ence, educators forget that those students are active participants in their own
learning and can choose to engage strategically in a domain task or not
(Snow et al., 1996). Further, students’ goals for engagement can range from
learning the content to getting a grade or avoiding embarrassment (Meece,
Blumenfeld, & Hoyle, 1988; Pintrich, 2000). If students do not manifest the
knowledge and processes associated with expertise, is it a case of ability or a
lack of personal investment in the task or the domain?
Educators also cannot operate under the assumption that the myriad of
novices moving through the educational system have the goal of becoming
experts in any academic domain, or any intention of committing the requisite
time and energy to achieve expertise, even in those cases where the requisite
cognitive abilities exist (Bransford et al., 1993; Meece et al., 1988).
- Limited consideration of the school context.Anyone who has spent time
in classrooms recently knows that schools are unique places. Educational
communities operate under their own set of accepted practices, routine tasks,
and value systems (Senge, 1990). Thus, there is always a risk when educators
seek to build instructional models around research conducted largely outside
of the educational context. This is true for the research on expertise.
Traditional expertise research requires us to overlay the findings from
non-academic domains or laboratory settings onto the educational system.
However, if there is truly a desire to transfer the wisdom of expert–novice
studies to schooling, then it would be wise to work within the system more di-
rectly. Study expertisein situ, for instance, or at least with an array of meas-
ures that draw directly on the tasks, procedures, and conditions aligned with
educational practice (Sternberg, 2003).
In light of the aforementioned limitations, the search for alternative concep-
tions of expertise that circumvent the theoretical and methodological short-
comings of past generations of expert–novice research seems worthwhile.
PRECURSOR STUDIES TO THE MDL
Unlike researchers in AI and IPT, I did not set out to study expertise when I
began my program of inquiry. My interests in past decades were centered on
text-based learning (e.g., Garner & Alexander, 1981; Judy, Alexander, Ku-
likowich, & Willson, 1988). How do students make sense of the linguistic ma-
terials they encounter? What factors contribute to students’ successes or diffi-
culties at that endeavor, and what can be done to facilitate their learning
throughandwithtext? Despite the differences in goals, my past explorations
of text-based learning went through some of the same generational shifts as I
previously ascribed to the expert–novice research.
280 ALEXANDER