6 Training Strategies to Accelerate Expertise from Sternberg’s Model of Intelligence

This article presents 6 training strategies to accelerate expertise based on the postulations from Sternberg’s (1999) model of expertise development.

How to accelerate expertise? In previous posts, I highlighted the need to find solutions to accelerate expertise. Among several models for training design, the “Developing Expertise” Model by Sternberg (1999) is quite useful to define training strategies. The main feature of this model is that it postulated that ‘expertise’ is trainable – however, required correct orchestration of the training strategies.

What is Sternberg’s Model of Expertise?

Sternberg presented a model of developing expertise have five key elements:

• Metacognitive skills,
• Learning skills,
• Thinking skills,
• Knowledge and
• Motivation.

Fundamentally Sternberg’s model is based on cycling and interactions of several skills together to achieve expertise. The core philosophy is that Motivation is believed to drive metacognitive skills which in turn activate learning and thinking skills, which then provide feedback to the metacognitive skills, enabling one’s level of expertise to increase (Sternberg, 1985). The declarative and procedural knowledge acquired through thinking skills and learning skills also contributes toward the acquisition of expertise.

6 components of Sternberg’s Model explained

Sternberg explains the following contributing elements that lead to the development of expertise:

1) Metacognitive skills.

Metacognitive skills are people’s ability to self-regulate their learning. Sternberg (1985, 1986) specified seven metacognitive skills are particularly important:

• problem recognition, problem definition,
• problem representation,
• strategy formulation,
• resource allocation,
• monitoring of problem-solving, and
• evaluation of problem-solving

The important postulation of this model is that all of these skills are modifiable and trainable (Sternberg, 1986, 1988; Sternberg & Spear-Swerling, 1996).

2) Learning skills.

Learning skills help an individual to attain knowledge. Sternberg specifies two kinds of learning skills: explicit and implicit ones. Explicit learning is what occurs when we make an effort deliberately to learn something whereas implicit learning is one which we pick incidentally without any systematic effort. Selective coding, selective filtering, and distinguishing relevant vs. non-relevant are learning skills which are again trainable with appropriate training.

3) Thinking skills.

Sternberg (1997a) emphasizes three kinds of thinking skills that attribute to developing expertise through training.

• Critical (analytical) thinking skills include analyzing, critiquing, judging, evaluating, comparing and contrasting, and assessing.
• Creative thinking skills include creating, discovering, inventing, imagining, supposing, and hypothesizing.
• Practical thinking skills include applying, using, utilizing, and practicing (Sternberg, 1997b).

4) Knowledge skills.

Sternberg specified two types of knowledge important to acquire expertise:

• Declarative knowledge refers to ‘knowing that’ like facts, concepts, principles, laws, and the like. Declarative knowledge is further represented by Anderson on revised Blooms’ taxonomy as
  • factual knowledge (knowledge of basic elements and knowledge of specific details of various elements) and
  • conceptual knowledge (interrelationship of basic elements within a large structure that makes them work together. for Example knowledge about the classification, the principle of operations, theory, models, and structures).
• Procedural knowledge, on the other hand, is ‘knowing how’ like procedures and strategies. Sternberg et al. (1995) place a big importance on procedural knowledge. Anderson et. al (2001)’s revised Blooms’ Taxonomy further defines procedure knowledge as knowledge of subject-specific skills and algorithms, knowledge of techniques and methods, knowledge of determining criteria for when to use appropriate procedures

5) Motivation:

Motivation has been categorized into two kinds:

• Achievement motivation (McClelland, 1985; McClelland, Atkinson, Clark, & Lowell, 1976) refers to people’s tendency to seek moderate challenges and risks to achieve accomplishments.
• Competence motivation refers to persons’ beliefs in their own ability to solve the problem at hand (Bandura, 1977, 1996).

Sternberg postulates that expert develops competence motivation that helps them solve difficult tasks in their domain. It can be inferred that competence and achievement motivation can be instilled through managed successes during a training course.

The novice works toward expertise through deliberate practice but motivation is the key to practice. Practice for expertise requires the interaction of all five of the key elements. At the center, driving the elements is motivation (Sternberg, 1999). Sternberg (1999) states that “Eventually, one reaches a kind of expertise, at which one becomes a reflective…practitioner of a certain set of skills. People thus cycle through many times, on the way to successively higher levels of expertise”.

6) Context:

All of these processes are affected by, and can, in turn, affect, the context in which they operate. Sternberg asserts that context also plays an important role in success in gaining expertise faster. The learning environment and its ability to provide the relevant context to the learner play a big role in gaining proficiency (Caterjon et al., 2006).

6 Training Strategies derived from Sternberg’s Model to Accelerate Expertise

Sternberg’s  research postulations can be used in the following ways:

1. Design a Thinking based curriculum to accelerate critical, creative, and practical thinking skills

Thinking is a core skill to gain expertise. Research has proven that experts and highly skilled individuals use their mental schema to their advantage. The key to a well-developed mental schema is the ability to think from different angles. For years training practitioners have had a particular challenge in designing a curriculum that develops higher-order thinking. The key to the thinking-based curriculum is designing “discussions” in the lesson plan.

• To develop critical thinking into the curriculum, make sure the course is designed as participant-centered with lots of reflection exercises and emphasis on why and cause-n-effect.
• Hands-on procedures with emphasis on situational and conditional context will help build practical thinking skills.
• A participant-centered course should allow plenty of activities allowing participants to come up with new ways to a given problem. This will help to build creative thinking skills.

2. Integrate managed challenges and managed successes in the assessment to enhance motivation

Training courses primarily should be focused on assessment, both formative and summative. However, if the target is to accelerate skill acquisition then assessment needs to be dealt with from a different angle. Assessments can range from challenging questions to solving actual problems or scenarios. Care should be taken to define the sequence of challenges correctly. This is key to building achievement motivation through the progressive successes of the learners throughout the course. The goal of these challenges should be to give the progressive ability to the individual to solve and gain confidence which leads to competence motivations.

3. Develop the scenarios with noise and signal to induct good learning skills

In the real world, the situations are presented as complex mixtures of noise and signals. Those are associated with a reasonable amount of noise (irrelevant information but it makes learning about the phenomenon difficult). It is important to teachability to disseminate noise from signals in order to gain expertise. A training course should include good activities which address both explicit and implicit learning skills.

4. Build a solid foundation of declarative and procedural knowledge in the course

Sternberg emphasized the importance of declarative and procedural knowledge. According to the revised Blooms’ Taxonomy by Anderson et. al (2001), declarative and procedural knowledge is acquired through cognitive processes like remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. Training course to build expertise. Note that some of these processes are also the underlying mechanism of critical thinking. Again, critical thinking and practical thinking skills are the mental processes through which knowledge is understood and disseminated, and grown further. The training technique here is to ensure that factual, conceptual, and procedural knowledge is presented and discussed with participants from the various cognitive mechanism. For example: while teaching aerodynamics, the content can address the definition and core principles which can be extended by presenting a problem to participants and having them analyze the data. This can further be re-positioned to give them a system with an issue and ask them to evaluate the root cause and then fix it. By doing so, factual, conceptual, and procedural knowledge get solidified through all cognitive processes at various levels.

5. Incorporate reflections on strategies and self-monitoring

A training program for expertise development not only focuses on providing training on using and applying declarative and procedural knowledge but also helps participants to form their own strategies and approaches and monitor their progress in problem-solving. This area, known as metacognitive knowledge has been the focus of many research studies. Two individuals with exactly the same skills may simply differ in effectiveness just because they differ in how they monitor their problem-solving progress, and how they use metacognitive strategies toward problem-solving. That is one of the key differentiation an expert has over a novice. The training design tip here is that design range of problems/scenarios in your training course and drive participants to apply various strategies in different situations, different conditions, and different contexts. That’s how you can develop metacognitive strategies and improve self-knowledge.

6. Design an environment close to a realistic situation

Context plays a great role in accelerating expertise. Care should be taken to provide the challenges as real as possible. According to research, if learners are given real problems as opposed to fabricated ones, they tend to pay more attention and put all their efforts to solve the same. If you are designing a car repair course, then better you simulate the actual car workshop environment in the class, Yet better if you conduct the course in an actual car workshop. Reality drives motivation. Simulation-based training is one method among others to build a realistic environment.

Stay tuned for more insights.

FURTHER READINGS

Interested readers can check out the following links to expand their understanding of Sternberg’s model of expertise:

Abilities Are Forms of Developing Expertise

Intelligence as developing Expertise

Metacognition, abilities, and developing expertise: what makes an expert student?

SUGGESTED CITATION

Attri, RK (2017), ‘6 Training Strategies to Accelerate Expertise from Sternberg’s Model of Intelligence’, [Blog post], Speed To Proficiency Research: S2PRo©, Available online at <https://get-there-faster.com/blog/6-training-strategies-to-accelerate-expertise-from-sternbergs-model/>.

REFERENCES

1. Sternberg, R. (1999). Intelligence as Developing Expertise. Contemporary educational psychology, 24(4), 359–375. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361476X98909985?via%3Dihub
2. Sternberg, R. J. (1985). Beyond IQ: A triarchic theory of human intelligence. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press. 
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5. Sternberg, R. J., & Spear-Swerling, L. (1996). Teaching for thinking. Washington, DC: APA Books.
6. Sternberg, R. J. (1997a). Successful intelligence. New York: Plume.
7. Sternberg, R. J. (1997b). Thinking styles. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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9. Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84, 181–215.
10. Bandura, A. (1996). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: Freeman.
11. McClelland, D. C. (1985). Human Motivation. New York: Scott, Foresman.
12. McClelland, D. C., Atkinson, J. W., Clark, R. A., & Lowell, E. L. (1976). The achievement motive. New York: Irvington.
13. Anderson, L.W., Krathwohl, D.R, Airasian, P.W., Cruikshank, K.A., Mayer, R.E, Pintrich, P.R., Raths, J., Wittrock, M.C. (2001), A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Complete Edition, Pearson

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