Bothered by abstraction: The effect of expertise on knowledge transfer and subsequent novice performance

Although experts should be well positioned to convey their superior knowledge and skill to novices, the organization of that knowledge, and particularly its level of abstraction, may make it difficult for them to do so. Using an electronic circuit-wiring task, the authors found that experts as compared with beginners used more abstract and advanced statements and fewer concrete statements when providing task instructions to novices. In a 2nd study. the authors found that beginner-instructed novices performed better than expert-instructed novices and reported fewer problems with the instructions when performing the same task. In Study 2, the authors found that although novices performed better on the target task when instructed by beginners, they did better on a different task within the same domain when instructed by experts. The evidence suggests that the abstract, advanced concepts conveyed by experts facilitated the transfer of learning between the different tasks.