a better definition of the still fuzzy boundaries among the different expertise required for the whole risk mitigation process. The last and probably more pressing challenge is related to the communication to the public. In fact, a wrong message could be useless or even counterproductive. Here we show some progresses that we have made in this field working with communication experts in Italy.

  16. A phenomenological investigation of science center exhibition developers' expertise development

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Young, Denise L.

    The purpose of this study was to examine the exhibition developer role in the context of United States (U.S.) science centers, and more specifically, to investigate the way science center exhibition developers build their professional expertise. This research investigated how successfully practicing exhibition developers described their current practices, how they learned to be exhibition developers, and what factors were the most important to the developers in building their professional expertise. Qualitative data was gathered from 10 currently practicing exhibition developers from three science centers: the Exploratorium, San Francisco, California; the Field Museum, Chicago, Illinois; and the Science Museum of Minnesota, St. Paul, Minnesota. In-depth, semistructured interviews were used to collect the data. The study embraced aspects of the phenomenological tradition and sought to derive a holistic understanding of the position and how expertise was built for it. The data were methodically coded and organized into themes prior to analysis. The data analysis found that the position consisted of numerous and varied activities, but the developers' primary roles were advocating for the visitor, storytelling, and mediating information and ideas. They conducted these activities in the context of a team and relied on an established exhibition planning process to guide their work. Developers described a process of learning exhibition development that was experiential in nature. Learning through daily practice was key, though they also consulted with mentors and relied on visitor studies to gauge the effectiveness of their work. They were adept at integrating prior knowledge gained from many aspects of their lives into their practice. The developers described several internal factors that contributed to their expertise development including the desire to help others, a natural curiosity about the world, a commitment to learning, and the ability to accept critique. They

  17. Pilot performance: assessing how scan patterns & navigational assessments vary by flight expertise.

    PubMed

    Yang, Ji Hyun; Kennedy, Quinn; Sullivan, Joseph; Fricker, Ronald D

    2013-02-01

    Helicopter overland navigation is a cognitively complex task that requires continuous monitoring of system and environmental parameters and many hours of training to master. This study investigated the effect of expertise on pilots' gaze measurements, navigation accuracy, and subjective assessment of their navigation accuracy in overland navigation on easy and difficult routes. A simulated overland task was completed by 12 military officers who ranged in flight experience as measured by total flight hours (TFH). They first studied a map of a route that included both easy and difficult route sections, and then had to 'fly' this simulated route in a fixed-base helicopter simulator. They also completed pre-task estimations and post-task assessments of the navigational difficulty of the transit to each waypoint in the route. Their scan pattern was tracked via eye tracking systems, which captured both the subject's out-the-window (OTW) and topographical map scan data. TFH was not associated with navigation accuracy or root mean square (RMS) error for any route section. For the easy routes, experts spent less time scanning out the window (p = 0.61) and had shorter OTW dwell (p = -0.66). For the difficult routes, experts appeared to slow down their scan by spending as much time scanning out the window as the novices while also having fewer Map fixations (p = -0.65) and shorter OTW dwell (p = -0.69). However, TFH was not significantly correlated with more accurate estimates of route difficulty. This study found that TFH did not predict navigation accuracy or subjective assessment, but was correlated with some gaze parameters.

  18. 42 CFR 93.502 - Appointment of the Administrative Law Judge and scientific expert.

    Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

    2010-10-01

    ... PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE POLICIES ON RESEARCH MISCONDUCT Opportunity To Contest ORI Findings of Research... expertise to assist the ALJ in evaluating scientific or technical issues related to the findings of research misconduct. (1) On the ALJ's or a party's motion to appoint an expert, the ALJ must give the parties an...

  19. 42 CFR 93.502 - Appointment of the Administrative Law Judge and scientific expert.

    Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

    2011-10-01

    ... PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE POLICIES ON RESEARCH MISCONDUCT Opportunity To Contest ORI Findings of Research... expertise to assist the ALJ in evaluating scientific or technical issues related to the findings of research misconduct. (1) On the ALJ's or a party's motion to appoint an expert, the ALJ must give the parties an...

  20. Learning to juggle: on the assembly of functional subsystems into a task-specific dynamical organization.

    PubMed

    Huys, R; Daffertshofer, A; Beek, P J

    2003-04-01

    We examined the development of task-specific couplings among functional subsystems (i.e., ball circulation, respiration, and body sway) when learning to juggle a three-ball cascade, with a focus on learning-induced changes in the coupling between ball movements and respiration and the coupling between ball movements and body sway. Six novices practiced to juggle three balls in cascade fashion for one hour per day for twenty days. On specific days (7 in total), ball movements, center-of-pressure (CoP) trajectories and respiration traces were measured simultaneously. Discrete, time-continuous and spectral analyses revealed that the spatio-temporal variability of the juggling patterns decreased with practice and that the degree to which the task constraints were satisfied increased gradually. No conclusive evidence was found for ball movement-respiration coupling. In contrast, clear-cut evidence was found for the presence of 1:3 and 2:3 frequency locking between the vertical component of the ball trajectories and both the anterior-posterior and the medio-lateral components of the CoP. Incidence and expression of these mode locks varied across individuals and altered in the course of learning. Gradual changes in locking strength, appearances and disappearances of mode locks, as well as abrupt transitions between coupled states were observed. These results indicate that dissimilar learning dynamics may arise in the functional embedding of subsystems into a task-specific organization and that motor equivalence is an inherent property of such emerging task-specific organizations.

  1. The transformation of (bio)ethics expertise in a world of ethical pluralism.

    PubMed

    Kovács, József

    2010-12-01

    Today, bioethics experts have an increasing role in public life. However, the question arises: what does bioethics expertise really mean? Can there be such a thing in our globalised world characterised by ethical pluralism? I will argue that bioethics as a discipline represents the transformation of ethics expertise from a hard to a soft form of it. Bioethics was born as a reaction to the growing awareness of ethical pluralism, and it denied the hard form of normative-prescriptive ethics expertise (the ability to determine what is the right course of action for others), particularly in its medical ethics form. In contrast, the traditional medical ethics model, and pre-modern societies in general, believed in hard normative ethics expertise. From this followed the characteristic paternalism of traditional medical practice: if physicians were experts in moral matters as well, if they knew what the right course of action to choose was, then they had a right to benevolently force this course of action on their patients. The remnants of this doctrine, although rarely stated explicitly, still can often be seen in clinical practice. The whole bioethics movement can be seen as a radical denial of the doctrine of physician's hard expertise in moral matters. Bioethics, however, represents a type of soft ethics expertise (mainly value sensitivity). Hence follows the seeming paradox of bioethics expertise: bioethics is both a denial of ethics expertise (in its hard form) as well as a type of (soft) ethics expertise.

  2. Helping Students Move from Coding to Publishing - Teaching Scientific Communication to Science Interns

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Batchelor, R.; Haacker-Santos, R.; Pandya, R. E.

    2012-12-01

    To help young scientists succeed in our field we should not only model scientific methods and inquiry, but also train them in the art of scientific writing - after all, poorly written proposals, reports or journal articles can be a show stopper for any researcher. Research internships are an effective place to provide such training, because they offer a unique opportunity to integrate writing with the process of conducting original research. This presentation will describe how scientific communication is integrated into the SOARS program. Significant Opportunities in Atmospheric Research and Science (SOARS) is an undergraduate-to graduate bridge program that broadens participation in the geosciences. SOARS aims to foster the next generation of leaders in the atmospheric and related sciences by helping students develop investigative expertise complemented by leadership and communication skills. Each summer, interns (called protégés) attend a weekly seminar designed to help them learn scientific writing and communication skills. The workshop is organized around the sections of a scientific paper. Workshop topics include reading and citing scientific literature, writing an introduction, preparing a compelling abstract, discussing results, designing effective figures, and writing illuminating conclusions. In addition, protégés develop the skills required to communicate their research to both scientists and non-scientists through the use of posters, presentations and informal 'elevator' speeches. Writing and communication mentors guide protégés in applying the ideas from the workshop to the protégés' required summer scientific paper, poster and presentation, while a strong peer-review component of the program gives the protégés a taste of analyzing, critiquing and collaborating within a scientific forum. This presentation will provide practical tips and lessons learned from over ten years of scientific communications workshops within the SOARS program

  3. Becoming an Expert: Developing Expertise in an Applied Discipline

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Kuhlmann, Diane Orlich; Ardichvili, Alexandre

    2015-01-01

    Purpose: This paper aims to examine the development of expertise in an applied discipline by addressing the research question: How is professional expertise developed in an applied profession? Design/methodology/approach: Using a grounded theory methodology (GTM), nine technical-tax experts, and three experienced, non-expert tax professionals were…

  4. Organ donation education initiatives: A report of the Donor Management Task Force.

    PubMed

    Michetti, Christopher P; Nakagawa, Thomas A; Malinoski, Darren; Wright, Charles; Swanson, LeAnn

    2016-10-01

    It is essential that hospitals and health professionals establish systems to facilitate patients' organ donation wishes. Donation education has been neither standardized nor systematic, and resources related to donation processes have not been widely accessible. This report describes 2 free, publicly available educational resources about the organ donation process created to advance the mission of basic education and improve donation processes within hospitals and health care systems. Members of the Donor Management Task Force of the Organ Donation and Transplantation Alliance (the Alliance) and the Health Resources and Services Administration of the US Department of Health and Human Services convened annually in person and by teleconferencing during the year to develop 2 educational vehicles on organ donation. Two educational products were developed: the Organ Donation Toolbox, an online repository of documents and resources covering all aspects of the donation process, and the Educational Training Video that reviews the basic foundations of a successful hospital donation system. There is a need for more research and education about the process of organ donation as it relates to the medical and psychosocial care of patients and families before the end of life. The educational products described can help fill this critical need. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  5. Environmental health sciences center task force review on halogenated organics in drinking water.

    PubMed

    Deinzer, M; Schaumburg, F; Klein, E

    1978-06-01

    The disinfection of drinking water by chlorination has in recent years come under closer scrutiny because of the potential hazards associated with the production of stable chlorinated organic chemicals. Organic chemical contaminants are common to all water supplies and it is now well-established that chlorinated by-products are obtained under conditions of disinfection, or during tertiary treatment of sewage whose products can ultimately find their way into drinking water supplies. Naturally occurring humic substances which are invariably present in drinking waters are probably the source of chloroform and other halogenated methanes, and chloroform has shown up in every water supply investigated thus far.The Environmental Protection Agency is charged with the responsibility of assessing the public health effects resulting from the consumption of contaminated drinking water. It has specifically undertaken the task of determining whether organic contaminants or their chlorinated derivatives have a special impact, and if so, what alternatives there are to protect the consumer against bacterial and viral diseases that are transmitted through infected drinking waters. The impetus to look at these chemicals is not entirely without some prima facie evidence of potential trouble. Epidemiological studies suggested a higher incidence of cancer along the lower Mississippi River where the contamination from organic chemicals is particularly high. The conclusions from these studies have, to be sure, not gone unchallenged.The task of assessing the effects of chemicals in the drinking water is a difficult one. It includes many variables, including differences in water supplies and the temporal relationship between contamination and consumption of the finished product. It must also take into account the relative importance of the effects from these chemicals in comparison to those from occupational exposure, ingestion of contaminated foods, inhalation of polluted air, and many

  6. Age and expertise effects in aviation decision making and flight control in a flight simulator.

    PubMed

    Kennedy, Quinn; Taylor, Joy L; Reade, Gordon; Yesavage, Jerome A

    2010-05-01

    Age (due to declines in cognitive abilities necessary for navigation) and level of aviation expertise are two factors that may affect aviation performance and decision making under adverse weather conditions. We examined the roles of age, expertise, and their relationship on aviation decision making and flight control performance during a flight simulator task. Seventy-two IFR-rated general aviators, aged 19-79 yr, made multiple approach, holding pattern entry, and landing decisions while navigating under Instrument Flight Rules weather conditions. Over three trials in which the fog level varied, subjects decided whether or not to land the aircraft. They also completed two holding pattern entries. Subjects' flight control during approaches and holding patterns was measured. Older pilots (41+ yr) were more likely than younger pilots to land when visibility was inadequate (older pilots' mean false alarm rate: 0.44 vs 0.25). They also showed less precise flight control for components of the approach, performing 0.16 SD below mean approach scores. Expertise attenuated an age-related decline in flight control during holding patterns: older IFR/CFI performed 0.73 SD below mean score; younger IFR/CFI, younger CFII/ATP, older CFII/ATP: 0.32, 0.26, 0.03 SD above mean score. Additionally, pilots with faster processing speed (by median split) had a higher mean landing decision false alarm rate (0.42 vs 0.28), yet performed 0.14 SD above the mean approach control score. Results have implications regarding specialized training for older pilots and for understanding processes involved in older adults' real world decision making and performance.

  7. Identification of Disciplines and Fields. Edis Task I Report, Work Unit 1.4.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Howard Research Co., Arlington, VA.

    This report presents the identification and definitions of subject oriented engineering and scientific disciplines and fields which are included in the EDIS Subject Categories. The discussion is extended to include the mix of subjects with other orientations, such as Item, Mission-Project, Expertise and Data Bank Categories. Sample queries are…

  8. Some methodological aspects of ethics committees' expertise: the Ukrainian example.

    PubMed

    Pustovit, Svitlana V

    2006-01-01

    Today local, national and international ethics committees have become an effective means of social regulation in many European countries. Science itself is an important precondition for the development of bioethical knowledge and ethics expertise. Cultural, social, historical and religious preconditions can facilitate different forms and methods of ethics expertise in each country. Ukrainian ethics expertise has some methodological problems connected with its socio-cultural, historical, science and philosophy development particularities. In this context, clarification of some common legitimacies or methodological approaches to ethics committee (EC) phenomena such as globalization, scientization and the prioritization of an ethics paradigm are very important. On the other hand, elaborate study and critical analysis of international experience by Ukraine and other Eastern European countries will provide the integration of their local and national ethics expertises into a world bioethics ethos.

  9. Implicit Learning in Science: Activating and Suppressing Scientific Intuitions to Enhance Conceptual Change

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Wang, Jeremy Yi-Ming

    This dissertation examines the thesis that implicit learning plays a role in learning about scientific phenomena, and subsequently, in conceptual change. Decades of research in learning science demonstrate that a primary challenge of science education is overcoming prior, naive knowledge of natural phenomena in order to gain scientific understanding. Until recently, a key assumption of this research has been that to develop scientific understanding, learners must abandon their prior scientific intuitions and replace them with scientific concepts. However, a growing body of research shows that scientific intuitions persist, even among science experts. This suggests that naive intuitions are suppressed, not supplanted, as learners gain scientific understanding. The current study examines two potential roles of implicit learning processes in the development of scientific knowledge. First, implicit learning is a source of cognitive structures that impede science learning. Second, tasks that engage implicit learning processes can be employed to activate and suppress prior intuitions, enhancing the likelihood that scientific concepts are adopted and applied. This second proposal is tested in two experiments that measure training-induced changes in intuitive and conceptual knowledge related to sinking and floating objects in water. In Experiment 1, an implicit learning task was developed to examine whether implicit learning can induce changes in performance on near and far transfer tasks. The results of this experiment provide evidence that implicit learning tasks activate and suppress scientific intuitions. Experiment 2 examined the effects of combining implicit learning with traditional, direct instruction to enhance explicit learning of science concepts. This experiment demonstrates that sequencing implicit learning task before and after direct instruction has different effects on intuitive and conceptual knowledge. Together, these results suggest a novel approach for

  10. Wine Expertise Predicts Taste Phenotype.

    PubMed

    Hayes, John E; Pickering, Gary J

    2012-03-01

    Taste phenotypes have long been studied in relation to alcohol intake, dependence, and family history, with contradictory findings. However, on balance - with appropriate caveats about populations tested, outcomes measured and psychophysical methods used - an association between variation in taste responsiveness and some alcohol behaviors is supported. Recent work suggests super-tasting (operationalized via propylthiouracil (PROP) bitterness) not only associates with heightened response but also with more acute discrimination between stimuli. Here, we explore relationships between food and beverage adventurousness and taste phenotype. A convenience sample of wine drinkers (n=330) were recruited in Ontario and phenotyped for PROP bitterness via filter paper disk. They also filled out a short questionnaire regarding willingness to try new foods, alcoholic beverages and wines as well as level of wine involvement, which was used to classify them as a wine expert (n=110) or wine consumer (n=220). In univariate logisitic models, food adventurousness predicted trying new wines and beverages but not expertise. Likewise, wine expertise predicted willingness to try new wines and beverages but not foods. In separate multivariate logistic models, willingness to try new wines and beverages was predicted by expertise and food adventurousness but not PROP. However, mean PROP bitterness was higher among wine experts than wine consumers, and the conditional distribution functions differed between experts and consumers. In contrast, PROP means and distributions did not differ with food adventurousness. These data suggest individuals may self-select for specific professions based on sensory ability (i.e., an active gene-environment correlation) but phenotype does not explain willingness to try new stimuli.

  11. Sherlock Holmes: an expert's view of expertise.

    PubMed

    André, Didierjean; Fernand, Gobet

    2008-02-01

    In recent years, there has been an intense research effort to understand the cognitive processes and structures underlying expert behaviour. Work in different fields, including scientific domains, sports, games and mnemonics, has shown that there are vast differences in perceptual abilities between experts and novices, and that these differences may underpin other cognitive differences in learning, memory and problem solving. In this article, we evaluate the progress made in the last years through the eyes of an outstanding, albeit fictional, expert: Sherlock Holmes. We first use the Sherlock Holmes character to illustrate expert processes as described by current research and theories. In particular, the role of perception, as well as the nature and influence of expert knowledge, are all present in the description of Conan Doyle's hero. In the second part of the article, we discuss a number of issues that current research on expertise has barely addressed. These gaps include, for example, several forms of reasoning, the influence of emotions on cognition, and the effect of age on experts' knowledge and cognitive processes. Thus, although nearly 120-year-old, Conan Doyle's books show remarkable illustrations of expert behaviour, including the coverage of themes that have mostly been overlooked by current research.

  12. [The current problems of injury assessment dealt with in the publications in the journal "Sudebnomeditsinskaya ekspertiza (Forensic medical expertise)" for the period from 2000 till 2014].

    PubMed

    Fetisov, V A; Gusarov, A A; Khabova, Z S; Smirenin, S A

    2015-01-01

    The objective of the present study was the analysis of the scientometric characteristics of the publication activity of the authors participating in the journal "Sudebno-meditsinskaya ekspertiza (Forensic medical expertise)" for the long period from 2000 till 2014 with special reference to the assessment of the coverage of the most topical problems, such as diagnostics of various injuries and their variability, expert evaluation of the conditions and mechanisms of their infliction for the purpose of characteristic of the properties of traumatic objects (weapons). The study allowed to identify the leading domestic and foreign periodicals most frequently cited by the authors of "Sudebno-meditsinskaya expertiza". The most active authors of the journal represent the research groups of the departments and laboratories of the forensic medical expertise agencies based at Moscow, Sankt-Peterburg, Novosibirsk, Barnaul, Kazan, Perm, Rostov-on-Don, Ryazan, Tver, and Khabarovsk. It is concluded that the continuation of the analysis and assessment of the scientific activity of the specialists in the this field of forensic medical expertise is an indispensable condition for the further development and improvement of forensic medical expertise in the Russian Federation.

  13. Performance of experienced versus less experienced paramedics in managing challenging scenarios: a cognitive task analysis study.

    PubMed

    Smith, Michael W; Bentley, Melissa A; Fernandez, Antonio R; Gibson, Gregory; Schweikhart, Sharon B; Woods, David D

    2013-10-01

    Out-of-hospital care is becoming more complex, thus placing greater reliance on the cognitive abilities of paramedics to manage difficult situations. In adapting to the challenges in their work, paramedics develop expertise. We study the cognitive strategies used by expert paramedics to contribute to understanding how paramedics and the EMS system can adapt to new challenges. We conducted a "staged-world" cognitive task analysis to explore paramedics' handling of cognitive challenges related to sense-making and to resource and task management. A mixed-fidelity simulation was used to present paramedics with 2 challenging scenarios: a pulmonary embolism initially presenting as a myocardial infarction and a 2-person shooting with limited resources available. Participants were 10 paramedics, 6 more experienced and 4 less experienced. Analysis involved comparing the performance of the 2 groups to identify strategies associated with expertise. The more experienced paramedics made more assessments, explored a wider variety of presumptive diagnoses, and identified the pulmonary embolism earlier. They switched attention between the 2 shooting victims more, used their emergency medical technician-basic level partners more, and provided more advanced level care for both patients. Their patients arrived at the emergency department more prepared for specialized emergency care. Our findings correspond to general cognitive attributes of expertise: greater cue gathering and inferential reasoning, and more functional and strategic thinking. These results suggest potential areas and methods to facilitate development of expertise, as well as ways to better support use of expertise. Future studies should expand on these findings through larger sample sizes and more complex scenarios. Copyright © 2013 American College of Emergency Physicians. Published by Mosby, Inc. All rights reserved.

  14. Unboxing the Black Box of Visual Expertise in Medicine

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Jarodzka, Halszka; Boshuizen, Henny P. .

    2017-01-01

    Visual expertise in medicine has been a subject of research since many decades. Interestingly, it has been investigated from two little related fields, namely the field that focused mainly on the visual search aspects whilst ignoring higher-level cognitive processes involved in medical expertise, and the field that mainly focused on these…

  15. Children's mathematical performance: five cognitive tasks across five grades.

    PubMed

    Moore, Alex M; Ashcraft, Mark H

    2015-07-01

    Children in elementary school, along with college adults, were tested on a battery of basic mathematical tasks, including digit naming, number comparison, dot enumeration, and simple addition or subtraction. Beyond cataloguing performance to these standard tasks in Grades 1 to 5, we also examined relationships among the tasks, including previously reported results on a number line estimation task. Accuracy and latency improved across grades for all tasks, and classic interaction patterns were found, for example, a speed-up of subitizing and counting, increasingly shallow slopes in number comparison, and progressive speeding of responses especially to larger addition and subtraction problems. Surprisingly, digit naming was faster than subitizing at all ages, arguing against a pre-attentive processing explanation for subitizing. Estimation accuracy and speed were strong predictors of children's addition and subtraction performance. Children who gave exponential responses on the number line estimation task were slower at counting in the dot enumeration task and had longer latencies on addition and subtraction problems. The results provided further support for the importance of estimation as an indicator of children's current and future mathematical expertise. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  16. A Review of NASA Human Research Program's Scientific Merit Processes: Letter Report

    NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

    Pawelczyk, James A. (Editor); Strawbridge, Larisa M. (Editor); Schultz, Andrea M. (Editor); Liverman, Catharyn T. (Editor)

    2012-01-01

    At the request of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Institute of Medicine (IOM) convened the Committee on the Review of NASA Human Research Program's (HRP's) Scientific Merit Assessment Processes in December 2011. The committee was asked to evaluate the scientific merit assessment processes that are applied to directed research tasks2 funded through the HRP and to determine best practices from similar assessment processes that are used in other federal agencies. This letter report and its recommendations are the product of a 10-member ad hoc committee, which included individuals who had previously conducted research under the HRP, were familiar with the HRP s research portfolio and operations, had specific knowledge of peer review processes, or were familiar with scientific merit assessment processes used in other organizations and federal agencies, such as the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR); National Institutes of Health (NIH); National Science Foundation (NSF); and U.S. Departments of Agriculture (USDA), Defense (DOD), and Transportation.

  17. Launching Complex Tasks

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Jackson, Kara J.; Shahan, Emily C.; Gibbons, Lynsey K.; Cobb, Paul A.

    2012-01-01

    Mathematics lessons can take a variety of formats. In this article, the authors discuss lessons organized around complex mathematical tasks. These lessons usually unfold in three phases. First, the task is introduced to students. Second, students work on solving the task. Third, the teacher "orchestrates" a concluding whole-class discussion in…

  18. Talent in the taxi: a model system for exploring expertise

    PubMed Central

    Woollett, Katherine; Spiers, Hugo J.; Maguire, Eleanor A.

    2009-01-01

    While there is widespread interest in and admiration of individuals with exceptional talents, surprisingly little is known about the cognitive and neural mechanisms underpinning talent, and indeed how talent relates to expertise. Because many talents are first identified and nurtured in childhood, it can be difficult to determine whether talent is innate, can be acquired through extensive practice or can only be acquired in the presence of the developing brain. We sought to address some of these issues by studying healthy adults who acquired expertise in adulthood. We focused on the domain of memory and used licensed London taxi drivers as a model system. Taxi drivers have to learn the layout of 25 000 streets in London and the locations of thousands of places of interest, and pass stringent examinations in order to obtain an operating licence. Using neuropsychological assessment and structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging, we addressed a range of key questions: in the context of a fully developed brain and an average IQ, can people acquire expertise to an exceptional level; what are the neural signatures, both structural and functional, associated with the use of expertise; does expertise change the brain compared with unskilled control participants; does it confer any cognitive advantages, and similarly, does it come at a cost to other functions? By studying retired taxi drivers, we also consider what happens to their brains and behaviour when experts stop using their skill. Finally, we discuss how the expertise of taxi drivers might relate to the issue of talent and innate abilities. We suggest that exploring talent and expertise in this manner could have implications for education, rehabilitation of patients with cognitive impairments, understanding individual differences and possibly conditions such as autism where exceptional abilities can be a feature. PMID:19528024

  19. The Teenage Expertise Network (TEN): An Online Ethnographic Approach

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Johnson, Nicola F.; Humphry, Nicoli

    2012-01-01

    The take-up of digital technology by young people is a well-known phenomenon and has been subject to socio-cultural analysis in areas such as youth studies and cultural studies. The Teenage Expertise Network (TEN) research project investigates how teenagers develop technological expertise in techno-cultural contexts via the use of a purposefully…

  20. Assessing the Quality of Expertise Differences in the Comprehension of Medical Visualizations

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Gegenfurtner, Andreas; Siewiorek, Anna; Lehtinen, Erno; Saljo, Roger

    2013-01-01

    Understanding how best to assess expertise, the situational variations of expertise, and distinctive qualities of expertise that arises from particular workplace experiences, presents an important challenge. Certainly, at this time, there is much interest in identifying standard occupational measures and competences, which are not well aligned…

  1. Developing expectations regarding the boundaries of expertise.

    PubMed

    Landrum, Asheley R; Mills, Candice M

    2015-01-01

    Three experiments examined elementary school-aged children's and adults' expectations regarding what specialists (i.e., those with narrow domains of expertise) and generalists (i.e., those with broad domains of expertise) are likely to know. Experiment 1 demonstrated developmental differences in the ability to differentiate between generalists and specialists, with younger children believing generalists have more specific trivia knowledge than older children and adults believed. Experiment 2 demonstrated that children and adults expected generalists to have more underlying principles knowledge than specific trivia knowledge about unfamiliar animals. However, they believed that generalists would have more of both types of knowledge than themselves. Finally, Experiment 3 demonstrated that children and adults recognized that underlying principles knowledge can be generalized between topics closely related to the specialists' domains of expertise. However, they did not recognize when this knowledge was generalizable to topics slightly less related, expecting generalists to know only as much as they would. Importantly, this work contributes to the literature by showing how much of and what kinds of knowledge different types of experts are expected to have. In sum, this work provides insight into some of the ways children's notions of expertise change over development. The current research demonstrates that between the ages of 5 and 10, children are developing the ability to recognize how experts' knowledge is likely to be limited. That said, even older children at times struggle to determine the breadth of an experts' knowledge. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  2. Training Packages: The Scientific Management of Education.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Hunter, John

    The theory of scientific management was established as a way to increase workers' productivity. The following are among the key principles underpinning scientific management: task simplification and division of labor boost productivity; management must control the planning of work down to its minutiae; and remuneration should be based on output.…

  3. Scientific, legal, and ethical challenges of end-of-life organ procurement in emergency medicine.

    PubMed

    Rady, Mohamed Y; Verheijde, Joseph L; McGregor, Joan L

    2010-09-01

    We review (1) scientific evidence questioning the validity of declaring death and procuring organs in heart-beating (i.e., neurological standard of death) and non-heart-beating (i.e., circulatory-respiratory standard of death) donation; (2) consequences of collaborative programs realigning hospital policies to maximize access of procurement coordinators to critically and terminally ill patients as potential donors on arrival in emergency departments; and (3) ethical and legal ramifications of current practices of organ procurement on patients and their families. Relevant publications in peer-reviewed journals and government websites. Scientific evidence undermines the biological criteria of death that underpin the definition of death in heart-beating (i.e., neurological standard) and non-heart-beating (i.e., circulatory-respiratory standard) donation. Philosophical reinterpretation of the neurological and circulatory-respiratory standards in the death statute, to avoid the appearance of organ procurement as an active life-ending intervention, lacks public and medical consensus. Collaborative programs bundle procurement coordinators together with hospital staff for a team-huddle and implement a quality improvement tool for a Rapid Assessment of Hospital Procurement Barriers in Donation. Procurement coordinators have access to critically ill patients during the course of medical treatment with no donation consent and with family or surrogates unaware of their roles. How these programs affect the medical care of these patients has not been studied. Policies enforcing end-of-life organ procurement can have unintended consequences: (1) erosion of care in the patient's best interests, (2) lack of transparency, and (3) ethical and legal ramifications of flawed standards of declaring death. Copyright 2010 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

  4. The influence of professional expertise and task complexity upon the potency of the contextual interference effect.

    PubMed

    Ollis, Stewart; Button, Chris; Fairweather, Malcolm

    2005-03-01

    The contextual interference (CI) effect has been investigated through practice schedule manipulations within both basic and applied studies. Despite extensive research activity there is little conclusive evidence regarding the optimal practice structure of real world manipulative tasks in professional training settings. The present study therefore assessed the efficacy of practising simple and complex knot-tying skills in professional fire-fighters training. Forty-eight participants were quasi-randomly assigned to various practice schedules along the CI continuum. Twenty-four participants were students selected for their novice knot-tying capabilities and 24 were experienced fire-fighters who were more 'experienced knot-tiers'. They were assessed for skill acquisition, retention and transfer effects having practiced tying knots classified as simple or complex. Surprisingly, high levels of CI scheduling enhance learning for novices even when practising a complex task. The findings also revealed that CI benefits are most apparent as learners engage in tasks high in transfer distality. In conclusion, complexity and experience are mediating factors influencing the potency of the CI training effect in real-world settings.

  5. Organizing Scientific Meetings

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Epple, August

    1997-03-01

    Preface; 1. Introduction: What can go wrong?; 2. The decision: To run or not to run; 3. Scientific and related events: variety delights; 4. Social events: something for every taste and budget; 5. The program: how to accommodate pigs in a poke; 6. Selection of the meeting site: a touch of Russian roulette; 7. The dates of the meeting: you can't win; 8. Publications: cruel and unusual punishment; 9. Selection of participants: how to lose old friends and make new enemies; 10. Committees: you have to live with them; 11. Accompanists: you better love'm; 12. Office and staff: don't take chances; 13. The budget: a jungle with pitfalls; 14. Fund raising: some would rather see their dentist; 15. Allocation of travel support: not much fun either; 16. Schedule of preparations: from dream to reality; 17. Announcements and other information: clarity pays; 18. Design of forms, name tags, tickets, signs and stickers: how about using some common sense?; 19. Satellite meetings: think twice; 20. Checklist of important no-nos; List of appendixes; Appendixes A-R; Index.

  6. Questioning and reading goals: information-seeking questions asked on scientific texts read under different task conditions.

    PubMed

    Ishiwa, Koto; Sanjosé, Vicente; Otero, José

    2013-09-01

    A number of studies report that few questions are asked in classrooms and that many of them are shallow questions. This study investigates the way in which reading goals determine questioning on scientific texts. Reading goals were manipulated through two different tasks: reading for understanding versus reading to solve a problem. A total of 183 university students. In the first and third questioning experiments, the participants read two short texts. Students in one condition were instructed to understand the texts, whereas in the alternative condition they had to read texts to solve a problem. Students were instructed to write down any questions they might have about the texts. The questions were categorized according to the type of underlying obstacle: associative, explanatory, or predictive. The second experiment used a think-aloud methodology to identify the mental representations generated by the students. The two questioning experiments show that the questions asked depend on the reading goals. Significantly more explanation questions were asked in the understanding condition than in the problem-solving condition. Also, the two conditions were found to have a different influence on the generation of association and explanation questions. Very few prediction questions were asked in either condition. The think-aloud experiment revealed that the mental representations attempted by readers under the two conditions were indeed different. In conclusion, the experiments showed that, given a certain textual input, readers' questions depend on the reading goals associated with tasks. © 2012 The British Psychological Society.

  7. Learning Stories from IT Workers--Development of Professional Expertise

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Ha, Tak S.

    2015-01-01

    In the knowledge economy, many companies are well aware of the vital need to maintain the professional expertise of their workers at a high level. Though there have been a lot of research studies in the areas of professional expertise and workplace learning, few examined the learning pathways novice workers went through to become experts in their…

  8. The role of domain expertise and judgment in dealing with unexpected events

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Kochan, Janeen Adrion

    Unexpected events, particularly those creating surprise, interrupt ongoing mental and behavioral processes, creating an increased potential for unwanted outcomes to the situation. Human reactions to unexpected events vary. One can hypothesize a number of reasons for this variation, including level of domain expertise, previous experience with similar events, emotional connotation, and the contextual surround of the event. Whereas interrupting ongoing activities and focusing attention temporarily on a surprising event may be a useful evolutionary response to a threatening situation, the same process may be maladaptive in today's highly dynamic world. The purpose of this study was to investigate how different aspects of expertise affected one's ability to detect and react to an unexpected event. It was hypothesized that there were two general types of expertise, domain expertise and judgment (Hammond, 2000), which influenced one's performance on dealing with an unexpected event. The goal of the research was to parse out the relative contribution of domain expertise, so the role of judgment could be revealed. The research questions for this study were: (a) Can we identify specific knowledges and skills which enhance one's ability to deal with unexpected events? (b) Are these skills "automatically" included in domain expertise? (c) How does domain expertise improve or deter one's reaction and response to unexpected events? (d) What role does judgment play in responding to surprise? The general hypothesis was that good judgment would influence the process of surprise at different stages and in different ways than would domain expertise. The conclusions from this research indicated that good judgment had a significant positive effect in helping pilots deal with unexpected events. This was most pronounced when domain expertise was low.

  9. Constructing Scientific Arguments Using Evidence from Dynamic Computational Climate Models

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Pallant, Amy; Lee, Hee-Sun

    2015-04-01

    Modeling and argumentation are two important scientific practices students need to develop throughout school years. In this paper, we investigated how middle and high school students ( N = 512) construct a scientific argument based on evidence from computational models with which they simulated climate change. We designed scientific argumentation tasks with three increasingly complex dynamic climate models. Each scientific argumentation task consisted of four parts: multiple-choice claim, openended explanation, five-point Likert scale uncertainty rating, and open-ended uncertainty rationale. We coded 1,294 scientific arguments in terms of a claim's consistency with current scientific consensus, whether explanations were model based or knowledge based and categorized the sources of uncertainty (personal vs. scientific). We used chi-square and ANOVA tests to identify significant patterns. Results indicate that (1) a majority of students incorporated models as evidence to support their claims, (2) most students used model output results shown on graphs to confirm their claim rather than to explain simulated molecular processes, (3) students' dependence on model results and their uncertainty rating diminished as the dynamic climate models became more and more complex, (4) some students' misconceptions interfered with observing and interpreting model results or simulated processes, and (5) students' uncertainty sources reflected more frequently on their assessment of personal knowledge or abilities related to the tasks than on their critical examination of scientific evidence resulting from models. These findings have implications for teaching and research related to the integration of scientific argumentation and modeling practices to address complex Earth systems.

  10. Developing a Deeper Understanding of "Mathematics Teaching Expertise": An Examination of Three Chinese Mathematics Teachers' Resource Systems as Windows into Their Work and Expertise

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Pepin, Birgit; Xu, Binyan; Trouche, Luc; Wang, Chongyang

    2017-01-01

    In order to develop a deeper understanding of mathematics teaching expertise, in this study we use the Documentational Approach to Didactics to explore the resource systems of three Chinese mathematics "expert" teachers. Exploiting the Western and Eastern literature we examine the notion of "mathematics teaching expertise", as…

  11. A scientific workflow framework for (13)C metabolic flux analysis.

    PubMed

    Dalman, Tolga; Wiechert, Wolfgang; Nöh, Katharina

    2016-08-20

    Metabolic flux analysis (MFA) with (13)C labeling data is a high-precision technique to quantify intracellular reaction rates (fluxes). One of the major challenges of (13)C MFA is the interactivity of the computational workflow according to which the fluxes are determined from the input data (metabolic network model, labeling data, and physiological rates). Here, the workflow assembly is inevitably determined by the scientist who has to consider interacting biological, experimental, and computational aspects. Decision-making is context dependent and requires expertise, rendering an automated evaluation process hardly possible. Here, we present a scientific workflow framework (SWF) for creating, executing, and controlling on demand (13)C MFA workflows. (13)C MFA-specific tools and libraries, such as the high-performance simulation toolbox 13CFLUX2, are wrapped as web services and thereby integrated into a service-oriented architecture. Besides workflow steering, the SWF features transparent provenance collection and enables full flexibility for ad hoc scripting solutions. To handle compute-intensive tasks, cloud computing is supported. We demonstrate how the challenges posed by (13)C MFA workflows can be solved with our approach on the basis of two proof-of-concept use cases. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  12. Scientific writing: strategies and tools for students and advisors.

    PubMed

    Singh, Vikash; Mayer, Philipp

    2014-01-01

    Scientific writing is a demanding task and many students need more time than expected to finish their research articles. To speed up the process, we highlight some tools, strategies as well as writing guides. We recommend starting early in the research process with writing and to prepare research articles, not after but in parallel to the lab or field work. We suggest considering scientific writing as a team enterprise, which needs proper organization and regular feedback. In addition, it is helpful to select potential target journals early and to consider not only scope and reputation, but also decision times and rejection rates. Before submission, instructions to authors and writing guides should be considered, and drafts should be extensively revised. Later in the process editor's and reviewer's comments should be followed. Our tips and tools help students and advisors to structure the writing and publishing process, thereby stimulating them to develop their own strategies to success. Copyright © 2014 The International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

  13. Expertise Development With Different Types of Automation: A Function of Different Cognitive Abilities.

    PubMed

    Jipp, Meike

    2016-02-01

    I explored whether different cognitive abilities (information-processing ability, working-memory capacity) are needed for expertise development when different types of automation (information vs. decision automation) are employed. It is well documented that expertise development and the employment of automation lead to improved performance. Here, it is argued that a learner's ability to reason about an activity may be hindered by the employment of information automation. Additional feedback needs to be processed, thus increasing the load on working memory and decelerating expertise development. By contrast, the employment of decision automation may stimulate reasoning, increase the initial load on information-processing ability, and accelerate expertise development. Authors of past research have not investigated the interrelations between automation assistance, individual differences, and expertise development. Sixty-one naive learners controlled simulated air traffic with two types of automation: information automation and decision automation. Their performance was captured across 16 trials. Well-established tests were used to assess information-processing ability and working-memory capacity. As expected, learners' performance benefited from expertise development and decision automation. Furthermore, individual differences moderated the effect of the type of automation on expertise development: The employment of only information automation increased the load on working memory during later expertise development. The employment of decision automation initially increased the need to process information. These findings highlight the importance of considering individual differences and expertise development when investigating human-automation interaction. The results are relevant for selecting automation configurations for expertise development. © 2015, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

  14. Digital health and the need to develop centers of expertise in sub-Saharan Africa : two examples in Mali and Cameroon.

    PubMed

    Bagayoko, C-O; Bediang, G; Anne, A; Niang, M; Traoré, A-K; Geissbuhler, A

    2017-11-01

    It is generally agreed today that digital technology provides a lever for improving access to health care, care processes, and public health planning and activities such as education and prevention. Its use in countries that have reached a given level of development has taken place in a somewhat fragmented manner that raises important interoperability problems and sometimes makes synergy impossible between the different projects of digital health. This may be linked to several factors, principally the lack of a global vision of digital health, and inadequate methodological knowledge that prevents the development and implementation of this vision. The countries of Africa should be able to profit from these errors from the beginnings of digital health, by moving toward systemic approaches, known standards, and tools appropriate to the realities on the ground. The aim of this work is to present the methodological approaches as well as the principal results of two relatively new centers of expertise in Mali and Cameroon intended to cultivate this vision of digital governance in the domain of health and to train professionals to implement the projects. Both centers were created due to initiatives of organizations of civil society. The center in Mali developed toward an economic interest group and then to collaboration with healthcare and university organizations. The same process is underway at the Cameroon center. The principal results from these centers can be enumerated under different aspects linked to research, development, training, and implementation of digital health tools. They have produced dozens of scientific publications, doctoral dissertations, theses, and papers focused especially on subjects such as the medicoeconomic evaluation tools of e-health and health information technology systems. In light of these results, we can conclude that these two centers of expertise have well and truly been established. Their role may be decisive in the local training of

  15. Understanding the Impact of Expertise in Joint and Solo-Improvisation.

    PubMed

    Issartel, Johann; Gueugnon, Mathieu; Marin, Ludovic

    2017-01-01

    Joint-improvisation is not only an open-ended creative action that two or more people perform together in the context of an artistic performance (e.g., theatre, music or dance). Joint-improvisation also takes place in daily life activities when humans take part in collective performance such as toddlers at play or adults engaged in a conversation. In the context of this article, joint-improvisation has been looked at from a social motor coordination perspective. In the literature, the nature of the social motor coordination characteristics of joint-improvisation for either the creative aspect or daily life features of this motor performance remains unclear. Additionally, both solo-improvisation and joint-improvisation need to be studied conjointly to establish the influence of the social element of improvisation in the emergence of multi-agent motor coordination. In order to better understand those two types of improvisation, we compared three level of expertise - novice, intermediate and professional in dance improvisation to identify movement characteristics for each of the groups. Pairs of the same level were asked to improvise together. Each individual was also asked to perform an improvisation on his/her own. We found that each of the three groups present specific movement organization with movement complexity increasing with the level of expertise. Experts performed shorter movement duration in conjunction with an increase range of movement. The direct comparison of individual and paired Conditions highlighted that the joint-improvisation reduced the complexity of the movement organization and those for all three levels while maintaining the differences between the groups. This direct comparison amongst those three distinct groups provides an original insight onto the nature of movement patterns in joint-improvisation situation. Overall, it reveals the role of both individual and collective properties in the emergence of social coordination.

  16. Understanding the Impact of Expertise in Joint and Solo-Improvisation

    PubMed Central

    Issartel, Johann; Gueugnon, Mathieu; Marin, Ludovic

    2017-01-01

    Joint-improvisation is not only an open-ended creative action that two or more people perform together in the context of an artistic performance (e.g., theatre, music or dance). Joint-improvisation also takes place in daily life activities when humans take part in collective performance such as toddlers at play or adults engaged in a conversation. In the context of this article, joint-improvisation has been looked at from a social motor coordination perspective. In the literature, the nature of the social motor coordination characteristics of joint-improvisation for either the creative aspect or daily life features of this motor performance remains unclear. Additionally, both solo-improvisation and joint-improvisation need to be studied conjointly to establish the influence of the social element of improvisation in the emergence of multi-agent motor coordination. In order to better understand those two types of improvisation, we compared three level of expertise – novice, intermediate and professional in dance improvisation to identify movement characteristics for each of the groups. Pairs of the same level were asked to improvise together. Each individual was also asked to perform an improvisation on his/her own. We found that each of the three groups present specific movement organization with movement complexity increasing with the level of expertise. Experts performed shorter movement duration in conjunction with an increase range of movement. The direct comparison of individual and paired Conditions highlighted that the joint-improvisation reduced the complexity of the movement organization and those for all three levels while maintaining the differences between the groups. This direct comparison amongst those three distinct groups provides an original insight onto the nature of movement patterns in joint-improvisation situation. Overall, it reveals the role of both individual and collective properties in the emergence of social coordination. PMID:28713301

  17. Wine Expertise Predicts Taste Phenotype

    PubMed Central

    Hayes, John E; Pickering, Gary J

    2011-01-01

    Taste phenotypes have long been studied in relation to alcohol intake, dependence, and family history, with contradictory findings. However, on balance – with appropriate caveats about populations tested, outcomes measured and psychophysical methods used – an association between variation in taste responsiveness and some alcohol behaviors is supported. Recent work suggests super-tasting (operationalized via propylthiouracil (PROP) bitterness) not only associates with heightened response but also with more acute discrimination between stimuli. Here, we explore relationships between food and beverage adventurousness and taste phenotype. A convenience sample of wine drinkers (n=330) were recruited in Ontario and phenotyped for PROP bitterness via filter paper disk. They also filled out a short questionnaire regarding willingness to try new foods, alcoholic beverages and wines as well as level of wine involvement, which was used to classify them as a wine expert (n=110) or wine consumer (n=220). In univariate logisitic models, food adventurousness predicted trying new wines and beverages but not expertise. Likewise, wine expertise predicted willingness to try new wines and beverages but not foods. In separate multivariate logistic models, willingness to try new wines and beverages was predicted by expertise and food adventurousness but not PROP. However, mean PROP bitterness was higher among wine experts than wine consumers, and the conditional distribution functions differed between experts and consumers. In contrast, PROP means and distributions did not differ with food adventurousness. These data suggest individuals may self-select for specific professions based on sensory ability (i.e., an active gene-environment correlation) but phenotype does not explain willingness to try new stimuli. PMID:22888174

  18. Designing a solution to enable agency-academic scientific collaboration for disasters

    USGS Publications Warehouse

    Mease, Lindley A.; Gibbs-Plessl, Theodora; Erickson, Ashley; Ludwig, Kristin A.; Reddy, Christopher M.; Lubchenco, Jane

    2017-01-01

    As large-scale environmental disasters become increasingly frequent and more severe globally, people and organizations that prepare for and respond to these crises need efficient and effective ways to integrate sound science into their decision making. Experience has shown that integrating nongovernmental scientific expertise into disaster decision making can improve the quality of the response, and is most effective if the integration occurs before, during, and after a crisis, not just during a crisis. However, collaboration between academic, government, and industry scientists, decision makers, and responders is frequently difficult because of cultural differences, misaligned incentives, time pressures, and legal constraints. Our study addressed this challenge by using the Deep Change Method, a design methodology developed by Stanford ChangeLabs, which combines human-centered design, systems analysis, and behavioral psychology. We investigated underlying needs and motivations of government agency staff and academic scientists, mapped the root causes underlying the relationship failures between these two communities based on their experiences, and identified leverage points for shifting deeply rooted perceptions that impede collaboration. We found that building trust and creating mutual value between multiple stakeholders before crises occur is likely to increase the effectiveness of problem solving. We propose a solution, the Science Action Network, which is designed to address barriers to scientific collaboration by providing new mechanisms to build and improve trust and communication between government administrators and scientists, industry representatives, and academic scientists. The Science Action Network has the potential to ensure cross-disaster preparedness and science-based decision making through novel partnerships and scientific coordination.

  19. Accurate diagnosis of CHD by Paediatricians with Expertise in Cardiology.

    PubMed

    Jacob, Hannah C; Massey, Hannah; Yates, Robert W M; Kelsall, A Wilfred

    2017-08-01

    Introduction Paediatricians with Expertise in Cardiology assess children with a full history, examination, and often perform an echocardiogram. A minority are then referred to an outreach clinic run jointly with a visiting paediatric cardiologist. The accuracy of the echocardiography diagnosis made by the Paediatrician with Expertise in Cardiology is unknown. Materials and methods We conducted a retrospective review of clinic letters for children seen in the outreach clinic for the first time between March, 2004 and March, 2011. Children with CHD diagnosed antenatally or elsewhere were excluded. We recorded the echocardiography diagnosis made by the paediatric cardiologist and previously by the Paediatrician with Expertise in Cardiology. The Paediatrician with Expertise in Cardiology referred 317/3145 (10%) children seen in the local cardiac clinics to the outreach clinic over this period, and among them 296 were eligible for inclusion. Their median age was 1.5 years (range 1 month-15.1 years). For 244 (82%) children, there was complete diagnostic agreement between the Paediatrician with Expertise in Cardiology and the paediatric cardiologist. For 29 (10%) children, the main diagnosis was identical with additional findings made by the paediatric cardiologist. The abnormality had resolved in 17 (6%) cases by the time of clinic attendance. In six (2%) patients, the paediatric cardiologist made a different diagnosis. In total, 138 (47%) patients underwent a surgical or catheter intervention. Discussion Paediatricians with Expertise in Cardiology can make accurate diagnoses of CHD in children referred to their clinics. This can allow effective triage of children attending the outreach clinic, making best use of limited specialist resources.

  20. Competencies of Thai expertise teacher and PCK

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Chantaranima, Tarntip; Yuenyong, Chokchai

    2018-01-01

    Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) was accepted by worldwide Educators that it is a ubiquitous word in the preparation of teachers in the past decade. This study uses Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) framework as a lens for classifying the guidelines and expectations for categorizing expertise teachers. Therefore, the paper tries to clarify the relationship between competencies of Thai expertise teacher and PCK elements. To promote skillful Thai teachers by offering them academic titles, the Office of the Teacher Civil Service and Education Personal Commission were developed to provide guidelines and expectations for categorizing expertise teachers (OTEPC, 2009). This article focuses on the guideline criteria which are three areas of consideration. The first area of consideration is teacher's disciplines including virtues and professional conducts. The second area of consideration is teacher's knowledge and teaching ability. The last area of consider is teacher's performance. It seemed that the OTEPC guideline pay too much attention on the first area. However, there are some issues of PCK appearing on the OTEPC teacher competency. The paper will discuss some suggestions of fill up PCK in the OTEPC guideline. The paper may have implication for Thailand teacher education.

  1. Age and Expertise Effects in Aviation Decision Making and Flight Control in a Flight Simulator

    PubMed Central

    Kennedy, Quinn; Taylor, Joy L.; Reade, Gordon; Yesavage, Jerome A.

    2010-01-01

    Introduction Age (due to declines in cognitive abilities necessary for navigation) and level of aviation expertise are two factors that may affect aviation performance and decision making under adverse weather conditions. We examined the roles of age, expertise, and their relationship on aviation decision making and flight control performance during a flight simulator task. Methods Seventy-two IFR-rated general aviators, aged 19–79 yr, made multiple approach, holding pattern entry, and landing decisions while navigating under Instrument Flight Rules weather conditions. Over three trials in which the fog level varied, subjects decided whether or not to land the aircraft. They also completed two holding pattern entries. Subjects’ flight control during approaches and holding patterns was measured. Results Older pilots (41+ yr) were more likely than younger pilots to land when visibility was inadequate (older pilots’ mean false alarm rate: 0.44 vs 0.25). They also showed less precise flight control for components of the approach, performing 0.16 SD below mean approach scores. Expertise attenuated an age-related decline in flight control during holding patterns: older IFR/CFI performed 0.73 SD below mean score; younger IFR/CFI, younger CFII/ATP, older CFII/ATP: 0.32, 0.26, 0.03 SD above mean score. Additionally, pilots with faster processing speed (by median split) had a higher mean landing decision false alarm rate (0.42 vs 0.28), yet performed 0.14 SD above the mean approach control score. Conclusions Results have implications regarding specialized training for older pilots and for understanding processes involved in older adults’ real world decision making and performance. PMID:20464816

  2. Quality of Feedback Following Performance Assessments: Does Assessor Expertise Matter?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Govaerts, Marjan J. B.; van de Wiel, Margje W. J.; van der Vleuten, Cees P. M.

    2013-01-01

    Purpose: This study aims to investigate quality of feedback as offered by supervisor-assessors with varying levels of assessor expertise following assessment of performance in residency training in a health care setting. It furthermore investigates if and how different levels of assessor expertise influence feedback characteristics.…

  3. Teaching Social Work Practice Research to Enhance Research-Minded Expertise

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Satka, Mirja; Kääriäinen, Aino; Yliruka, Laura

    2016-01-01

    The emphasis on student cognitive knowledge and expertise in social work education has been shifting more toward reflective learning that features learning networks and dialogical interaction. In the context of innovative knowledge communities for promoting social work expertise, educators have become facilitators of learning that is expanding…

  4. A Review of Primary and Secondary Influences on Sport Expertise

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Baker, Joseph; Horton, Sean

    2004-01-01

    Sport scientists have examined numerous factors influencing the acquisition and manifestation of high levels of performance. These factors can be divided into variables having a primary influence on expertise and variables that have a secondary influence through their interaction with other variables. Primary influences on expertise include…

  5. Environmental health sciences center task force review on halogenated organics in drinking water

    PubMed Central

    Deinzer, M.; Schaumburg, F.; Klein, E.

    1978-01-01

    The disinfection of drinking water by chlorination has in recent years come under closer scrutiny because of the potential hazards associated with the production of stable chlorinated organic chemicals. Organic chemical contaminants are common to all water supplies and it is now well-established that chlorinated by-products are obtained under conditions of disinfection, or during tertiary treatment of sewage whose products can ultimately find their way into drinking water supplies. Naturally occurring humic substances which are invariably present in drinking waters are probably the source of chloroform and other halogenated methanes, and chloroform has shown up in every water supply investigated thus far. The Environmental Protection Agency is charged with the responsibility of assessing the public health effects resulting from the consumption of contaminated drinking water. It has specifically undertaken the task of determining whether organic contaminants or their chlorinated derivatives have a special impact, and if so, what alternatives there are to protect the consumer against bacterial and viral diseases that are transmitted through infected drinking waters. The impetus to look at these chemicals is not entirely without some prima facie evidence of potential trouble. Epidemiological studies suggested a higher incidence of cancer along the lower Mississippi River where the contamination from organic chemicals is particularly high. The conclusions from these studies have, to be sure, not gone unchallenged. The task of assessing the effects of chemicals in the drinking water is a difficult one. It includes many variables, including differences in water supplies and the temporal relationship between contamination and consumption of the finished product. It must also take into account the relative importance of the effects from these chemicals in comparison to those from occupational exposure, ingestion of contaminated foods, inhalation of polluted air, and many

  6. An adaptive toolbox approach to the route to expertise in sport.

    PubMed

    de Oliveira, Rita F; Lobinger, Babett H; Raab, Markus

    2014-01-01

    Expertise is characterized by fast decision-making which is highly adaptive to new situations. Here we propose that athletes use a toolbox of heuristics which they develop on their route to expertise. The development of heuristics occurs within the context of the athletes' natural abilities, past experiences, developed skills, and situational context, but does not pertain to any of these factors separately. This is a novel approach because it integrates separate factors into a comprehensive heuristic description. The novelty of this approach lies within the integration of separate factors determining expertise into a comprehensive heuristic description. It is our contention that talent identification methods and talent development models should therefore be geared toward the assessment and development of specific heuristics. Specifically, in addition to identifying and developing separate natural abilities and skills as per usual, heuristics should be identified and developed. The application of heuristics to talent and expertise models can bring the field one step away from dichotomized models of nature and nurture toward a comprehensive approach to the route to expertise.

  7. Expertise in ill-defined problem-solving domains as effective strategy use.

    PubMed

    Schunn, Christian D; McGregor, Mark U; Saner, Lelyn D

    2005-12-01

    Expertise consists of many different cognitive structures. Lemaire and Siegler (1995) have proposed a four-layered account of expertise from a strategies perspective: Experts have better strategies, tend to use strategies that are better overall more often, are better able to select the circumstances to which a strategy best applies, and are better able to execute a given strategy. Originally, this account came from work in simple, well-defined domains. We explored this account in the complex, ill-defined domain of platoon leadership. In Experiment 1A, we elicited free-text responses to leadership scenarios from novices, intermediates, and experts, finding expertise effects for strategy base rates and choice, but not for strategy existence or the number of strategies used. In Experiment 1B, we used a new group of experts to gather ratings of the execution accuracy of the responses in Experiment 1A and found expertise differences in the ability to execute the same strategies. We propose several elaborations to the original four-layered strategies account of expertise on the basis of these results.

  8. An adaptive toolbox approach to the route to expertise in sport

    PubMed Central

    de Oliveira, Rita F.; Lobinger, Babett H.; Raab, Markus

    2014-01-01

    Expertise is characterized by fast decision-making which is highly adaptive to new situations. Here we propose that athletes use a toolbox of heuristics which they develop on their route to expertise. The development of heuristics occurs within the context of the athletes’ natural abilities, past experiences, developed skills, and situational context, but does not pertain to any of these factors separately. This is a novel approach because it integrates separate factors into a comprehensive heuristic description. The novelty of this approach lies within the integration of separate factors determining expertise into a comprehensive heuristic description. It is our contention that talent identification methods and talent development models should therefore be geared toward the assessment and development of specific heuristics. Specifically, in addition to identifying and developing separate natural abilities and skills as per usual, heuristics should be identified and developed. The application of heuristics to talent and expertise models can bring the field one step away from dichotomized models of nature and nurture toward a comprehensive approach to the route to expertise. PMID:25071673

  9. Change Blindness as a Means of Studying Expertise in Physics

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Feil, Adam; Mestre, Jose P.

    2010-01-01

    Previous studies examining expertise have used a wide range of methods. Beyond characterizing expert and novice behavior in different contexts and circumstances, many studies have examined the processes that comprise the behavior itself and, more recently, processes that comprise training and practice that develop expertise. Other studies, dating…

  10. Symbolic Instruments and the Internet Mediation of Knowledge and Expertise

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Johnson, Nicola F.

    2014-01-01

    In this chapter, I demonstrate how Bourdieu's (1991) notion of symbolic instruments, that is structured and structuring structures, can be applied to the Internet to demonstrate the mediation and construction of knowledge and validation of expertise. This qualitative pilot study explored the online language and interrelationship between expertise,…

  11. Beyond perceptual expertise: revisiting the neural substrates of expert object recognition

    PubMed Central

    Harel, Assaf; Kravitz, Dwight; Baker, Chris I.

    2013-01-01

    Real-world expertise provides a valuable opportunity to understand how experience shapes human behavior and neural function. In the visual domain, the study of expert object recognition, such as in car enthusiasts or bird watchers, has produced a large, growing, and often-controversial literature. Here, we synthesize this literature, focusing primarily on results from functional brain imaging, and propose an interactive framework that incorporates the impact of high-level factors, such as attention and conceptual knowledge, in supporting expertise. This framework contrasts with the perceptual view of object expertise that has concentrated largely on stimulus-driven processing in visual cortex. One prominent version of this perceptual account has almost exclusively focused on the relation of expertise to face processing and, in terms of the neural substrates, has centered on face-selective cortical regions such as the Fusiform Face Area (FFA). We discuss the limitations of this face-centric approach as well as the more general perceptual view, and highlight that expert related activity is: (i) found throughout visual cortex, not just FFA, with a strong relationship between neural response and behavioral expertise even in the earliest stages of visual processing, (ii) found outside visual cortex in areas such as parietal and prefrontal cortices, and (iii) modulated by the attentional engagement of the observer suggesting that it is neither automatic nor driven solely by stimulus properties. These findings strongly support a framework in which object expertise emerges from extensive interactions within and between the visual system and other cognitive systems, resulting in widespread, distributed patterns of expertise-related activity across the entire cortex. PMID:24409134

  12. Collaboration Expertise in Medicine - No Evidence for Cross-Domain Application from a Memory Retrieval Study.

    PubMed

    Kiesewetter, Jan; Fischer, Frank; Fischer, Martin R

    2016-01-01

    Is there evidence for expertise on collaboration and, if so, is there evidence for cross-domain application? Recall of stimuli was used to measure so-called internal collaboration scripts of novices and experts in two studies. Internal collaboration scripts refer to an individual's knowledge about how to interact with others in a social situation. METHOD— Ten collaboration experts and ten novices of the content domain social science were presented with four pictures of people involved in collaborative activities. The recall texts were coded, distinguishing between superficial and collaboration script information. RESULTS— Experts recalled significantly more collaboration script information (M = 25.20; SD = 5.88) than did novices (M = 13.80; SD = 4.47). Differences in superficial information were not found. Study 2 tested whether the differences found in Study 1 could be replicated. Furthermore, the cross-domain application of internal collaboration scripts was explored. METHOD— Twenty collaboration experts and 20 novices of the content domain medicine were presented with four pictures and four videos of their content domain and a video and picture of another content domain. All stimuli showed collaborative activities typical for the respective content domains. RESULTS— As in Study 1, experts recalled significantly more collaboration script information of their content domain (M = 71.65; SD = 33.23) than did novices (M = 54.25; SD = 15.01). For the novices, no differences were found for the superficial information nor for the retrieval of collaboration script information recalled after the other content domain stimuli. There is evidence for expertise on collaboration in memory tasks. The results show that experts hold substantially more collaboration script information than did novices. Furthermore, the differences between collaboration novices and collaboration experts occurred only in their own content domain, indicating that internal collaboration scripts

  13. Nurturing Sport Expertise: Factors Influencing the Development of Elite Athlete

    PubMed Central

    Baker, Joseph; Horton, Sean; Robertson-Wilson, Jennifer; Wall, Michael

    2003-01-01

    The development of expertise in sport is the result of successful interaction of biological, psychological, and sociological constraints. This review examines the training and environmental factors that influence the acquisition of sport expertise. Research examining the quality and quantity of training indicate that these two elements are crucial predictors of attainment. In addition, the possession of resources such as parental support and adequate coaching are essential. Social factors such as cultural influences and the relative age effect are also considered as determinants of sport expertise. Although it is evident that environmental factors are essential to the acquisition of high levels of sport development, further research is clearly required. PMID:24616603

  14. A defense of the subordinate-level expertise account for the N170 component.

    PubMed

    Rossion, Bruno; Curran, Tim; Gauthier, Isabel

    2002-09-01

    A recent paper in this journal reports two event-related potential (ERP) experiments interpreted as supporting the domain specificity of the visual mechanisms implicated in processing faces (Cognition 83 (2002) 1). The authors argue that because a large neurophysiological response to faces (N170) is less influenced by the task than the response to objects, and because the response for human faces extends to ape faces (for which we are not expert), we should reject the hypothesis that the face-sensitivity reflected by the N170 can be accounted for by the subordinate-level expertise model of object recognition (Nature Neuroscience 3 (2000) 764). In this commentary, we question this conclusion based on some of our own ERP work on expert object recognition as well as the work of others.

  15. Sport Skill-Specific Expertise Biases Sensory Integration for Spatial Referencing and Postural Control.

    PubMed

    Thalassinos, Michalis; Fotiadis, Giorgos; Arabatzi, Fotini; Isableu, Brice; Hatzitaki, Vassilia

    2017-09-15

    The authors asked how sport expertise modulates visual field dependence and sensory reweighting for controlling posture. Experienced soccer athletes, ballet dancers, and nonathletes performed (a) a Rod and Frame test and (b) a 100-s bipedal stance task during which vision and proprioception were successively or concurrently disrupted in 20-s blocks. Postural adaptation was assessed in the mean center of pressure displacement, root mean square of center of pressure velocity and ankle muscles integrated electromyography activity. Soccer athletes were more field dependent than were nonathletes. During standing, dancers were more destabilized by vibration and required more time to reweigh sensory information compared with the other 2 groups. These findings reveal a sport skill-specific bias in the reweighing of sensory inputs for spatial orientation and postural control.

  16. "All Your Dreadful Scientific Things": Women, Science and Education in the Years around 1900

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Jones, Claire G.

    2017-01-01

    In the years around 1900, more women were benefiting from a university education and using it as a pathway to acquiring research expertise and contributing to the development of scientific knowledge. Although numbers were small compared with men, it is clear that the idea of a female researcher was no longer an oddity. As illustrated by…

  17. Capturing flight system test engineering expertise: Lessons learned

    NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

    Woerner, Irene Wong

    1991-01-01

    Within a few years, JPL will be challenged by the most active mission set in history. Concurrently, flight systems are increasingly more complex. Presently, the knowledge to conduct integration and test of spacecraft and large instruments is held by a few key people, each with many years of experience. JPL is in danger of losing a significant amount of this critical expertise, through retirement, during a period when demand for this expertise is rapidly increasing. The most critical issue at hand is to collect and retain this expertise and develop tools that would ensure the ability to successfully perform the integration and test of future spacecraft and large instruments. The proposed solution was to capture and codity a subset of existing knowledge, and to utilize this captured expertise in knowledge-based systems. First year results and activities planned for the second year of this on-going effort are described. Topics discussed include lessons learned in knowledge acquisition and elicitation techniques, life-cycle paradigms, and rapid prototyping of a knowledge-based advisor (Spacecraft Test Assistant) and a hypermedia browser (Test Engineering Browser). The prototype Spacecraft Test Assistant supports a subset of integration and test activities for flight systems. Browser is a hypermedia tool that allows users easy perusal of spacecraft test topics. A knowledge acquisition tool called ConceptFinder which was developed to search through large volumes of data for related concepts is also described and is modified to semi-automate the process of creating hypertext links.

  18. Flight nursing expertise: towards a middle-range theory.

    PubMed

    Reimer, Andrew P; Moore, Shirley M

    2010-05-01

    This paper presents a middle-range Theory of Flight Nursing Expertise. Rotary-wing (helicopter) medical transport has grown rapidly in the USA since its introduction, particularly during the past 5 years. Patients once considered too sick to transport are now being transported more frequently and over longer distances. Many limitations are imposed by the air medical transport environment and these require nurses to alter their practice. A literature search was conducted using Pubmed, Medline, CINAHL, secondary referencing and an Internet search from 1960 to 2008 for studies related to the focal concepts in flight nursing. The middle-range Theory of Flight Nursing Expertise is composed of nine concepts (experience, training, transport environment of care, psychomotor skills, flight nursing knowledge, cue recognition, pattern recognition, decision-making and action) and their relationships. Five propositions describe the relationships between those concepts and how they apply to flight nursing expertise. After empirical testing, this theory may be a useful tool to assist novice flight nurses to attain the skills necessary to provide safe and competent care more efficiently, and may aid in designing curricula and programmes of research. Research is needed to determine the usefulness of this theory in both rotary and fixed-wing medical transport settings, and to examine the similarities and differences related to expertise needed for different flight nurse team compositions. Curriculum and training innovations can result from increased understanding of the concepts and relationships proposed in this theory.

  19. The Influence of Subject Matter Expertise on Pedagogical Content Knowledge.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Manross, Dean; And Others

    This study investigated the role of subject matter expertise on the pedagogical content knowledge of physical education teachers. Data were collected through multiple interviews on 10 teachers with expertise in at least one physical education subject area. Each teacher was interviewed four times, with each interview lasting approximately 1 hour.…

  20. A Multimodal Neural Network Recruited by Expertise with Musical Notation

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Wong, Yetta Kwailing; Gauthier, Isabel

    2010-01-01

    Prior neuroimaging work on visual perceptual expertise has focused on changes in the visual system, ignoring possible effects of acquiring expert visual skills in nonvisual areas. We investigated expertise for reading musical notation, a skill likely to be associated with multimodal abilities. We compared brain activity in music-reading experts…

  1. Electrophysiological correlates of looking at paintings and its association with art expertise.

    PubMed

    Pang, C Y; Nadal, M; Müller-Paul, J S; Rosenberg, R; Klein, C

    2013-04-01

    This study investigated the electrocortical correlates of art expertise, as defined by a newly developed, content-valid and internally consistent 23-item art expertise questionnaire in N=27 participants that varied in their degree of art expertise. Participants viewed each 50 paintings, filtering-distorted versions of these paintings and plain colour stimuli under free-viewing conditions whilst the EEG was recorded from 64 channels. Results revealed P3b-/LPC-like bilateral posterior event-related potentials (ERP) that were larger over the right hemisphere than over the left hemisphere. Art expertise correlated negatively with the amplitude of the ERP responses to paintings and control stimuli. We conclude that art expertise is associated with reduced ERP responses to visual stimuli in general that can be considered to reflect increased neural efficiency due to extensive practice in the contemplation of visual art. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  2. The Curse of Expertise: When More Knowledge Leads to Miscalibrated Explanatory Insight.

    PubMed

    Fisher, Matthew; Keil, Frank C

    2016-07-01

    Does expertise within a domain of knowledge predict accurate self-assessment of the ability to explain topics in that domain? We find that expertise increases confidence in the ability to explain a wide variety of phenomena. However, this confidence is unwarranted; after actually offering full explanations, people are surprised by the limitations in their understanding. For passive expertise (familiar topics), miscalibration is moderated by education; those with more education are accurate in their self-assessments (Experiment 1). But when those with more education consider topics related to their area of concentrated study (college major), they also display an illusion of understanding (Experiment 2). This "curse of expertise" is explained by a failure to recognize the amount of detailed information that had been forgotten (Experiment 3). While expertise can sometimes lead to accurate self-knowledge, it can also create illusions of competence. Copyright © 2015 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

  3. San Joaquin River Up-Stream DO TMDL Project Task 4: MonitoringStudy Interim Task Report #3

    DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

    Stringfellow, William; Borglin, Sharon; Dahlgren, Randy

    2007-03-30

    The purpose of the Dissolved Oxygen Total Maximum Daily LoadProject (DO TMDLProject) is to provide a comprehensive understanding ofthe sources and fate of oxygen consuming materials in the San JoaquinRiver (SJR) watershed between Channel Point and Lander Avenue (upstreamSJR). When completed, this study will provide the stakeholders anunderstanding of the baseline conditions of the basin, provide input foran allocation decision, and provide the stakeholders with a tool formeasuring the impact of any waterquality management program that may beimplemented as part of the DO TMDL process. Previous studies haveidentified algal biomass as the most significant oxygen-demandingsubstance in the DO TMDL Projectmore » study-area between of Channel Point andLander Ave onthe SJR. Other oxygen-demanding substances found in theupstream SJR include ammonia and organic carbon from sources other thanalgae. The DO TMDL Project study-area contains municipalities, dairies,wetlands, cattle ranching, irrigated agriculture, and industries thatcould potentially contribute biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) to the SJR.This study is designed to discriminate between algal BOD and othersources of BOD throughout the entire upstream SJR watershed. Algalbiomass is not a conserved substance, but grows and decays in the SJR;hence, characterization of oxygen-demanding substances in the SJR isinherently complicated and requires an integrated effort of extensivemonitoring, scientific study, and modeling. In order to achieve projectobjectives, project activities were divided into a number of Tasks withspecific goals and objectives. In this report, we present the results ofmonitoring and research conducted under Task 4 of the DO TMDL Project.The major objective of Task 4 is to collect sufficient hydrologic (flow)and water quality (WQ) data to characterize the loading of algae, otheroxygen-demanding materials, and nutrients fromindividual tributaries andsub-watersheds of the upstream SJR between Mossdale

  4. Organization of Heterogeneous Scientific Data Using the EAV/CR Representation

    PubMed Central

    Nadkarni, Prakash M.; Marenco, Luis; Chen, Roland; Skoufos, Emmanouil; Shepherd, Gordon; Miller, Perry

    1999-01-01

    Entity-attribute-value (EAV) representation is a means of organizing highly heterogeneous data using a relatively simple physical database schema. EAV representation is widely used in the medical domain, most notably in the storage of data related to clinical patient records. Its potential strengths suggest its use in other biomedical areas, in particular research databases whose schemas are complex as well as constantly changing to reflect evolving knowledge in rapidly advancing scientific domains. When deployed for such purposes, the basic EAV representation needs to be augmented significantly to handle the modeling of complex objects (classes) as well as to manage interobject relationships. The authors refer to their modification of the basic EAV paradigm as EAV/CR (EAV with classes and relationships). They describe EAV/CR representation with examples from two biomedical databases that use it. PMID:10579606

  5. Using Network-Based Language Analysis to Bridge Expertise and Cultivate Sensitivity to Differentiated Language Use in Interdisciplinary Geoscience Research

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Hannah, M. A.; Simeone, M.

    2017-12-01

    On interdisciplinary teams, expertise is varied, as is evidenced by differences in team members' language use. Developing strategies to combine that expertise and bridge differentiated language practices is especially difficult between geoscience subdisciplines as researchers assume they use a shared language—vocabulary, jargon, codes, linguistic styles. In our paper, we discuss a network-based approach used to identify varied expertise and language practices between geoscientists (n=29) on a NSF team funded to study how deep and surface Earth processes worked together to give rise to the Great Oxygenation Event. We describe how we modeled the team's expertise from a language corpus consisting of 220 oxygen-related terms frequently used by team members and then compared their understanding of the terms to develop interventions to bridge the team's expertise. Corpus terms were identified via team member interviews, observations of members' interactions at research meetings, and discourse analysis of members' publications. Comparisons of members' language use were based on a Likert scale survey that asked members to assess how they understood a term; how frequently they used a term; and whether they conceptualized a term as an object or process. Rather than use our method as a communication audit tool (Zwijze-Koning & de Jong, 2015), teams can proactively use it in a project's early stages to assess the contours of the team's differentiated expertise and show where specialized knowledge resides in the team, where latent or non-obvious expertise exists, where expertise overlaps, and where gaps are in the team's knowledge. With this information, teams can make evidence based recommendations to forward their work such as allocating resources; identifying and empowering members to serve as connectors and lead cross-functional project initiatives; and developing strategies to avoid communication barriers. The method also generates models for teaching language

  6. WCRP Task Team for the Intercomparison of Reanalyses (TIRA): Motivation and Progress

    NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

    Bosilovich, Michael

    2017-01-01

    Reanalyses have proven to be an important resource for weather and climate related research, as well as societal applications at large. Several centers have emerged to produce new atmospheric reanalyses in various forms every few years. In addition, land and ocean communities are producing disciplinary uncoupled reanalyses. Current research and development in reanalysis is directed at (1) extending the length of reanalyzed period and (2) use of coupled Earth system models for climate reanalysis. While WCRPs involvement in the reanalyses communities through its Data Advisory Council (WDAC) has been substantial, for example in organizing international conferences on reanalyses, a central team of reanalyses expertise is not in place in the WCRP structure. The differences among reanalyses and their inherent uncertainties are some of the most important questions for both users and developers of reanalyses. Therefore, a collaborative effort to systematically assess and intercompare reanalyses would be a logical progression that fills the needs of the community and contributes to the WCRP mission. The primary charge to the TIRA is to develop a reanalysis intercomparison project plan that will attain the following objectives.1)To foster understanding and estimation of uncertainties in reanalysis data by intercomparison and other means 2)To communicate new developments and best practices among the reanalyses producing centers 3)To enhance the understanding of data and assimilation issues and their impact on uncertainties, leading to improved reanalyses for climate assessment 4)To communicate the strengths and weaknesses of reanalyses, their fitness for purpose, and best practices in the use of reanalysis datasets by the scientific community. This presentation outlines the need for a task team on reanalyses, their intercomparison, the objectives of the team and progress thus far.

  7. Hybrid Symbiotic Organisms Search Optimization Algorithm for Scheduling of Tasks on Cloud Computing Environment.

    PubMed

    Abdullahi, Mohammed; Ngadi, Md Asri

    2016-01-01

    Cloud computing has attracted significant attention from research community because of rapid migration rate of Information Technology services to its domain. Advances in virtualization technology has made cloud computing very popular as a result of easier deployment of application services. Tasks are submitted to cloud datacenters to be processed on pay as you go fashion. Task scheduling is one the significant research challenges in cloud computing environment. The current formulation of task scheduling problems has been shown to be NP-complete, hence finding the exact solution especially for large problem sizes is intractable. The heterogeneous and dynamic feature of cloud resources makes optimum task scheduling non-trivial. Therefore, efficient task scheduling algorithms are required for optimum resource utilization. Symbiotic Organisms Search (SOS) has been shown to perform competitively with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The aim of this study is to optimize task scheduling in cloud computing environment based on a proposed Simulated Annealing (SA) based SOS (SASOS) in order to improve the convergence rate and quality of solution of SOS. The SOS algorithm has a strong global exploration capability and uses fewer parameters. The systematic reasoning ability of SA is employed to find better solutions on local solution regions, hence, adding exploration ability to SOS. Also, a fitness function is proposed which takes into account the utilization level of virtual machines (VMs) which reduced makespan and degree of imbalance among VMs. CloudSim toolkit was used to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed method using both synthetic and standard workload. Results of simulation showed that hybrid SOS performs better than SOS in terms of convergence speed, response time, degree of imbalance, and makespan.

  8. Hybrid Symbiotic Organisms Search Optimization Algorithm for Scheduling of Tasks on Cloud Computing Environment

    PubMed Central

    Abdullahi, Mohammed; Ngadi, Md Asri

    2016-01-01

    Cloud computing has attracted significant attention from research community because of rapid migration rate of Information Technology services to its domain. Advances in virtualization technology has made cloud computing very popular as a result of easier deployment of application services. Tasks are submitted to cloud datacenters to be processed on pay as you go fashion. Task scheduling is one the significant research challenges in cloud computing environment. The current formulation of task scheduling problems has been shown to be NP-complete, hence finding the exact solution especially for large problem sizes is intractable. The heterogeneous and dynamic feature of cloud resources makes optimum task scheduling non-trivial. Therefore, efficient task scheduling algorithms are required for optimum resource utilization. Symbiotic Organisms Search (SOS) has been shown to perform competitively with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The aim of this study is to optimize task scheduling in cloud computing environment based on a proposed Simulated Annealing (SA) based SOS (SASOS) in order to improve the convergence rate and quality of solution of SOS. The SOS algorithm has a strong global exploration capability and uses fewer parameters. The systematic reasoning ability of SA is employed to find better solutions on local solution regions, hence, adding exploration ability to SOS. Also, a fitness function is proposed which takes into account the utilization level of virtual machines (VMs) which reduced makespan and degree of imbalance among VMs. CloudSim toolkit was used to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed method using both synthetic and standard workload. Results of simulation showed that hybrid SOS performs better than SOS in terms of convergence speed, response time, degree of imbalance, and makespan. PMID:27348127

  9. Head Stability and Head-Trunk Coordination in Horseback Riders: The Contribution of Visual Information According to Expertise

    PubMed Central

    Olivier, Agnès; Faugloire, Elise; Lejeune, Laure; Biau, Sophie; Isableu, Brice

    2017-01-01

    Maintaining equilibrium while riding a horse is a challenging task that involves complex sensorimotor processes. We evaluated the relative contribution of visual information (static or dynamic) to horseback riders' postural stability (measured from the variability of segment position in space) and the coordination modes they adopted to regulate balance according to their level of expertise. Riders' perceptual typologies and their possible relation to postural stability were also assessed. Our main assumption was that the contribution of visual information to postural control would be reduced among expert riders in favor of vestibular and somesthetic reliance. Twelve Professional riders and 13 Club riders rode an equestrian simulator at a gallop under four visual conditions: (1) with the projection of a simulated scene reproducing what a rider sees in the real context of a ride in an outdoor arena, (2) under stroboscopic illumination, preventing access to dynamic visual cues, (3) in normal lighting but without the projected scene (i.e., without the visual consequences of displacement) and (4) with no visual cues. The variability of the position of the head, upper trunk and lower trunk was measured along the anteroposterior (AP), mediolateral (ML), and vertical (V) axes. We computed discrete relative phase to assess the coordination between pairs of segments in the anteroposterior axis. Visual field dependence-independence was evaluated using the Rod and Frame Test (RFT). The results showed that the Professional riders exhibited greater overall postural stability than the Club riders, revealed mainly in the AP axis. In particular, head variability was lower in the Professional riders than in the Club riders in visually altered conditions, suggesting a greater ability to use vestibular and somesthetic information according to task constraints with expertise. In accordance with this result, RFT perceptual scores revealed that the Professional riders were less dependent

  10. The Roles of Intuition and Informants' Expertise in Children's Epistemic Trust.

    PubMed

    Lane, Jonathan D; Harris, Paul L

    2015-01-01

    This study examined how children's intuitions and informants' expertise influence children's trust in informants' claims. Three- to 8-year-olds (N = 192) watched videos in which experts (animal/biology experts or artifact/physics experts) made either intuitively plausible or counterintuitive claims about obscure animals or artifacts. Claims fell either within or beyond experts' domains of expertise. Children of all ages were more trusting of claims made by informants with relevant, as opposed to irrelevant, expertise. Children also showed greater acceptance of intuitive rather than counterintuitive claims, a differentiation that increased with age as they developed firmer intuitions about what can ordinarily happen. In summary, children's trust in testimony depends on whether informants have the relevant expertise as well as on children's own developing intuitions. © 2014 The Authors. Child Development © 2014 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.

  11. The edge of expertise: Representing barefoot doctors in Cultural Revolution China.

    PubMed

    Li, Lan Angela

    2015-01-01

    ‘Barefoot doctors’ were designed as an innovative task force during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) to provide health care to rural villages in China. Without formal training that would identify the group professionally, barefoot doctors were at once amateur medical practitioners and expert revolutionary actors in Communist Party propaganda. At stake in legitimating revolutionary medicine was allowing revolutionary spirit to supplement for minimal medical training. As a result, the symbolic power of representing barefoot doctors rested in showcasing their devotion to enhancing access to health care in rural China. These representations followed an intensifying militarization of civilians, embracing the barefoot doctor’s ability to survive any obstacle while also celebrating those who died in the process. This paper examines three public portrayals of barefoot doctors, arguing that conflicting idealizations of rural epistemology combined the opposing elements of self-cultivation and self-annihilation to unite the identity of an emerging group of amateur doctors and illustrate acceptable forms of medical and revolutionary expertise.

  12. Expertise in Musical Improvisation and Creativity: The Mediation of Idea Evaluation

    PubMed Central

    Kleinmintz, Oded M.; Goldstein, Pavel; Mayseless, Naama; Abecasis, Donna; Shamay-Tsoory, Simone G.

    2014-01-01

    The current study explored the influence of musical expertise, and specifically training in improvisation on creativity, using the framework of the twofold model, according to which creativity involves a process of idea generation and idea evaluation. Based on the hypothesis that a strict evaluation phase may have an inhibiting effect over the generation phase, we predicted that training in improvisation may have a “releasing effect” on the evaluation system, leading to greater creativity. To examine this hypothesis, we compared performance among three groups - musicians trained in improvisation, musicians not trained in improvisation, and non-musicians - on divergent thinking tasks and on their evaluation of creativity. The improvisation group scored higher on fluency and originality compared to the other two groups. Among the musicians, evaluation of creativity mediated how experience in improvisation was related to originality and fluency scores. It is concluded that deliberate practice of improvisation may have a “releasing effect” on creativity. PMID:25010334

  13. Expertise in musical improvisation and creativity: the mediation of idea evaluation.

    PubMed

    Kleinmintz, Oded M; Goldstein, Pavel; Mayseless, Naama; Abecasis, Donna; Shamay-Tsoory, Simone G

    2014-01-01

    The current study explored the influence of musical expertise, and specifically training in improvisation on creativity, using the framework of the twofold model, according to which creativity involves a process of idea generation and idea evaluation. Based on the hypothesis that a strict evaluation phase may have an inhibiting effect over the generation phase, we predicted that training in improvisation may have a "releasing effect" on the evaluation system, leading to greater creativity. To examine this hypothesis, we compared performance among three groups--musicians trained in improvisation, musicians not trained in improvisation, and non-musicians--on divergent thinking tasks and on their evaluation of creativity. The improvisation group scored higher on fluency and originality compared to the other two groups. Among the musicians, evaluation of creativity mediated how experience in improvisation was related to originality and fluency scores. It is concluded that deliberate practice of improvisation may have a "releasing effect" on creativity.

  14. The Problem of Developing Professional Expertise of Vocational College Students

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Zakirova, Venera G.; Gilmiyarova, Sophia G.

    2016-01-01

    The goal of the paper is to study the problem of developing the professional expertise of vocational college students, future technicians of the road transport industry. The nature and content of the concept "the professional expertise of a technician of road transport industry" has been defined. This concept is considered as a set of…

  15. Self-reported craft expertise predicts maintenance of spatial ability in old age.

    PubMed

    Bailey, Shannon K T; Sims, Valerie K

    2014-05-01

    Three hundred and three female participants between the ages of 18 and 77 reported their experience in crafting (sewing, knitting, and crocheting) and completed a measure of spatial ability: The Paper Folding Test. To investigate the connection between spatial ability performance, age, and craft expertise, an ANOVA was conducted for the Paper Folding Test using two levels of crafting expertise (High and Low) and three age categories (younger adults: 18-39, middle-aged adults: 40-59, and older adults: 60-77). Performance on the spatial ability test declined with age as predicted from previous literature. However, there was a significant Age by Expertise interaction. No difference was found between High and Low craft expertise groups in younger adults (18-39), but there was a growing difference between expertise groups in middle-aged adults (40-59) and older adults (60-77). The results suggest that continued hands-on experience in spatial domains is a predictor of maintenance of spatial ability across the life span.

  16. ACR-SNM Task Force on Nuclear Medicine Training: report of the task force.

    PubMed

    Guiberteau, Milton J; Graham, Michael M

    2011-06-01

    The expansion of knowledge and technological advances in nuclear medicine and radiology require physicians to have more expertise in functional and anatomic imaging. The convergence of these two specialties into the new discipline of molecular imaging has also begun to place demands on residency training programs for additional instruction in physiology and molecular biology. These changes have unmasked weaknesses in current nuclear medicine and radiology training programs. Adding to the impetus for change are the attendant realities of the job market and uncertain employment prospects for physicians trained in nuclear medicine but not also trained in diagnostic radiology. With this background, the ACR and the Society of Nuclear Medicine convened the Task Force on Nuclear Medicine Training to define the issues and develop recommendations for resident training.

  17. The first step in the development of text mining technology for cancer risk assessment: identifying and organizing scientific evidence in risk assessment literature

    PubMed Central

    Korhonen, Anna; Silins, Ilona; Sun, Lin; Stenius, Ulla

    2009-01-01

    Background One of the most neglected areas of biomedical Text Mining (TM) is the development of systems based on carefully assessed user needs. We have recently investigated the user needs of an important task yet to be tackled by TM -- Cancer Risk Assessment (CRA). Here we take the first step towards the development of TM technology for the task: identifying and organizing the scientific evidence required for CRA in a taxonomy which is capable of supporting extensive data gathering from biomedical literature. Results The taxonomy is based on expert annotation of 1297 abstracts downloaded from relevant PubMed journals. It classifies 1742 unique keywords found in the corpus to 48 classes which specify core evidence required for CRA. We report promising results with inter-annotator agreement tests and automatic classification of PubMed abstracts to taxonomy classes. A simple user test is also reported in a near real-world CRA scenario which demonstrates along with other evaluation that the resources we have built are well-defined, accurate, and applicable in practice. Conclusion We present our annotation guidelines and a tool which we have designed for expert annotation of PubMed abstracts. A corpus annotated for keywords and document relevance is also presented, along with the taxonomy which organizes the keywords into classes defining core evidence for CRA. As demonstrated by the evaluation, the materials we have constructed provide a good basis for classification of CRA literature along multiple dimensions. They can support current manual CRA as well as facilitate the development of an approach based on TM. We discuss extending the taxonomy further via manual and machine learning approaches and the subsequent steps required to develop TM technology for the needs of CRA. PMID:19772619

  18. Report of the European Respiratory Society/European Cystic Fibrosis Society task force on the care of adults with cystic fibrosis.

    PubMed

    Elborn, J Stuart; Bell, Scott C; Madge, Susan L; Burgel, Pierre-Regis; Castellani, Carlo; Conway, Steven; De Rijcke, Karleen; Dembski, Birgit; Drevinek, Pavel; Heijerman, Harry G M; Innes, J Alistair; Lindblad, Anders; Marshall, Bruce; Olesen, Hanne V; Reimann, Andreas L; Solé, Ampara; Viviani, Laura; Wagner, Thomas O F; Welte, Tobias; Blasi, Francesco

    2016-02-01

    The improved survival in people with cystic fibrosis has led to an increasing number of patients reaching adulthood. This trend is likely to be maintained over the next decades, suggesting a need to increase the number of centres with expertise in the management of adult patients with cystic fibrosis. These centres should be capable of delivering multidisciplinary care addressing the complexity of the disease, in addition to addressing the psychological burden on patients and their families. Further issues that require attention are organ transplantation and end of life management.Lung disease in adults with cystic fibrosis drives most of the clinical care requirements, and major life-threatening complications, such as respiratory infection, respiratory failure, pneumothorax and haemoptysis, and the management of lung transplantation require expertise from trained respiratory physicians. The taskforce therefore strongly reccommends that medical leadership in multidisciplinary adult teams should be attributed to a respiratory physician adequately trained in cystic fibrosis management.The task force suggests the implementation of a core curriculum for trainees in adult respiratory medicine and the selection and accreditation of training centres that deliver postgraduate training to the standards of the HERMES programme. Copyright ©ERS 2016.

  19. Exploring the influence of cultural familiarity and expertise on neurological responses to music.

    PubMed

    Demorest, Steven M; Morrison, Steven J

    2003-11-01

    Contemporary music education in many countries has begun to incorporate not only the dominant music of the culture, but also a variety of music from around the world. Although the desirability of such a broadened curriculum is virtually unquestioned, the specific function of these musical encounters and their potential role in children's cognitive development remain unclear. We do not know if studying a variety of world music traditions involves the acquisition of new skills or an extension and refinement of traditional skills long addressed by music teachers. Is a student's familiarity with a variety of musical traditions a manifestation of a single overarching "musicianship" or is knowledge of these various musical styles more similar to a collection of discrete skills much like learning a second language? Research on the comprehension of spoken language has disclosed a neurologically distinct response among subjects listening to their native language rather than an unfamiliar language. In a recent study comparing Western subjects' responses to music of their native culture and music of an unfamiliar culture, we found that subjects' activation did not differ on the basis of the cultural familiarity of the music, but on the basis of musical expertise. We discuss possible interpretations of these findings in relation to the concept of musical universals, cross-cultural stimulus characteristics, cross-cultural judgment tasks, and the influence of musical expertise. We conclude with suggestions for future research.

  20. Task performance in astronomical adaptive optics

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Barrett, Harrison H.; Myers, Kyle J.; Devaney, Nicholas; Dainty, J. C.; Caucci, Luca

    2006-06-01

    In objective or task-based assessment of image quality, figures of merit are defined by the performance of some specific observer on some task of scientific interest. This methodology is well established in medical imaging but is just beginning to be applied in astronomy. In this paper we survey the theory needed to understand the performance of ideal or ideal-linear (Hotelling) observers on detection tasks with adaptive-optical data. The theory is illustrated by discussing its application to detection of exoplanets from a sequence of short-exposure images.

  1. Flight nursing expertise: towards a middle-range theory

    PubMed Central

    Reimer, Andrew P.; Moore, Shirley M.

    2010-01-01

    Aim This paper presents a middle-range Theory of Flight Nursing Expertise. Background Rotary-wing (helicopter) medical transport has grown rapidly in the USA since its introduction, particularly during the past 5 years. Patients once considered too sick to transport are now being transported more frequently and over longer distances. Many limitations are imposed by the air medical transport environment and these require nurses to alter their practice. Data sources A literature search was conducted using Pubmed, Medline, CINAHL, secondary referencing and an Internet search from 1960 to 2008 for studies related to the focal concepts in flight nursing. Discussion The middle-range Theory of Flight Nursing Expertise is composed of nine concepts (experience, training, transport environment of care, psychomotor skills, flight nursing knowledge, cue recognition, pattern recognition, decision-making and action) and their relationships. Five propositions describe the relationships between those concepts and how they apply to flight nursing expertise. Implications for nursing After empirical testing, this theory may be a useful tool to assist novice flight nurses to attain the skills necessary to provide safe and competent care more efficiently, and may aid in designing curricula and programmes of research. Conclusion Research is needed to determine the usefulness of this theory in both rotary and fixed-wing medical transport settings, and to examine the similarities and differences related to expertise needed for different flight nurse team compositions. Curriculum and training innovations can result from increased understanding of the concepts and relationships proposed in this theory. PMID:20337803

  2. Student performance on argumentation task in the Swedish National Assessment in science

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Jönsson, Anders

    2016-07-01

    The aim of this study is to investigate the influence of content knowledge on students' socio-scientific argumentation in the Swedish National Assessment in biology, chemistry and physics for 12-year-olds. In Sweden, the assessment of socio-scientific argumentation has been a major part of the National Assessment during three consecutive years and this study utilizes data on student performance to investigate (a) the relationship between tasks primarily addressing argumentation and tasks addressing primarily content knowledge as well as (b) students' performance on argumentation tasks, which differ in relation to content, subject, aspect of argumentation and assessment criteria. Findings suggest a strong and positive relationship between content knowledge and students' performance on argumentation tasks. The analysis also provides some hypotheses about the task difficulty of argumentation tasks that may be pursued in future investigations.

  3. The Scientific Institutions of Latin America.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Hilton, Ronald

    This book is a comprehensive survey of the scientific institutions and science information facilities of Latin America and the Caribbean. The organization of the book is by countries and by institutions within each country. The section on each country begins with a description of the country and its scientific organizations. A series of…

  4. Expertise sensitive item selection.

    PubMed

    Chow, P; Russell, H; Traub, R E

    2000-12-01

    In this paper we describe and illustrate a procedure for selecting items from a large pool for a certification test. The proposed procedure, which is intended to improve the alignment of the certification test with on-the-job performance, is based on an expertise sensitive index. This index for an item is the difference between the item's p values for experts and novices. An example is provided of the application of the index for selecting items to be used in certifying bakers.

  5. Assessment of Scientific Reasoning: the Effects of Task Context, Data, and Design on Student Reasoning in Control of Variables.

    PubMed

    Zhou, Shaona; Han, Jing; Koenig, Kathleen; Raplinger, Amy; Pi, Yuan; Li, Dan; Xiao, Hua; Fu, Zhao; Bao, Lei

    2016-03-01

    Scientific reasoning is an important component under the cognitive strand of the 21st century skills and is highly emphasized in the new science education standards. This study focuses on the assessment of student reasoning in control of variables (COV), which is a core sub-skill of scientific reasoning. The main research question is to investigate the extent to which the existence of experimental data in questions impacts student reasoning and performance. This study also explores the effects of task contexts on student reasoning as well as students' abilities to distinguish between testability and causal influences of variables in COV experiments. Data were collected with students from both USA and China. Students received randomly one of two test versions, one with experimental data and one without. The results show that students from both populations (1) perform better when experimental data are not provided, (2) perform better in physics contexts than in real-life contexts, and (3) students have a tendency to equate non-influential variables to non-testable variables. In addition, based on the analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data, a possible progression of developmental levels of student reasoning in control of variables is proposed, which can be used to inform future development of assessment and instruction.

  6. Assessment of Scientific Reasoning: the Effects of Task Context, Data, and Design on Student Reasoning in Control of Variables

    PubMed Central

    Zhou, Shaona; Han, Jing; Koenig, Kathleen; Raplinger, Amy; Pi, Yuan; Li, Dan; Xiao, Hua; Fu, Zhao

    2015-01-01

    Scientific reasoning is an important component under the cognitive strand of the 21st century skills and is highly emphasized in the new science education standards. This study focuses on the assessment of student reasoning in control of variables (COV), which is a core sub-skill of scientific reasoning. The main research question is to investigate the extent to which the existence of experimental data in questions impacts student reasoning and performance. This study also explores the effects of task contexts on student reasoning as well as students’ abilities to distinguish between testability and causal influences of variables in COV experiments. Data were collected with students from both USA and China. Students received randomly one of two test versions, one with experimental data and one without. The results show that students from both populations (1) perform better when experimental data are not provided, (2) perform better in physics contexts than in real-life contexts, and (3) students have a tendency to equate non-influential variables to non-testable variables. In addition, based on the analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data, a possible progression of developmental levels of student reasoning in control of variables is proposed, which can be used to inform future development of assessment and instruction. PMID:26949425

  7. The Role of Standards-Based Education in Fostering Scientific Literacy in the Geosciences

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Moosavi, S. C.

    2008-12-01

    Societal controversy over the content taught in K-12 science classrooms continues at a time of increasing demand for teacher and school accountability enacted through legislative mandates such as the No Child Left Behind Law. As teachers are held increasingly to nationally-inspired state standards, building blocks for future controversy are being built via inclusion of social and environmental policy agendas related to diversity, multiculturalism and environmental stewardship into these same science standards. While the authors' attempts to include such policies are well intended, they undermine the narrow answer to the question, "What is science?" leaving the door open to inclusion of pseudo-scientific content into the science curriculum in compliance with the perceived mandate of the standards. Disparate interpretation of the language and intent of the standards between that written by scientists, science educators and policy makers relative to that of the teachers, school administrators and parents tasked to implement and work within these standards leaves room for inclusion of much content that most scientists would object to. The resulting controversy and confusion have the potential to undermine public confidence in the scientific community's opinions on geoscience issues precisely at the time that full societal engagement is necessary to deal with climate change and other major environmental challenges. Results from this study suggest using the standards to mandate opening the scientific curriculum to political and social agendas, even under the guise of diversity, multiculturalism and environmental awareness, has created a whole raft of unintended consequences. These same mandates can be interpreted by the general public as also opening the curriculum to other views of science ranging from traditional religious and cultural views to intelligent design and alternative ways of knowing, thereby undermining scientific literacy in the general population

  8. VisEL: Visualisation of Expertise Level in a Special Interest Group Knowledge Portal

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Zulhafizsyam Wan Ahmad, Wan Muhammad; Sulaiman, Shahida; Yusof, Umi Kalsom

    A variety of portals are available nowadays to support diverse purposes such as commercial, publishing, personal, affinity and corporate portals. Affinity portals promote electronic communities who share common interest such as a special interest group (SIG). Knowledge portal is an emerging trend that benefits the existing portal technology by designing such portals with proper representation of the members' shared knowledge. Besides textual representation for diverse expertise levels, graphical visualisation will be able to support the requirements in searching and representing expertise level among e-community. There is a number of existing SIG portals available. However, they do not visualise effectively and accurately the expertise level of members and make it difficult for users to search their targeted experts for instance searching the highest expertise level to have a discussion and to solve their problems related to a project. The goal of this paper is to propose a graphical visualisation of expertise level method (VisEL) using an interactive tag cloud technique that represents expertise level of each member based on their knowledge in a software engineering SIG portal.

  9. A case-based assistant for clinical psychiatry expertise.

    PubMed

    Bichindaritz, I

    1994-01-01

    Case-based reasoning is an artificial intelligence methodology for the processing of empirical knowledge. Recent case-based reasoning systems also use theoretic knowledge about the domain to constrain the case-based reasoning. The organization of the memory is the key issue in case-based reasoning. The case-based assistant presented here has two structures in memory: cases and concepts. These memory structures permit it to be as skilled in problem-solving tasks, such as diagnosis and treatment planning, as in interpretive tasks, such as clinical research. A prototype applied to clinical work about eating disorders in psychiatry, reasoning from the alimentary questionnaires of these patients, is presented as an example of the system abilities.

  10. The Cognitive Roots of Scientific and Mathematical Ability and Discussant Reaction: Alternative Representations: A Key to Academic Talent?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Perkins, D. N.; Simmons, Rebecca

    This paper examines the cognitive structures and processes that mediate mathematical and scientific ability. Ability is divided into achieved abilities and precursor abilities. Identified concepts in the area of achieved ability include expertise, understanding, and problem-solving. Other abilities can be seen as precursors to such achieved…

  11. Effects of metacognitive exercise on the development of scientific reasoning

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Pearsall, Susan Helen

    1999-12-01

    The essence of scientific reasoning is the coordination of theory and evidence. Kuhn (1998) implicates metacognitive skill in reflecting on one's theories, and metastrategic management of inferential strategies involved in their coordination with evidence, as critical to scientific reasoning. The present study investigates how metacognitive exercise may improve children's performance on scientific reasoning tasks. Two groups composed of 50 fifth- and sixth-grade students engaged in a scientific investigation activity over six weekly sessions. Additionally, one group engaged in an activity involving reflection on others' performance on the task, while the comparison group spent equivalent time on an unrelated task. Children in the experimental condition showed significant improvement (relative to those in the comparison condition) in terms of the sequence identified by Kuhn et al. (1995), from entirely theory-based reasoning to the skilled coordination of theory and evidence. This improvement, however, was confined to the beginning levels in the sequence. Specifically, experimental subjects attended to and employed evidence in their reasoning to a greater extent than did comparison subjects, even though their inferences remained largely invalid. Also, experimental subjects showed a marginally significant trend toward greater use of multiple-instance evidence (which, unlike single instance evidence, allowed them to make comparative inferences). On a delayed posttest, children in the experimental condition continued to use evidence to justify their inferences to a significantly greater extent than the comparison group. In contrast, performance increased only slightly on a transfer task and group differences were largely nonsignificant. At the delayed posttest, experimental children's level of performance on the metacognitive activity was compared to their performance on the main task. Results indicated that when children were not consistent on both tasks, performance

  12. Scientific Data Stewardship in the 21'st Century

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Mabie, J. J.; Redmon, R.; Bullett, T.; Kihn, E. A.; Conkright, R.; Manley, J.; Horan, K.

    2008-12-01

    The Ionosonde Program at the National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) serves as a case study for how to approach data stewardship in the 21'st century. As the number and sophistication of scientific instruments increase, along with the volumes and complexity of data that need to be preserved for future generations, the old approach of simply storing data in a library, physical or electronic, is no longer sufficient to ensure the long term preservation of our important environmental data. To ensure the data can be accessed, understood, and used by future generations, the data stewards must be familiar with the observation process before the data reach the archive and the scientific applications to which the data may be called to serve. This familiarity is best obtained by active participation. In the NGDC Ionosonde Program team, we strive to have activity and expertise in ionosonde field operations and scientific data analysis in addition to our core mission of preservation and distribution of data and metadata. We believe this approach produces superior data quality, proper documentation and evaluation tools for data customers as part of the archive process. We are presenting the Ionosonde Program as an example of modern scientific data stewardship.

  13. Social networks and expertise development for Australian breast radiologists.

    PubMed

    Taba, Seyedamir Tavakoli; Hossain, Liaquat; Willis, Karen; Lewis, Sarah

    2017-02-11

    In this study, we explore the nexus between social networks and expertise development of Australian breast radiologists. Background literature has shown that a lack of appropriate social networks and interaction among certain professional group(s) may be an obstacle for knowledge acquisition, information flow and expertise sharing. To date there have not been any systematic studies investigating how social networks and expertise development are interconnected and whether this leads to improved performance for breast radiologists. This study explores the value of social networks in building expertise alongside with other constructs of performance for the Australian radiology workforce using semi-structured in-depth interviews with 17 breast radiologists. The findings from this study emphasise the influences of knowledge transfer and learning through social networks and interactions as well as knowledge acquisition and development through experience and feedback. The results also show that accessibility to learning resources and a variety of timely feedback on performance through the information and communication technologies (ICT) is likely to facilitate improved performance and build social support. We argue that radiologists' and, in particular, breast radiologists' work performance, needs to be explored not only through individual numerical characteristics but also by analysing the social context and peer support networks in which they operate and we identify multidisciplinary care as a core entity of social learning.

  14. But what about the Empress of Racnoss? The allocation of attention to spiders and Doctor Who in a visual search task is predicted by fear and expertise.

    PubMed

    Purkis, Helena M; Lester, Kathryn J; Field, Andy P

    2011-12-01

    If there is a spider in the room, then the spider phobic in your group is most likely to point it out to you. This phenomenon is believed to arise because our attentional systems are hardwired to attend to threat in our environment, and, to a spider phobic, spiders are threatening. However, an alternative explanation is simply that attention is quickly drawn to the stimulus of most personal relevance in the environment. Our research examined whether positive stimuli with no biological or evolutionary relevance could be allocated preferential attention. We compared attention to pictures of spiders with pictures from the TV program Doctor Who, for people who varied in both their love of Doctor Who and their fear of spiders. We found a double dissociation: interference from spider and Doctor-Who-related images in a visual search task was predicted by spider fear and Doctor Who expertise, respectively. As such, allocation of attention reflected the personal relevance of the images rather than their threat content. The attentional system believed to have a causal role in anxiety disorders is therefore likely to be a general system that responds not to threat but to stimulus relevance; hence, nonevolutionary images, such as those from Doctor Who, captured attention as quickly as fear-relevant spider images. Where this leaves the Empress of Racnoss, we are unsure. (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved.

  15. Expertise transfer for expert system design

    DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

    Boose, J.H.

    This book is about the Expertise Transfer System-a computer program which interviews experts and helps them build expert systems, i.e. computer programs that use knowledge from experts to make decisions and judgements under conditions of uncertainty. The techniques are useful to anyone who uses decision-making information based on the expertise of others. The methods can also be applied to personal decision-making. The interviewing methodology is borrowed from a branch of psychology called Personal Construct Theory. It is not necessary to use a computer to take advantage of the techniques from Personal Construction Theory; the fundamental procedures used by the Expertisemore » Transfer System can be performed using paper and pencil. It is not necessary that the reader understand very much about computers to understand the ideas in this book. The few relevant concepts from computer science and expert systems that are needed are explained in a straightforward manner. Ideas from Personal Construct Psychology are also introduced as needed.« less

  16. A new kind of uncertainty for a new kind of modernity? Expertise in an age of risk.

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Munk, A.

    2009-04-01

    Modernity is not what it used to be (see for example Giddens 1991, Beck 1992, Bauman 2000, Luhman 2005). It has, so the sociologists tell us, mutated in order to thrive in a new age of risk and uncertainty. Some might say that it is not quite thriving yet. Whereas old modernity relied on experts to evaluate the problems opposing society and devise solutions for them - savoir pour prevoir, prevoir pour pouvoir - new modernity can no longer indulge in such straightforwardness. The hazards facing us have become so undeniably complex and in multiple ways produced by the very social activities they threaten, that uncontroversial fixes based on indisputable evidence can no longer be assumed. What role for expertise, then, in this increasingly complicated social landscape? As a starting point for thinking about this question, the paper sets out to explore the concept of uncertainty. After all, when it comes to hazards, this is what experts are expected to handle. Has it mutated as well? Does it make sense to speak of a new kind of uncertainty for a new kind of modernity? In its first modernity setting, uncertainty was what had to be transformed into some sort of certainty (see for example Latour 1999). In the case of the inherent uncertainties related to hazards and risk this task was accomplished with the emergence of probability theory and actuarial science (see for example Hacking 1979, 1990). Expertise in old modernity thus acquired a lot of its straightforwardness from its belief in uncomplicating uncertainty by transforming it into certainty. So, why is it still complicated? A crucial point in Latour's argument is that expertise works by reducing complexity in order to amplify facts (certainties). This requires a sense of direction and an agreement as to what is deemed important. Markets, for example, possess this. So do scientific communities and political institutions. But do the combined constituencies implicated by the complex risks facing society possess it

  17. Expertise with artificial non-speech sounds recruits speech-sensitive cortical regions

    PubMed Central

    Leech, Robert; Holt, Lori L.; Devlin, Joseph T.; Dick, Frederic

    2009-01-01

    Regions of the human temporal lobe show greater activation for speech than for other sounds. These differences may reflect intrinsically specialized domain-specific adaptations for processing speech, or they may be driven by the significant expertise we have in listening to the speech signal. To test the expertise hypothesis, we used a video-game-based paradigm that tacitly trained listeners to categorize acoustically complex, artificial non-linguistic sounds. Before and after training, we used functional MRI to measure how expertise with these sounds modulated temporal lobe activation. Participants’ ability to explicitly categorize the non-speech sounds predicted the change in pre- to post-training activation in speech-sensitive regions of the left posterior superior temporal sulcus, suggesting that emergent auditory expertise may help drive this functional regionalization. Thus, seemingly domain-specific patterns of neural activation in higher cortical regions may be driven in part by experience-based restructuring of high-dimensional perceptual space. PMID:19386919

  18. Eye Movement Correlates of Expertise in Visual Arts.

    PubMed

    Francuz, Piotr; Zaniewski, Iwo; Augustynowicz, Paweł; Kopiś, Natalia; Jankowski, Tomasz

    2018-01-01

    The aim of this study was to search for oculomotor correlates of expertise in visual arts, in particular with regard to paintings. Achieving this goal was possible by gathering data on eye movements of two groups of participants: experts and non-experts in visual arts who viewed and appreciated the aesthetics of paintings. In particular, we were interested in whether visual arts experts more accurately recognize a balanced composition in one of the two paintings being compared simultaneously, and whether people who correctly recognize harmonious paintings are characterized by a different visual scanning strategy than those who do not recognize them. For the purposes of this study, 25 paintings with an almost ideal balanced composition have been chosen. Some of these paintings are masterpieces of the world cultural heritage, and some of them are unknown. Using Photoshop, the artist developed three additional versions of each of these paintings, differing from the original in the degree of destruction of its harmonious composition: slight, moderate, or significant. The task of the participants was to look at all versions of the same painting in pairs (including the original) and decide which of them looked more pleasing. The study involved 23 experts in art, students of art history, art education or the Academy of Fine Arts, and 19 non-experts, students in the social sciences and the humanities. The experimental manipulation of comparing pairs of paintings, whose composition is at different levels of harmony, has proved to be an effective tool for differentiating people because of their ability to distinguish paintings with balanced composition from an unbalanced one. It turned out that this ability only partly coincides with expertise understood as the effect of education in the field of visual arts. We also found that the eye movements of people who more accurately appreciated paintings with balanced composition differ from those who more liked their altered

  19. Eye Movement Correlates of Expertise in Visual Arts

    PubMed Central

    Francuz, Piotr; Zaniewski, Iwo; Augustynowicz, Paweł; Kopiś, Natalia; Jankowski, Tomasz

    2018-01-01

    The aim of this study was to search for oculomotor correlates of expertise in visual arts, in particular with regard to paintings. Achieving this goal was possible by gathering data on eye movements of two groups of participants: experts and non-experts in visual arts who viewed and appreciated the aesthetics of paintings. In particular, we were interested in whether visual arts experts more accurately recognize a balanced composition in one of the two paintings being compared simultaneously, and whether people who correctly recognize harmonious paintings are characterized by a different visual scanning strategy than those who do not recognize them. For the purposes of this study, 25 paintings with an almost ideal balanced composition have been chosen. Some of these paintings are masterpieces of the world cultural heritage, and some of them are unknown. Using Photoshop, the artist developed three additional versions of each of these paintings, differing from the original in the degree of destruction of its harmonious composition: slight, moderate, or significant. The task of the participants was to look at all versions of the same painting in pairs (including the original) and decide which of them looked more pleasing. The study involved 23 experts in art, students of art history, art education or the Academy of Fine Arts, and 19 non-experts, students in the social sciences and the humanities. The experimental manipulation of comparing pairs of paintings, whose composition is at different levels of harmony, has proved to be an effective tool for differentiating people because of their ability to distinguish paintings with balanced composition from an unbalanced one. It turned out that this ability only partly coincides with expertise understood as the effect of education in the field of visual arts. We also found that the eye movements of people who more accurately appreciated paintings with balanced composition differ from those who more liked their altered

  20. Who can escape the natural number bias in rational number tasks? A study involving students and experts.

    PubMed

    Obersteiner, Andreas; Hoof, Jo Van; Verschaffel, Lieven; Dooren, Wim Van

    2016-08-01

    Many learners have difficulties with rational number tasks because they persistently rely on their natural number knowledge, which is not always applicable. Studies show that such a natural number bias can mislead not only children but also educated adults. It is still unclear whether and under what conditions mathematical expertise enables people to be completely unaffected by such a bias on tasks in which people with less expertise are clearly biased. We compared the performance of eighth-grade students and expert mathematicians on the same set of algebraic expression problems that addressed the effect of arithmetic operations (multiplication and division). Using accuracy and response time measures, we found clear evidence for a natural number bias in students but no traces of a bias in experts. The data suggested that whereas students based their answers on their intuitions about natural numbers, expert mathematicians relied on their skilled intuitions about algebraic expressions. We conclude that it is possible for experts to be unaffected by the natural number bias on rational number tasks when they use strategies that do not involve natural numbers. © 2015 The British Psychological Society.

  1. Using a terminology server and consumer search phrases to help patients find physicians with particular expertise.

    PubMed

    Cole, Curtis L; Kanter, Andrew S; Cummens, Michael; Vostinar, Sean; Naeymi-Rad, Frank

    2004-01-01

    To design and implement a real world application using a terminology server to assist patients and physicians who use common language search terms to find specialist physicians with a particular clinical expertise. Terminology servers have been developed to help users encoding of information using complicated structured vocabulary during data entry tasks, such as recording clinical information. We describe a methodology using Personal Health Terminology trade mark and a SNOMED CT-based hierarchical concept server. Construction of a pilot mediated-search engine to assist users who use vernacular speech in querying data which is more technical than vernacular. This approach, which combines theoretical and practical requirements, provides a useful example of concept-based searching for physician referrals.

  2. Teaching Scientific Communication Skills in Science Studies: Does It Make a Difference?

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Spektor-Levy, Ornit; Eylon, Bat-Sheva; Scherz, Zahava

    2009-01-01

    This study explores the impact of "Scientific Communication" (SC) skills instruction on students' performances in scientific literacy assessment tasks. We present a general model for skills instruction, characterized by explicit and spiral instruction, integration into content learning, practice in several scientific topics, and application of…

  3. The Volcanic Hazards Simulation: Students behaving expert-like when faced with challenging, authentic tasks during a simulated Volcanic Crisis

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Dohaney, J. A.; kennedy, B.; Brogt, E.; Gravley, D.; Wilson, T.; O'Steen, B.

    2011-12-01

    This qualitative study investigates behaviors and experiences of upper-year geosciences undergraduate students during an intensive role-play simulation, in which the students interpret geological data streams and manage a volcanic crisis event. We present the development of the simulation, its academic tasks, (group) role assignment strategies and planned facilitator interventions over three iterations. We aim to develop and balance an authentic, intensive and highly engaging capstone activity for volcanology and geo-hazard courses. Interview data were collected from academic and professional experts in the fields of Volcanology and Hazard Management (n=11) in order to characterize expertise in the field, characteristics of key roles in the simulation, and to validate the authenticity of tasks and scenarios. In each iteration, observations and student artifacts were collected (total student participants: 68) along with interviews (n=36) and semi-structured, open-ended questionnaires (n=26). Our analysis of these data indicates that increasing the structure (i.e. organization, role-specific tasks and responsibilities) lessens non-productive group dynamics, which allows for an increase in difficulty of academic tasks within the simulation without increasing the cognitive load on students. Under these conditions, students exhibit professional expert-like behaviours, in particular in the quality of decision-making, communication skills and task-efficiency. In addition to illustrating the value of using this simulation to teach geosciences concepts, this study has implications for many complex situated-learning activities.

  4. Expertise in Clinical Psychology. The Effects of University Training and Practical Experience on Expertise in Clinical Psychology

    PubMed Central

    Vollmer, Sabine; Spada, Hans; Caspar, Franz; Burri, Salome

    2013-01-01

    How do university training and subsequent practical experience affect expertise in clinical psychology? To answer this question we developed methods to assess psychological knowledge and the competence to diagnose, construct case conceptualizations, and plan psychotherapeutic treatment: a knowledge test and short case studies in a first study, and a complex, dynamically evolving case study in the second study. In our cross-sectional studies, psychology students, trainees in a certified postgraduate psychotherapist curriculum, and behavior therapists with more than 10 years of experience were tested (100 in total: 20 each of novice, intermediate, and advanced university students, postgraduate trainees, and therapists). Clinical knowledge and competence increased up to the level of trainees but unexpectedly decreased at the level of experienced therapists. We discuss the results against the background of expertise research and the training of clinical psychologists (in Germany). Important factors for the continuing professional development of psychotherapists are proposed. PMID:23543213

  5. Expertise and processing distorted structure in chess.

    PubMed

    Bartlett, James C; Boggan, Amy L; Krawczyk, Daniel C

    2013-01-01

    A classic finding in research on human expertise and knowledge is that of enhanced memory for stimuli in a domain of expertise as compared to either stimuli outside that domain, or within-domain stimuli that have been degraded or distorted in some way. However, we do not understand how experts process degradation or distortion of stimuli within the expert domain (e.g., a face with the eyes, nose, and mouth in the wrong positions, or a chessboard with pieces placed randomly). Focusing on the domain of chess, we present new fMRI evidence that when experts view such distorted/within-domain stimuli, they engage an active search for structure-a kind of exploratory chunking-that involves a component of a prefrontal-parietal network linked to consciousness, attention and working memory.

  6. Expertise and processing distorted structure in chess

    PubMed Central

    Bartlett, James C.; Boggan, Amy L.; Krawczyk, Daniel C.

    2013-01-01

    A classic finding in research on human expertise and knowledge is that of enhanced memory for stimuli in a domain of expertise as compared to either stimuli outside that domain, or within-domain stimuli that have been degraded or distorted in some way. However, we do not understand how experts process degradation or distortion of stimuli within the expert domain (e.g., a face with the eyes, nose, and mouth in the wrong positions, or a chessboard with pieces placed randomly). Focusing on the domain of chess, we present new fMRI evidence that when experts view such distorted/within-domain stimuli, they engage an active search for structure—a kind of exploratory chunking—that involves a component of a prefrontal-parietal network linked to consciousness, attention and working memory. PMID:24348371

  7. The Value of Digital Tutoring and Accelerated Expertise for Military Veterans

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Fletcher, J. D.

    2017-01-01

    This report concerns use of a digital tutor to accelerate veterans' acquisition of expertise and improve their preparation for the civilian workforce. As background, it briefly discusses the need to improve veterans' employability, the technology of digital tutoring, its ability to produce advanced levels of technical expertise, and the design,…

  8. Non-Certified Environment and Geography Subject Expertise in Chilean Rural Educators

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Salinas-Silva, Victor; Arenas-Martija, Andoni; Margalef-García, Leonor

    2016-01-01

    In this paper, environmental and geographical subject expertise is explored, based on the notion of expertise as rooted both in subject knowledge and knowledge of teaching and as acquired through experience. The research questions that guided this study focused on the importance of understanding how teachers negotiate their assumptions and what…

  9. Association and dissociation between detection and discrimination of objects of expertise: Evidence from visual search.

    PubMed

    Golan, Tal; Bentin, Shlomo; DeGutis, Joseph M; Robertson, Lynn C; Harel, Assaf

    2014-02-01

    Expertise in face recognition is characterized by high proficiency in distinguishing between individual faces. However, faces also enjoy an advantage at the early stage of basic-level detection, as demonstrated by efficient visual search for faces among nonface objects. In the present study, we asked (1) whether the face advantage in detection is a unique signature of face expertise, or whether it generalizes to other objects of expertise, and (2) whether expertise in face detection is intrinsically linked to expertise in face individuation. We compared how groups with varying degrees of object and face expertise (typical adults, developmental prosopagnosics [DP], and car experts) search for objects within and outside their domains of expertise (faces, cars, airplanes, and butterflies) among a variable set of object distractors. Across all three groups, search efficiency (indexed by reaction time slopes) was higher for faces and airplanes than for cars and butterflies. Notably, the search slope for car targets was considerably shallower in the car experts than in nonexperts. Although the mean face slope was slightly steeper among the DPs than in the other two groups, most of the DPs' search slopes were well within the normative range. This pattern of results suggests that expertise in object detection is indeed associated with expertise at the subordinate level, that it is not specific to faces, and that the two types of expertise are distinct facilities. We discuss the potential role of experience in bridging between low-level discriminative features and high-level naturalistic categories.

  10. Exploring nursing expertise in residential care for older people: a mixed method study.

    PubMed

    Phelan, Amanda; McCormack, Brendan

    2016-10-01

    To explore the expertise of Registered Nurses in residential care for older people. As older people in residential care have many complex dependencies, nursing expertise is an essential component of care excellence. However, the work of these nurses can be invisible and, therefore, unrecognized. Thus, additional attention is required to illuminate such nursing expertise. A mixed method design was used in this study. The research took place in 2012 in the Republic of Ireland. Twenty-three case study nurses were recruited from nursing homes. Each case study nurse involved five data collection methods: shadowing, interview with a colleague, interview with a resident, a demographic profile and a director of nursing survey. The study was also informed by a modified focus group. Qualitative data were analysed using directed content analysis using a conceptual framework generated from the literature on nursing expertise. Quantitative data were analysed using SPSS and presented in descriptive statistics. The findings from the case studies and the modified focus group are presented in seven themes, which represent nursing expertise in residential care of older people: transitions, context of the nursing home, saliency, holistic practice knowledge, knowing the resident, moral agency and skilled know how. Nursing expertise in residential care of older people is a complex phenomenon which encompasses many aspects of care delivery in a person-centred framework. By rendering this expertise visible, the need for appropriate and adequate skill mix for a growing residential care population is presented. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

  11. Psychological Factors Associated with Paranursing Expertise.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Brammer, Robert; Haller, Katherine

    The psychological factors associated with paranursing expertise were examined in a study of 135 certified nursing assistants (CNAs) at a geriatric nursing facility in Amarillo, Texas. Data were collected through a project-developed screening tool called the Geriatric Employee Screening Tool (GEST), which is a true-false instrument patterned after…

  12. A toolbox and a record for scientific model development

    NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

    Ellman, Thomas

    1994-01-01

    Scientific computation can benefit from software tools that facilitate construction of computational models, control the application of models, and aid in revising models to handle new situations. Existing environments for scientific programming provide only limited means of handling these tasks. This paper describes a two pronged approach for handling these tasks: (1) designing a 'Model Development Toolbox' that includes a basic set of model constructing operations; and (2) designing a 'Model Development Record' that is automatically generated during model construction. The record is subsequently exploited by tools that control the application of scientific models and revise models to handle new situations. Our two pronged approach is motivated by our belief that the model development toolbox and record should be highly interdependent. In particular, a suitable model development record can be constructed only when models are developed using a well defined set of operations. We expect this research to facilitate rapid development of new scientific computational models, to help ensure appropriate use of such models and to facilitate sharing of such models among working computational scientists. We are testing this approach by extending SIGMA, and existing knowledge-based scientific software design tool.

  13. Are there specific conditions for which expertise in gymnastics could have an effect on postural control and performance?

    PubMed

    Asseman, François B; Caron, Olivier; Crémieux, Jacques

    2008-01-01

    The first aim of this study was to analyse the effect of elite training, linked to expertise, in gymnastics on postural performance and control. For this purpose, body sway of expert gymnasts was compared to other sportsmen, non-experts and non-gymnasts, in two different postures: bipedal (easy and unspecific to gymnasts) and unipedal (difficult and fairly specific). The second aim was to compare the groups in the same tasks but in a visual condition for which they were not trained, i.e. with eyes closed. Postural performance was assessed by centre of gravity motion, which was computed from centre of pressure motion, estimating postural control. A significant difference between the two groups was observed for postural performance in the unipedal posture and with eyes open only. Regardless of their posture, the groups were similarly affected by removal of vision. Expertise in gymnastics seemed to improve postural performances only in situations for which their practise is related to, i.e. unipedal with eyes open. These reveal the importance of choosing a relevant postural configuration and visual condition according to the people's training or by extension experience.

  14. Maxims, Tacit Knowledge and Learning: Developing Expertise in Dry Stone Walling

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Farrar, Nicholas; Trorey, Gill

    2008-01-01

    This study attempts to further our understanding of how expertise is acquired in a specific vocational context. Using unstructured interviews with both individuals and groups, carried out whilst engaged in practice, it examines what happens when dry stone wallers are developing their skills, how they gain expertise and how they communicate their…

  15. The Role of Initial Attack and Performer Expertise on Instrument Identification

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Cassidy, Jane W.; Schlegel, Amanda L.

    2016-01-01

    The purpose of this study was to examine the role initial attack and expertise play in the identification of instrumental tones. A stimulus CD was made of 32 excerpts of instrumental tones. Sixteen possible combinations of the variables of initial attack (present or absent), expertise (beginner versus professional), and timbre (flute, clarinet,…

  16. A systematic review of the use of an expertise-based randomised controlled trial design.

    PubMed

    Cook, Jonathan A; Elders, Andrew; Boachie, Charles; Bassinga, Ted; Fraser, Cynthia; Altman, Doug G; Boutron, Isabelle; Ramsay, Craig R; MacLennan, Graeme S

    2015-05-30

    Under a conventional two-arm randomised trial design, participants are allocated to an intervention and participating health professionals are expected to deliver both interventions. However, health professionals often have differing levels of expertise in a skill-based interventions such as surgery or psychotherapy. An expertise-based approach to trial design, where health professionals only deliver an intervention in which they have expertise, has been proposed as an alternative. The aim of this project was to systematically review the use of an expertise-based trial design in the medical literature. We carried out a comprehensive search of nine databases--AMED, BIOSIS, CENTRAL, CINAHL, Cochrane Methodology Register, EMBASE, MEDLINE, Science Citation Index, and PsycINFO--from 1966 to 2012 and performed citation searches using the ISI Citation Indexes and Scopus. Studies that used an expertise-based trial design were included. Two review authors independently screened the titles and abstracts and assessed full-text reports. Data were extracted and summarised on the study characteristics, general and expertise-specific study methodology, and conduct. In total, 7476 titles and abstracts were identified, leading to 43 included studies (54 articles). The vast majority (88%) used a pure expertise-based design; three (7%) adopted a hybrid design, and two (5%) used a design that was unclear. Most studies compared substantially different interventions (79%). In many cases, key information relating to the expertise-based design was absent; only 12 (28%) reported criteria for delivering both interventions. Most studies recruited the target sample size or very close to it (median of 101, interquartile range of 94 to 118), although the target was reported for only 40% of studies. The proportion of participants who received the allocated intervention was high (92%, interquartile range of 82 to 99%). While use of an expertise-based trial design is growing, it remains uncommon

  17. Maximally Expressive Task Modeling

    NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

    Japp, John; Davis, Elizabeth; Maxwell, Theresa G. (Technical Monitor)

    2002-01-01

    Planning and scheduling systems organize "tasks" into a timeline or schedule. The tasks are defined within the scheduling system in logical containers called models. The dictionary might define a model of this type as "a system of things and relations satisfying a set of rules that, when applied to the things and relations, produce certainty about the tasks that are being modeled." One challenging domain for a planning and scheduling system is the operation of on-board experiment activities for the Space Station. The equipment used in these experiments is some of the most complex hardware ever developed by mankind, the information sought by these experiments is at the cutting edge of scientific endeavor, and the procedures for executing the experiments are intricate and exacting. Scheduling is made more difficult by a scarcity of space station resources. The models to be fed into the scheduler must describe both the complexity of the experiments and procedures (to ensure a valid schedule) and the flexibilities of the procedures and the equipment (to effectively utilize available resources). Clearly, scheduling space station experiment operations calls for a "maximally expressive" modeling schema. Modeling even the simplest of activities cannot be automated; no sensor can be attached to a piece of equipment that can discern how to use that piece of equipment; no camera can quantify how to operate a piece of equipment. Modeling is a human enterprise-both an art and a science. The modeling schema should allow the models to flow from the keyboard of the user as easily as works of literature flowed from the pen of Shakespeare. The Ground Systems Department at the Marshall Space Flight Center has embarked on an effort to develop a new scheduling engine that is highlighted by a maximally expressive modeling schema. This schema, presented in this paper, is a synergy of technological advances and domain-specific innovations.

  18. Factors influencing increased expertise for a sustainable workforce at a research centre in South Africa

    PubMed Central

    Draper, H. R.; Enarson, D. A.; Beyers, N.; Claassens, M.

    2014-01-01

    Setting: The Desmond Tutu Tuberculosis (TB) Centre (DTTC), Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Objectives: 1) To determine whether access to designated funding is associated with the development of expertise in employees, and 2) which other factors are associated with the development of expertise in employees. Design: This was a retrospective study. The target population consisted of all employees at the DTTC during the period 1 January 2004 to 31 December 2011. Improvement in expertise during employment was the primary outcome; the secondary outcome was an increase in educational level linked to the National Qualifications Framework. Results: There was no association between access to funding and expertise development, but an association between the number of months employed and improvement of expertise during employment was observed (OR 1.03, 95%CI 1.02–1.04, P < 0.001), controlling for age at appointment, sex, access to designated funding and education level. Conclusion: The study shows that almost a third of employees increased their expertise, more than 90% had access to designated funding and personnel employed for a longer duration were more likely to experience improvements in expertise. We encourage research organisations in low- and middle-income countries to implement strategies to retain employees in order to build their expertise. PMID:26400709

  19. Scientific networking in disciplines

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Chang, Ching-Ray; Marks, Ann; Dawson, Silvina Ponce

    2013-03-01

    Scientific networking occurs at various levels. There are regional and worldwide professional organizations that link together national physical societies (IUPAP, EPS, AAPPS, FeLaSoFi), providing a platform to exchange ideas and advance common agendas. National and international agencies have special lines of funding for scientific collaboration between groups of various countries. Some of these lines are targeted at improving science education at all levels. There are then personal networks that link people with common interests or who know each other for any reason. The International Conferences on Women in Physics have provided a unique opportunity for female physicists from all over the world to start a network of interactions that can involve all sorts of collaborative efforts. In the three-session workshop organized at ICWIP11, we discussed these various issues that the worldwide scientific community faces. In this paper we summarize the main ideas that surged during the meeting and provide the list of recommendations that were to start and keep an active network of female physicists and to foster scientific collaboration regionally and internationally.

  20. Key Scientific Issues in the Health Risk Assessment of Trichloroethylene

    PubMed Central

    Chiu, Weihsueh A.; Caldwell, Jane C.; Keshava, Nagalakshmi; Scott, Cheryl Siegel

    2006-01-01

    Trichloroethylene (TCE) is a common environmental contaminant at hazardous waste sites and in ambient and indoor air. Assessing the human health risks of TCE is challenging because of its inherently complex metabolism and toxicity and the widely varying perspectives on a number of critical scientific issues. Because of this complexity, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) drew upon scientific input and expertise from a wide range of groups and individuals in developing its 2001 draft health risk assessment of TCE. This scientific outreach, which was aimed at engaging a diversity of perspectives rather than developing consensus, culminated in 2000 with 16 state-of-the-science articles published together as an Environmental Health Perspectives supplement. Since that time, a substantial amount of new scientific research has been published that is relevant to assessing TCE health risks. Moreover, a number of difficult or controversial scientific issues remain unresolved and are the subject of a scientific consultation with the National Academy of Sciences coordinated by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and co-sponsored by a number of federal agencies, including the U.S. EPA. The articles included in this mini-monograph provide a scientific update on the most prominent of these issues: the pharmacokinetics of TCE and its metabolites, mode(s) of action and effects of TCE metabolites, the role of peroxisome proliferator–activated receptor in TCE toxicity, and TCE cancer epidemiology. PMID:16966103

  1. Measurement of Scientific Productivity in R&D Sector: Changing paradigm.

    PubMed

    Kumar, Abhishek; Srivastava, Alpana; Kumar, R P Jeevan; Tiwari, Rajesh K

    2017-01-01

    Scientific Productivity is a demand of policy makers for a judicious utilization of massive R&D budget allocated and utilized. A huge mass of intellectual assets is employed, which after investing manpower, infrastructure and lab consumables demand for a major outcome which contributes towards building nation's economy. Scientific productivity was only measured through publications or patents. Patents, earmarked as a strong parameter for innovation generation, where, Word Intellectual Property Organisation generated a data on applications for the top 20 offices for patents, where Australia, Brazil and Canada occupied top 3 positions. India ranked 9th with the total patent applications rising from 39762 (2010) to 42854 (2014) i.e. 15%, whereas, it contributes around 2% Patents (innovative productivity) on global scale. Many studies have come forward interestingly within scientific and academic domains in the form of measurement of scientific performance, however, development of productivity indicators and calculation of Scientific Productivity (SP) as a holistic evaluation system is a significant demand. SP, a herculean task is envisaged for productivity analysis and would submit significant factors towards fabricating an effective measurement engine in a holistic manner viable for an individual and organization, being supplementary to each other. This review projects the significance of performance measurement system in R&D through identification and standardization of key parameters. It also includes emphasis on inclusion of standardized parameters, effective for performance measurement which is applicable for scientists, technical staff as well as lab as a facility. This review aims at providing an insight to the evaluators, policy makers, and high level scientific panels to stimulate the scientific intellects on identified indicators so that their work proceeds to generate productive outcome contributing to the economic growth. Copyright© Bentham Science

  2. Rethinking a Writing Teacher's Expertise: Following Students under the Kitchen Table

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Wilson, Maja

    2010-01-01

    In society, expertise bestows directive power--the authority to tell others what to do and how to do it, or simply to do it for them. In a school system that still operates on an authoritarian model, the author's expertise as a writer and teacher gives her directive prerogative when responding to student writing. Traditionally, teachers have used…

  3. Cancer Diagnosis Epigenomics Scientific Workflow Scheduling in the Cloud Computing Environment Using an Improved PSO Algorithm

    PubMed

    N, Sadhasivam; R, Balamurugan; M, Pandi

    2018-01-27

    Objective: Epigenetic modifications involving DNA methylation and histone statud are responsible for the stable maintenance of cellular phenotypes. Abnormalities may be causally involved in cancer development and therefore could have diagnostic potential. The field of epigenomics refers to all epigenetic modifications implicated in control of gene expression, with a focus on better understanding of human biology in both normal and pathological states. Epigenomics scientific workflow is essentially a data processing pipeline to automate the execution of various genome sequencing operations or tasks. Cloud platform is a popular computing platform for deploying large scale epigenomics scientific workflow. Its dynamic environment provides various resources to scientific users on a pay-per-use billing model. Scheduling epigenomics scientific workflow tasks is a complicated problem in cloud platform. We here focused on application of an improved particle swam optimization (IPSO) algorithm for this purpose. Methods: The IPSO algorithm was applied to find suitable resources and allocate epigenomics tasks so that the total cost was minimized for detection of epigenetic abnormalities of potential application for cancer diagnosis. Result: The results showed that IPSO based task to resource mapping reduced total cost by 6.83 percent as compared to the traditional PSO algorithm. Conclusion: The results for various cancer diagnosis tasks showed that IPSO based task to resource mapping can achieve better costs when compared to PSO based mapping for epigenomics scientific application workflow. Creative Commons Attribution License

  4. Developing Open Mindedness for Coaching Expertise

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Strand, Bradford; Christofferson, Jennifer

    2017-01-01

    Effective coaches have the ability to recognize and use their athletes' strengths while at the same time finding ways to improve their weaknesses. An essential part of coaching effectiveness and expertise is a coach's ability to be introspective and reflective with an "open mind" that allows him or her to critically look back at past…

  5. SDS: A Framework for Scientific Data Services

    DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

    Dong, Bin; Byna, Surendra; Wu, Kesheng

    2013-10-31

    Large-scale scientific applications typically write their data to parallel file systems with organizations designed to achieve fast write speeds. Analysis tasks frequently read the data in a pattern that is different from the write pattern, and therefore experience poor I/O performance. In this paper, we introduce a prototype framework for bridging the performance gap between write and read stages of data access from parallel file systems. We call this framework Scientific Data Services, or SDS for short. This initial implementation of SDS focuses on reorganizing previously written files into data layouts that benefit read patterns, and transparently directs read callsmore » to the reorganized data. SDS follows a client-server architecture. The SDS Server manages partial or full replicas of reorganized datasets and serves SDS Clients' requests for data. The current version of the SDS client library supports HDF5 programming interface for reading data. The client library intercepts HDF5 calls and transparently redirects them to the reorganized data. The SDS client library also provides a querying interface for reading part of the data based on user-specified selective criteria. We describe the design and implementation of the SDS client-server architecture, and evaluate the response time of the SDS Server and the performance benefits of SDS.« less

  6. Collaboration Expertise in Medicine - No Evidence for Cross-Domain Application from a Memory Retrieval Study

    PubMed Central

    Kiesewetter, Jan; Fischer, Frank; Fischer, Martin R.

    2016-01-01

    Background Is there evidence for expertise on collaboration and, if so, is there evidence for cross-domain application? Recall of stimuli was used to measure so-called internal collaboration scripts of novices and experts in two studies. Internal collaboration scripts refer to an individual’s knowledge about how to interact with others in a social situation. Method—Study 1 Ten collaboration experts and ten novices of the content domain social science were presented with four pictures of people involved in collaborative activities. The recall texts were coded, distinguishing between superficial and collaboration script information. Results—Study 1 Experts recalled significantly more collaboration script information (M = 25.20; SD = 5.88) than did novices (M = 13.80; SD = 4.47). Differences in superficial information were not found. Study 2 Study 2 tested whether the differences found in Study 1 could be replicated. Furthermore, the cross-domain application of internal collaboration scripts was explored. Method—Study 2 Twenty collaboration experts and 20 novices of the content domain medicine were presented with four pictures and four videos of their content domain and a video and picture of another content domain. All stimuli showed collaborative activities typical for the respective content domains. Results—Study 2 As in Study 1, experts recalled significantly more collaboration script information of their content domain (M = 71.65; SD = 33.23) than did novices (M = 54.25; SD = 15.01). For the novices, no differences were found for the superficial information nor for the retrieval of collaboration script information recalled after the other content domain stimuli. Discussion There is evidence for expertise on collaboration in memory tasks. The results show that experts hold substantially more collaboration script information than did novices. Furthermore, the differences between collaboration novices and collaboration experts occurred only in their own

  7. Varying Use of Conceptual Metaphors across Levels of Expertise in Thermodynamics

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Jeppsson, Fredrik; Haglund, Jesper; Amin, Tamer G.

    2015-04-01

    Many studies have previously focused on how people with different levels of expertise solve physics problems. In early work, focus was on characterising differences between experts and novices and a key finding was the central role that propositionally expressed principles and laws play in expert, but not novice, problem-solving. A more recent line of research has focused on characterising continuity between experts and novices at the level of non-propositional knowledge structures and processes such as image-schemas, imagistic simulation and analogical reasoning. This study contributes to an emerging literature addressing the coordination of both propositional and non-propositional knowledge structures and processes in the development of expertise. Specifically, in this paper, we compare problem-solving across two levels of expertise-undergraduate students of chemistry and Ph.D. students in physical chemistry-identifying differences in how conceptual metaphors (CMs) are used (or not) to coordinate propositional and non-propositional knowledge structures in the context of solving problems on entropy. It is hypothesised that the acquisition of expertise involves learning to coordinate the use of CMs to interpret propositional (linguistic and mathematical) knowledge and apply it to specific problem situations. Moreover, we suggest that with increasing expertise, the use of CMs involves a greater degree of subjective engagement with physical entities and processes. Implications for research on learning and instructional practice are discussed. Third contribution to special issue entitled: Conceptual metaphor and embodied cognition in science learning

  8. Source credibility and idea improvement have independent effects on unconscious plagiarism errors in recall and generate-new tasks.

    PubMed

    Perfect, Timothy J; Field, Ian; Jones, Robert

    2009-01-01

    Unconscious plagiarism occurs when people try to generate new ideas or when they try to recall their own ideas from among a set generated by a group. In this study, the factors that independently influence these two forms of plagiarism error were examined. Participants initially generated solutions to real-world problems in 2 domains of knowledge in collaboration with a confederate presented as an expert in 1 domain. Subsequently, the participant generated improvements to half of the ideas from each person. Participants returned 1 day later to recall either their own ideas or their partner's ideas and to complete a generate-new task. A double dissociation was observed. Generate-new plagiarism was driven by partner expertise but not by idea improvement, whereas recall plagiarism was driven by improvement but not expertise. This improvement effect on recall plagiarism was seen for the recall-own but not the recall-partner task, suggesting that the increase in recall-own plagiarism is due to mistaken idea ownership, not source confusion.

  9. Partially Overlapping Mechanisms of Language and Task Control in Young and Older Bilinguals

    PubMed Central

    Weissberger, Gali H.; Wierenga, Christina E.; Bondi, Mark W.; Gollan, Tamar H.

    2012-01-01

    The current study tested the hypothesis that bilinguals rely on domain-general mechanisms of executive control to achieve language control by asking if linguistic and nonlinguistic switching tasks exhibit similar patterns of aging-related decline. Thirty young and 30 aging bilinguals completed a cued language-switching task and a cued color-shape switching task. Both tasks demonstrated significant aging effects, but aging-related slowing and the aging-related increase in errors were significantly larger on the color-shape than on the language task. In the language task, aging increased language-switching costs in both response times and errors, and language-mixing costs only in response times. In contrast, the color-shape task exhibited an aging-related increase in costs only in mixing errors. Additionally, a subset of the older bilinguals could not do the color-shape task, but were able to do the language task, and exhibited significantly larger language-switching costs than matched controls. These differences, and some subtle similarities, in aging effects observed across tasks imply that mechanisms of nonlinguistic task and language control are only partly shared and demonstrate relatively preserved language control in aging. More broadly, these data suggest that age deficits in switching and mixing costs may depend on task expertise, with mixing deficits emerging for less-practiced tasks and switching deficits for highly practiced, possibly “expert” tasks (i.e., language). PMID:22582883

  10. Evidence for arrogance: On the relative importance of expertise, outcome, and manner

    PubMed Central

    Kruglanski, Arie W.; Chernikova, Marina; Schori-Eyal, Noa

    2017-01-01

    Arrogant behavior is as old as human nature. Nonetheless, the factors that cause people to be perceived as arrogant have received very little research attention. In this paper, we focused on a typical manifestation of arrogance: dismissive behavior. In particular, we explored the conditions under which a person who dismissed advice would be perceived as arrogant. We examined two factors: the advisee’s competence, and the manner in which he or she dismissed the advice. The effect of the advisee’s competence was tested by manipulating two competence cues: relative expertise, and the outcome of the advice dismissal (i.e., whether the advisee was right or wrong). In six studies (N = 1304), participants made arrogance judgments about protagonists who dismissed the advice of another person while the advisees’ relative expertise (compared to the advisor), their eventual correctness, and the manner of their dismissal were manipulated in between-participant designs. Across various types of decisions and advisee-advisor relationships, the results show that less expert, less correct, and ruder advisees are perceived as more arrogant. We also find that outcome trumps expertise, and manner trumps both expertise and outcomes. In two additional studies (N = 101), we examined people’s naïve theories about the relative importance of the aforementioned arrogance cues. These studies showed that people overestimate the role of expertise information as compared to the role of interpersonal manner and outcomes. Thus, our results suggest that people may commit arrogant faux pas because they erroneously expect that their expertise will justify their dismissive behavior. PMID:28683114

  11. [Stages of development of flight medical expertise in Russia].

    PubMed

    Chaplyuk, A L; Vovkodav, V S; Churilov, Yu K; Klepikov, A N

    2015-07-01

    Flight medical expertise (FME) in military aviation is one of the most important areas of medical support of flight crews manning, maintaining of aircrew health and flight safety. The authors analyse the main stages of development of this area of medical practice. The priority in creation of FME system belongs to our country. Domestic scientists, prominent organizers of military medicine and a large group of aviation physicians developed organizational and methodological basis for studying different impacts of flight factors on the health of flight personnel, development of criteria for admission to flight operations, principles of organization of the examination, implementation of effective methods of disease diagnosis. At the present stage FME development is determined by the needs of medical, technical and psycho-physiological support of supersonic aircraft, the need to adjust to the requirements of aircrew health, advanced diagnostics of the functional state and the search for means to improve the stability of his body to flight factors. The main principles of the FME remains the complexity of the study of the human body in terms of its professional and individual approach to a medical examination, a thorough clinical, clinical and physiological and psychological examinations, regular medical supervision of the health of flight crews.

  12. Assessment of Preschooler's Scientific Reasoning in Adult-Child Interactions: What Is the Optimal Context?

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Meindertsma, Heidi B.; van Dijk, Marijn W. G.; Steenbeek, Henderien W.; van Geert, Paul L. C.

    2014-04-01

    In educational settings, continuous assessment of the child's level of understanding is necessary to effectively utilize the principles of scaffolding and to create contexts that can advance the scientific reasoning of the child. In this article, we argue that a child's performance is a dynamic notion that is created by all elements in an interaction, including the task. Therefore, we studied preschoolers' levels of scientific reasoning varying different properties of the assessment context. Young children were interviewed about four scientific tasks using one out of four different protocols (varying in the degree of flexibility and adaptiveness) by an adult. In the first study, different task contents resulted in different performance levels. The second study indicated that the most structured protocol elicited the highest maximum level of reasoning in children and the highest percentage of correct predictions. The third study showed differences between the protocols in the adult's verbal behavior. Adaptation in verbal behavior to different children by the adult did not result in higher scientific understanding by the children, whereas a higher degree of task structure did. Combined, the studies emphasize the importance of context, which has implications for assessment and teaching situations.

  13. Context-specific effects of musical expertise on audiovisual integration

    PubMed Central

    Bishop, Laura; Goebl, Werner

    2014-01-01

    Ensemble musicians exchange auditory and visual signals that can facilitate interpersonal synchronization. Musical expertise improves how precisely auditory and visual signals are perceptually integrated and increases sensitivity to asynchrony between them. Whether expertise improves sensitivity to audiovisual asynchrony in all instrumental contexts or only in those using sound-producing gestures that are within an observer's own motor repertoire is unclear. This study tested the hypothesis that musicians are more sensitive to audiovisual asynchrony in performances featuring their own instrument than in performances featuring other instruments. Short clips were extracted from audio-video recordings of clarinet, piano, and violin performances and presented to highly-skilled clarinetists, pianists, and violinists. Clips either maintained the audiovisual synchrony present in the original recording or were modified so that the video led or lagged behind the audio. Participants indicated whether the audio and video channels in each clip were synchronized. The range of asynchronies most often endorsed as synchronized was assessed as a measure of participants' sensitivities to audiovisual asynchrony. A positive relationship was observed between musical training and sensitivity, with data pooled across stimuli. While participants across expertise groups detected asynchronies most readily in piano stimuli and least readily in violin stimuli, pianists showed significantly better performance for piano stimuli than for either clarinet or violin. These findings suggest that, to an extent, the effects of expertise on audiovisual integration can be instrument-specific; however, the nature of the sound-producing gestures that are observed has a substantial effect on how readily asynchrony is detected as well. PMID:25324819

  14. Changes in P3b Latency and Amplitude Reflect Expertise Acquisition in a Football Visuomotor Learning Task.

    PubMed

    Morgan, Kyle K; Luu, Phan; Tucker, Don M

    2016-01-01

    Learning is not a unitary phenomenon. Rather, learning progresses through stages, with the stages reflecting different challenges that require the support of specific cognitive processes that reflect the functions of different brain networks. A theory of general learning proposes that learning can be divided into early and late stages controlled by corticolimbic networks located in frontal and posterior brain regions, respectively. Recent human studies using dense-array EEG (dEEG) support these results by showing progressive increases in P3b amplitude (an Event Related Potential with estimated sources in posterior cingulate cortex and hippocampus) as participants acquire a new visuomotor skill. In the present study, the P3b was used to track the learning and performance of participants as they identify defensive football formations and make an appropriate response. Participants acquired the task over three days, and P3b latency and amplitude significantly changed when participants learned the task. As participants demonstrated further proficiency with extensive training, amplitude and latency changes in the P3b continued to closely mirror performance improvements. Source localization results across all days suggest that an important source generator of the P3b is located in the posterior cingulate cortex. Results from the study support prior findings and further suggest that the careful analysis of covert learning mechanisms and their underlying electrical signatures are a robust index of task competency.

  15. Competing Discourses of Scientific Identity among Postdoctoral Scholars in the Biomedical Sciences.

    PubMed

    Price, Rebecca M; Kantrowitz-Gordon, Ira; Gordon, Sharona E

    2018-06-01

    The postdoctoral period is generally one of low pay, long hours, and uncertainty about future career options. To better understand how postdocs conceive of their present and future goals, we asked researchers about their scientific identities while they were in their postdoctoral appointments. We used discourse analysis to analyze interviews with 30 scholars from a research-intensive university or nearby research institutions to better understand how their scientific identities influenced their career goals. We identified two primary discourses: bench scientist and principal investigator (PI). The bench scientist discourse is characterized by implementing other people's scientific visions through work in the laboratory and expertise in experimental design and troubleshooting. The PI discourse is characterized by a focus on formulating scientific visions, obtaining funding, and disseminating results through publishing papers and at invited talks. Because these discourses represent beliefs, they can-and do-limit postdocs' understandings of what career opportunities exist and the transferability of skills to different careers. Understanding the bench scientist and PI discourses, and how they interact, is essential for developing and implementing better professional development programs for postdocs.

  16. Truck and bus driver task analysis

    DOT National Transportation Integrated Search

    1973-05-01

    This report describes the tasks involved in driving large trucks and buses. The task descriptions are an extension of the task description developed by Human Resources Research Organization (HumRRO) for passenger car drivers and deal with those uniqu...

  17. Science teachers' perceptions of expertise in practice : An exploratory study

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Bevins, Stuart Carl

    This thesis reports on an exploration of the nature and characteristics of science teaching expertise as exhibited by six identified expert science teachers. An action research methodology was adopted with data gathered through: semi-structured interviews; classroom observations, and reflective discussions. A culture of collaboration between the researcher and teachers was encouraged by the researcher in an attempt to create a 'bottom-up' approach to the study. The teachers acted as research collaborators by continuously reflecting on, and analysing their knowledge and practice within the context of the study.The reported study emphasises a need for identifying characteristics of science teacher expertise from the insights of teachers themselves. The study considers the reflections and perceptions of the science teachers involved to be an important part of their continuing professional development, which leads to a greater self-awareness and understanding of their teaching expertise. Findings show that these six science teachers demonstrate: subject master; deep pedagogical understanding; considerable pedagogical content knowledge, and a desire to continue learning for an entire professional life, in an attempt to keep abreast of changes and developments in science and education. Within these characteristics, the teachers exhibit, for example, organisational skills, empathy, flexibility, intuition, enthusiasm and professionalism. Most of all, they demonstrate an ability to operate and communicate at the level of their pupils. They study contributes to the debate about effective teaching and better ways for teachers to learn from their experienced by offering a detailed account of science teacher expertise from the perceptions of six expert teachers. The study also highlights a wide ranging existing literature base in a attempt to offer a way of thinking about teaching expertise. Findings from the study indicate strong similarities with those of the existing

  18. Music and words in the visual cortex: The impact of musical expertise.

    PubMed

    Mongelli, Valeria; Dehaene, Stanislas; Vinckier, Fabien; Peretz, Isabelle; Bartolomeo, Paolo; Cohen, Laurent

    2017-01-01

    How does the human visual system accommodate expertise for two simultaneously acquired symbolic systems? We used fMRI to compare activations induced in the visual cortex by musical notation, written words and other classes of objects, in professional musicians and in musically naïve controls. First, irrespective of expertise, selective activations for music were posterior and lateral to activations for words in the left occipitotemporal cortex. This indicates that symbols characterized by different visual features engage distinct cortical areas. Second, musical expertise increased the volume of activations for music and led to an anterolateral displacement of word-related activations. In musicians, there was also a dramatic increase of the brain-scale networks connected to the music-selective visual areas. Those findings reveal that acquiring a double visual expertise involves an expansion of category-selective areas, the development of novel long-distance functional connectivity, and possibly some competition between categories for the colonization of cortical space. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  19. Expanding the use of Scientific Data through Maps and Apps

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Shrestha, S. R.; Zimble, D. A.; Herring, D.; Halpert, M.

    2014-12-01

    The importance of making scientific data more available can't be overstated. There is a wealth of useful scientific data available and demand for this data is only increasing; however, applying scientific data towards practical uses poses several technical challenges. These challenges can arise from difficulty in handling the data due largely to 1) the complexity, variety and volume of scientific data and 2) applying and operating the techniques and tools needed to visualize and analyze the data. As a result, the combined knowledge required to take advantage of these data requires highly specialized skill sets that in total, limit the ability of scientific data from being used in more practical day-to-day decision making activities. While these challenges are daunting, information technologies do exist that can help mitigate some of these issues. Many organizations for years have already been enjoying the benefits of modern service oriented architectures (SOAs) for everyday enterprise tasks. We can use this approach to modernize how we share and access our scientific data where much of the specialized tools and techniques needed to handle and present scientific data can be automated and executed by servers and done so in an appropriate way. We will discuss and show an approach for preparing file based scientific data (e.g. GRIB, netCDF) for use in standard based scientific web services. These scientific web services are able to encapsulate the logic needed to handle and describe scientific data through a variety of service types including, image, map, feature, geoprocessing, and their respective service methods. By combining these types of services and leveraging well-documented and modern web development APIs, we can afford to focus our attention on the design and development of user-friendly maps and apps. Our scenario will include developing online maps through these services by integrating various forecast data from the Climate Forecast System (CFSv2). This

  20. Time course of the influence of musical expertise on the processing of vocal and musical sounds.

    PubMed

    Rigoulot, S; Pell, M D; Armony, J L

    2015-04-02

    Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have suggested that different cerebral regions preferentially process human voice and music. Yet, little is known on the temporal course of the brain processes that decode the category of sounds and how the expertise in one sound category can impact these processes. To address this question, we recorded the electroencephalogram (EEG) of 15 musicians and 18 non-musicians while they were listening to short musical excerpts (piano and violin) and vocal stimuli (speech and non-linguistic vocalizations). The task of the participants was to detect noise targets embedded within the stream of sounds. Event-related potentials revealed an early differentiation of sound category, within the first 100 ms after the onset of the sound, with mostly increased responses to musical sounds. Importantly, this effect was modulated by the musical background of participants, as musicians were more responsive to music sounds than non-musicians, consistent with the notion that musical training increases sensitivity to music. In late temporal windows, brain responses were enhanced in response to vocal stimuli, but musicians were still more responsive to music. These results shed new light on the temporal course of neural dynamics of auditory processing and reveal how it is impacted by the stimulus category and the expertise of participants. Copyright © 2015 IBRO. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  1. Budgetary Expertise and Experience: A Significant Link to Effective Management and Leadership.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Hogges, Ralph

    The importance of expertise and experience in university budgetary management is discussed. A short survey of higher education institutions indicated that program administrations were not knowledgeable about budgetary processes and procedures and were not interested in developing such expertise. It is suggested that there is a need for…

  2. Effects of Students' Prior Knowledge on Scientific Reasoning in Density.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Yang, Il-Ho; Kwon, Yong-Ju; Kim, Young-Shin; Jang, Myoung-Duk; Jeong, Jin-Woo; Park, Kuk-Tae

    2002-01-01

    Investigates the effects of students' prior knowledge on the scientific reasoning processes of performing the task of controlling variables with computer simulation and identifies a number of problems that students encounter in scientific discovery. Involves (n=27) 5th grade students and (n=33) 7th grade students. Indicates that students' prior…

  3. Relevant Indicators of Relative Expertise in Economic Problem Solving: A Factor Analysis.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    VanFossen, Phillip J.

    This paper reports preliminary research into the nature of relative expertise in economic problem solving. Specifically, this report seeks to address the question of whether the presence of economic knowledge alone accounts for expertise in economic problem solving or whether both economic knowledge and the development and employment of economic…

  4. [Tasks and duties of veterinary reference laboratories for food borne zoonoses].

    PubMed

    Ellerbroek, Lüppo; Alter, T; Johne, R; Nöckler, K; Beutin, L; Helmuth, R

    2009-02-01

    Reference laboratories are of central importance for consumer protection. Field expertise and high scientific competence are basic requirements for the nomination of a national reference laboratory. To ensure a common approach in the analysis of zoonotic hazards, standards have been developed by the reference laboratories together with national official laboratories on the basis of Art. 33 of Directive (EG) No. 882/2004. Reference laboratories function as arbitrative boards in the case of ambivalent or debatable results. New methods for detection of zoonotic agents are developed and validated to provide tools for analysis, e. g., in legal cases, if results from different parties are disputed. Besides these tasks, national reference laboratories offer capacity building and advanced training courses and control the performance of ring trials to ensure consistency in the quality of analyses in official laboratories. All reference laboratories work according to the ISO standard 17025 which defines the grounds for strict laboratory quality rules and in cooperation with the respective Community Reference Laboratories (CRL). From the group of veterinary reference laboratories for food-borne zoonoses, the national reference laboratories are responsible for Listeria monocytogenes, for Campylobacter, for the surveillance and control of viral and bacterial contamination of bivalve molluscs, for E. coli, for the performance of analysis and tests on zoonoses (Salmonella), and from the group of parasitological zoonotic agents, the national reference laboratory for Trichinella.

  5. Pilot age and expertise predict flight simulator performance

    PubMed Central

    Kennedy, Quinn; Noda, Art; Yesavage, Jerome A.

    2010-01-01

    Background Expert knowledge may compensate for age-related declines in basic cognitive and sensory-motor abilities in some skill domains. We investigated the influence of age and aviation expertise (indexed by Federal Aviation Administration pilot ratings) on longitudinal flight simulator performance. Methods Over a 3-year period, 118 general aviation pilots aged 40 to 69 years were tested annually, in which their flight performance was scored in terms of 1) executing air-traffic controller communications; 2) traffic avoidance; 3) scanning cockpit instruments; 4) executing an approach to landing; and 5) a flight summary score. Results More expert pilots had better flight summary scores at baseline and showed less decline over time. Secondary analyses revealed that expertise effects were most evident in the accuracy of executing aviation communications, the measure on which performance declined most sharply over time. Regarding age, even though older pilots initially performed worse than younger pilots, over time older pilots showed less decline in flight summary scores than younger pilots. Secondary analyses revealed that the oldest pilots did well over time because their traffic avoidance performance improved more vs younger pilots. Conclusions These longitudinal findings support previous cross-sectional studies in aviation as well as non-aviation domains, which demonstrated the advantageous effect of prior experience and specialized expertise on older adults’ skilled cognitive performances. PMID:17325270

  6. International energy: Research organizations, 1986--1990

    DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

    Hendricks, P.; Jordan, S.

    The International Energy: Research Organizations publication contains the standardized names of energy research organizations used in energy information databases. Involved in this cooperative task are (1) the technical staff of the USDOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) in cooperation with the member countries of the Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDE) and (2) the International Nuclear Information System (INIS). This publication identifies current organizations doing research in all energy fields, standardizes the format for recording these organization names in bibliographic citations, assigns a numeric code to facilitate data entry, and identifies report number prefixes assigned by these organizations. Thesemore » research organization names may be used in searching the databases Energy Science Technology'' on DIALOG and Energy'' on STN International. These organization names are also used in USDOE databases on the Integrated Technical Information System. Research organizations active in the past five years, as indicated by database records, were identified to form this publication. This directory includes approximately 34,000 organizations that reported energy-related literature from 1986 to 1990 and updates the DOE Energy Data Base: Corporate Author Entries.« less

  7. Turning Crisis into Opportunity: Nature of Science and Scientific Inquiry as Illustrated in the Scientific Research on Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Wong, Siu Ling; Kwan, Jenny; Hodson, Derek; Yung, Benny Hin Wai

    2009-01-01

    Interviews with key scientists who had conducted research on Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), together with analysis of media reports, documentaries and other literature published during and after the SARS epidemic, revealed many interesting aspects of the nature of science (NOS) and scientific inquiry in contemporary scientific research in the rapidly growing field of molecular biology. The story of SARS illustrates vividly some NOS features advocated in the school science curriculum, including the tentative nature of scientific knowledge, theory-laden observation and interpretation, multiplicity of approaches adopted in scientific inquiry, the inter-relationship between science and technology, and the nexus of science, politics, social and cultural practices. The story also provided some insights into a number of NOS features less emphasised in the school curriculum—for example, the need to combine and coordinate expertise in a number of scientific fields, the intense competition between research groups (suspended during the SARS crisis), the significance of affective issues relating to intellectual honesty and the courage to challenge authority, the pressure of funding issues on the conduct of research and the ‘peace of mind’ of researchers, These less emphasised elements provided empirical evidence that NOS knowledge, like scientific knowledge itself, changes over time. They reflected the need for teachers and curriculum planners to revisit and reconsider whether the features of NOS currently included in the school science curriculum are fully reflective of the practice of science in the 21st century. In this paper, we also report on how we made use of extracts from the news reports and documentaries on SARS, together with episodes from the scientists’ interviews, to develop a multimedia instructional package for explicitly teaching the prominent features of NOS and scientific inquiry identified in the SARS research.

  8. The Effects of Self-Esteem and Task Perception on Goal Setting, Efficacy, and Task Performance.

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Tang, Thomas Li-Ping; Reynolds, David Bryan

    This study examined the effects of self-esteem and task perception on goal setting, efficacy, and task performance in 52 recreational dart throwers who were members of two dart organizations. Task perception was manipulated by asking each dart thrower to compete against self, a difficult competitor, and an easy competitor on the same dart game.…

  9. A cognitive perspective on medical expertise: theory and implication.

    PubMed

    Schmidt, H G; Norman, G R; Boshuizen, H P

    1990-10-01

    A new theory of the development of expertise in medicine is outlined. Contrary to existing views, this theory assumes that expertise is not so much a matter of superior reasoning skills or in-depth knowledge of pathophysiological states as it is based on cognitive structures that describe the features of prototypical or even actual patients. These cognitive structures, referred to as "illness scripts," contain relatively little knowledge about pathophysiological causes of symptoms and complaints but a wealth of clinically relevant information about disease, its consequences, and the context under which illness develops. By contrast, intermediate-level students without clinical experience typically use pathophysiological, causal models of disease when solving problems. The authors review evidence supporting the theory and discuss its implications for the understanding of five phenomena extensively documented in the clinical-reasoning literature: (1) content specificity in diagnostic performance; (2) typical differences in data-gathering techniques between medical students and physicians; (3) difficulties involved in setting standards; (4) a decline in performance on certain measures of clinical reasoning with increasing expertise; and (5) a paradoxical association between errors and longer response times in visual diagnosis.

  10. The IUGS Task Group on Global Geoscience Professionalism - promoting professional skills professionalism in the teaching, research and application of geoscience for the protection and education of the public

    NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

    Allington, Ruth; Fernandez-Fuentes, Isabel

    2013-04-01

    A new IUGS Task Group entitled the Task Group on Global Geoscience Professionalism was formed in 2012 and launched at a symposium at the 341GC in Brisbane on strengthening communication between fundamental and applied geosciences and between geoscientists and public. The Task Group aims to ensure that the international geoscience community is engaged in a transformation of its profession so as to embed the need for a professional skills base alongside technical and scientific skills and expertise, within a sound ethical framework in all arenas of geoscience practice. This needs to be established during training and education and reinforced as CPD throughout a career in geoscience as part of ensuring public safety and effective communication of geoscience concepts to the public. The specific objective of the Task Group on Global Geoscience Professionalism that is relevant to this poster session is: • To facilitate a more 'joined up' geoscience community fostering better appreciation by academics and teachers of the professional skills that geoscientists need in the workplace, and facilitate better communication between academic and applied communities leading to more effective application of research findings and technology to applied practitioners and development of research programmes that truly address urgent issues. Other Task Group objectives are: • To provide a specific international forum for discussion of matters of common concern and interest among geoscientists and geoscientific organizations involved in professional affairs, at the local, national and international level; • To act as a resource to IUGS on professional affairs in the geosciences as they may influence and impact "Earth Science for the Global Community" in general - both now and in the future; • To offer and provide leadership and knowledge transfer services to countries and geoscientist communities around the world seeking to introduce systems of professional governance and self

  11. Adults' representations of the Earth: implications for children's acquisition of scientific concepts.

    PubMed

    Nobes, Gavin; Panagiotaki, Georgia

    2007-11-01

    When children are asked to draw the Earth they often produce intriguing pictures in which, for example, people seem to be standing on a flat disc or inside a hollow sphere. These drawings, and children's answers to questions, have been interpreted as indicating that children construct naïve, theory-like mental models of the Earth (e.g. Vosniadou & Brewer, 1992). However, recent studies using different methods have found little or no evidence of these mental models, and report that many young children have some scientific knowledge of the Earth. To examine the reasons for these contrasting findings, adults (N=350) were given the drawing task previously given to 5-year-old children. Fewer than half of the adults' pictures were scientific, and 15% were identical to children's 'naïve' drawings. Up to half of the answers to questions (e.g. 'Where do people live?') were non-scientific. Open-ended questions and follow-up interviews revealed that non-scientific responses were given because adults found the apparently simple task confusing and challenging. Since children very probably find it even more difficult, these findings indicate that children's non-scientific responses, like adults', often result from methodological problems with the task. These results therefore explain the discrepant findings of previous research, and support the studies which indicate that children do not have naïve mental models of the Earth.

  12. Proposing an International Collaboration on Lightweight Autonomous Vehicles to Conduct Scientific Traverses and Surveys over Antarctica and the Surrounding Sea Ice

    NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

    Carsey, Frank; Behar, Alberto

    2004-01-01

    We have continued to develop a concept for use of autonomous rovers, originally developed for use in planetary exploration, in polar science on Earth; the concept was the subject of a workshop, and this report summarizes and extends that workshop. The workshop on Antarctic Autonomous Scientific Vehicles and Traverses met at the National Geographic Society on February 14 and 15, 2001 to discuss scientific objectives and benefits of the use of autonomous rovers. The participants enthusiastically viewed rovers as being uniquely valuable for such tasks as data taking on tedious or repetitive routes, traverses in polar night, difficult or hazardous routes, extremely remote regions, routes requiring only simple instrumentation, traverses that must be conducted at low speed, augments of manned traverses, and scientific procedures not compatible with human presence or combustion engines. The workshop has concluded that instrumented autonomous vehicles, of the type being developed for planetary exploration, have the potential to contribute significantly to the way science in conducted in Antarctica while also aiding planetary technology development, and engaging the public's interest. Specific objectives can be supported in understanding ice sheet mass balance, sea ice heat and momentum exchange, and surface air chemistry processes. In the interval since the workshop, we have concluded that organized program to employ such rovers to perform scientific tasks in the Fourth International Polar Year would serve the objectives of that program well.

  13. Musical expertise and foreign speech perception.

    PubMed

    Martínez-Montes, Eduardo; Hernández-Pérez, Heivet; Chobert, Julie; Morgado-Rodríguez, Lisbet; Suárez-Murias, Carlos; Valdés-Sosa, Pedro A; Besson, Mireille

    2013-01-01

    The aim of this experiment was to investigate the influence of musical expertise on the automatic perception of foreign syllables and harmonic sounds. Participants were Cuban students with high level of expertise in music or in visual arts and with the same level of general education and socio-economic background. We used a multi-feature Mismatch Negativity (MMN) design with sequences of either syllables in Mandarin Chinese or harmonic sounds, both comprising deviants in pitch contour, duration and Voice Onset Time (VOT) or equivalent that were either far from (Large deviants) or close to (Small deviants) the standard. For both Mandarin syllables and harmonic sounds, results were clear-cut in showing larger MMNs to pitch contour deviants in musicians than in visual artists. Results were less clear for duration and VOT deviants, possibly because of the specific characteristics of the stimuli. Results are interpreted as reflecting similar processing of pitch contour in speech and non-speech sounds. The implications of these results for understanding the influence of intense musical training from childhood to adulthood and of genetic predispositions for music on foreign language perception are discussed.

  14. Musical expertise and foreign speech perception

    PubMed Central

    Martínez-Montes, Eduardo; Hernández-Pérez, Heivet; Chobert, Julie; Morgado-Rodríguez, Lisbet; Suárez-Murias, Carlos; Valdés-Sosa, Pedro A.; Besson, Mireille

    2013-01-01

    The aim of this experiment was to investigate the influence of musical expertise on the automatic perception of foreign syllables and harmonic sounds. Participants were Cuban students with high level of expertise in music or in visual arts and with the same level of general education and socio-economic background. We used a multi-feature Mismatch Negativity (MMN) design with sequences of either syllables in Mandarin Chinese or harmonic sounds, both comprising deviants in pitch contour, duration and Voice Onset Time (VOT) or equivalent that were either far from (Large deviants) or close to (Small deviants) the standard. For both Mandarin syllables and harmonic sounds, results were clear-cut in showing larger MMNs to pitch contour deviants in musicians than in visual artists. Results were less clear for duration and VOT deviants, possibly because of the specific characteristics of the stimuli. Results are interpreted as reflecting similar processing of pitch contour in speech and non-speech sounds. The implications of these results for understanding the influence of intense musical training from childhood to adulthood and of genetic predispositions for music on foreign language perception are discussed. PMID:24294193

  15. Multisociety task force recommendations of competencies in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine.

    PubMed

    Buckley, John D; Addrizzo-Harris, Doreen J; Clay, Alison S; Curtis, J Randall; Kotloff, Robert M; Lorin, Scott M; Murin, Susan; Sessler, Curtis N; Rogers, Paul L; Rosen, Mark J; Spevetz, Antoinette; King, Talmadge E; Malhotra, Atul; Parsons, Polly E

    2009-08-15

    Numerous accrediting organizations are calling for competency-based medical education that would help define specific specialties and serve as a foundation for ongoing assessment throughout a practitioner's career. Pulmonary Medicine and Critical Care Medicine are two distinct subspecialties, yet many individual physicians have expertise in both because of overlapping content. Establishing specific competencies for these subspecialties identifies educational goals for trainees and guides practitioners through their lifelong learning. To define specific competencies for graduates of fellowships in Pulmonary Medicine and Internal Medicine-based Critical Care. A Task Force composed of representatives from key stakeholder societies convened to identify and define specific competencies for both disciplines. Beginning with a detailed list of existing competencies from diverse sources, the Task Force categorized each item into one of six core competency headings. Each individual item was reviewed by committee members individually, in group meetings, and conference calls. Nominal group methods were used for most items to retain the views and opinions of the minority perspective. Controversial items underwent additional whole group discussions with iterative modified-Delphi techniques. Consensus was ultimately determined by a simple majority vote. The Task Force identified and defined 327 specific competencies for Internal Medicine-based Critical Care and 276 for Pulmonary Medicine, each with a designation as either: (1) relevant, but competency is not essential or (2) competency essential to the specialty. Specific competencies in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine can be identified and defined using a multisociety collaborative approach. These recommendations serve as a starting point and set the stage for future modification to facilitate maximum quality of care as the specialties evolve.

  16. Task switching in video game players: Benefits of selective attention but not resistance to proactive interference.

    PubMed

    Karle, James W; Watter, Scott; Shedden, Judith M

    2010-05-01

    Research into the perceptual and cognitive effects of playing video games is an area of increasing interest for many investigators. Over the past decade, expert video game players (VGPs) have been shown to display superior performance compared to non-video game players (nVGPs) on a range of visuospatial and attentional tasks. A benefit of video game expertise has recently been shown for task switching, suggesting that VGPs also have superior cognitive control abilities compared to nVGPs. In two experiments, we examined which aspects of task switching performance this VGP benefit may be localized to. With minimal trial-to-trial interference from minimally overlapping task set rules, VGPs demonstrated a task switching benefit compared to nVGPs. However, this benefit disappeared when proactive interference between tasks was increased, with substantial stimulus and response overlap in task set rules. We suggest that VGPs have no generalized benefit in task switching-related cognitive control processes compared to nVGPs, with switch cost reductions due instead to a specific benefit in controlling selective attention. Copyright 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  17. Temporal Comparison Between NIRS and EEG Signals During a Mental Arithmetic Task Evaluated with Self-Organizing Maps.

    PubMed

    Oyama, Katsunori; Sakatani, Kaoru

    2016-01-01

    Simultaneous monitoring of brain activity with near-infrared spectroscopy and electroencephalography allows spatiotemporal reconstruction of the hemodynamic response regarding the concentration changes in oxyhemoglobin and deoxyhemoglobin that are associated with recorded brain activity such as cognitive functions. However, the accuracy of state estimation during mental arithmetic tasks is often different depending on the length of the segment for sampling of NIRS and EEG signals. This study compared the results of a self-organizing map and ANOVA, which were both used to assess the accuracy of state estimation. We conducted an experiment with a mental arithmetic task performed by 10 participants. The lengths of the segment in each time frame for observation of NIRS and EEG signals were compared with the 30-s, 1-min, and 2-min segment lengths. The optimal segment lengths were different for NIRS and EEG signals in the case of classification of feature vectors into the states of performing a mental arithmetic task and being at rest.

  18. Universities and the Public Recognition of Expertise

    ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

    Arnoldi, Jakob

    2007-01-01

    This article argues that new sites of knowledge production, increasingly cultivated by the mass media, are threatening the role of academics and universities as traditional sources of expertise. Drawing upon the conceptual categories of Pierre Bourdieu, the article suggests an alternative way of understanding this "crisis of legitimacy."

  19. Study design in medical research: part 2 of a series on the evaluation of scientific publications.

    PubMed

    Röhrig, Bernd; du Prel, Jean-Baptist; Blettner, Maria

    2009-03-01

    The scientific value and informativeness of a medical study are determined to a major extent by the study design. Errors in study design cannot be corrected afterwards. Various aspects of study design are discussed in this article. Six essential considerations in the planning and evaluation of medical research studies are presented and discussed in the light of selected scientific articles from the international literature as well as the authors' own scientific expertise with regard to study design. The six main considerations for study design are the question to be answered, the study population, the unit of analysis, the type of study, the measuring technique, and the calculation of sample size. This article is intended to give the reader guidance in evaluating the design of studies in medical research. This should enable the reader to categorize medical studies better and to assess their scientific quality more accurately.

  20. The ethic of care: recapturing social work's first voice.

    PubMed

    Dybicz, Phillip

    2012-07-01

    This article examines the dynamic between expressions of care--that is, simple acts of kindness and consideration that make up friendly relations--and professional expertise. During the 20th century, social work based its expertise on a solid scientific foundation. Within the embrace of scientific expertise, expressions of care are assigned the vital, but limited, role of ameliorating the sterile application of scientific knowledge, mainly through the application of social work values. This role is limited, however, because social workers are cautioned to avoid dual relationships; one cannot be both a professional and a friend to the client. This was not always the case. Working from a different paradigm, Charity Organization Society workers and settlement house workers each actively embraced and nurtured the notion of being a friend and neighbor to those they served. Post-modern practices--also stemming from a different paradigm and embracing an expertise in critical consciousness, in turn--seek to redefine the client-social worker relationship along this dimension. Expressions of care, propagated through a genuine (albeit circumscribed) friendship, actively contribute to treatment planning and a more fruitful outcome.