The Development and Psychometric Evaluation of a Multidimensional Measurement Instrument of Professional Expertise

Abstract

The aim of the present study was to determine the nature of the knowledge and skills related to professional expertise, and to develop means by which such expertise may be individually measured. An instrument was developed consisting of ® ve different scales (with contents ranging from 12 to 19 items each), each re¯ecting one of ® ve dimensions: knowledge, meta-cognitive knowledge, skills, social recognition, growth and ¯exibility. Participants were two different, but relevant, groups of raters: individual employees (N 5 558) and their immediate supervisors (N 5 454). The item-sets for both groups are nominally identical, except that the wording was adapted when necessary to suit one group or the other. The reliabilities of the developed scales were high with Cronbach's a ranging from 0.83 to 0.94, for both the self-ratings and the supervisor ratings. All ® ve scales are homogeneous and distinctive as corroborated by Multitrait-Multimethod and LISREL analyses. Background and construction of the instrument are discussed at length and the instrument is appended in two versions: the original Dutch questionnaire and an English version.

Measuring adaptive expertise: development and validation of an instrument

“…The instruments developed by Fisher and Peterson (2001) and van der Heijden (2000) provide the closest fit to the concept of adaptive expertise. Therefore, these two instruments were selected to serve as the basis for the development of a new instrument.…”

“…We drew items from the scales "metacognitive skills" and "growth and flexibility" of van der Heijden's (2000) instrument. This created a pool of items for the optional subscale of metacognitive skills and the necessary subscale of innovative capacities.…”

“…The instrument by van der Heijden (2000) related all items to the participant's work environment, whereas the instrument by Fisher and Peterson (2001) used problems or tasks as a reference category. As the level of adaptive expertise is dependent on the domain, it was decided to change the reference category to "work" or "discipline".…”

How flexperts deal with changing expertise demands: A qualitative study into the processes of expertise renewal

“…Based on an elaborate literature review and extensive empirical work on the performance of experts in professional settings, Van der Heijden (1998, 2000 1 came up with a comprehensive definition and multidimensional operationalization of the concept of occupational expertise. The first dimension concerns the acknowledgement that professionals need to have a vast amount of relevant domain-specific knowledge, often described as declarative or factual knowledge ("knowing that"), procedural knowledge ("knowing how"), and conditional knowledge ("knowing when and where or under what conditions") (see also Alexander, Schallert, & Hare, 1991).…”

“…Van der Heijden (2000) defined "flexperts" as "individuals who are capable of acquiring more than one area of expertise within adjacent or radically different fields or who are capable of acquiring a strategy to master a new area of expertise or expert performance in another territory" (p. 12). As suggested by Van der Heijden (2000, p. 30 Recently, different researchers showed a regaining interest in better understanding what is needed for meeting the changing demands for expertise, which Van der Heijden (1998, 2000 labelled as "flexpertise". Birney, Beckmann, and Wood (2012) used the term "flexible expertise" for "the capacity to move across different domains and problem types smoothly and appropriately" (p. 573).…”