Development of Schemata and pattern Recognition

Pattern recognition is a perceptual ability of a person to recognise relationships without specifying the components of the given situation. Expert clinician’s superior ability to see meaningful patterns is not the result of superior perceptual or memory skills, but reflects a more highly organised knowledge base (Jones, 1992). Whereas, novices use more recall of surface features of a problem and have less developed and fewer variations of patterns stored in their memory. In a clinical situation, patients present patterns of responses that expert clinicians learn to recognise in their practice. Experts make inferences about clinically relevant information and chunk information into recognisable patterns. Context-free criteria are never sufficient to capture either essential relationships or subtle variations in the pattern.

Patterns, cognitive models or mental schema provide “meaning and structure to an otherwise chaotic influx of information and give coherence to experiences that would otherwise seem incomplete or fragmentary” (Schmidt, Norman, & Boshuizen, 1990). The cognitive models of human judgment treat pattern recognition either as a feature- detection system, in which a list of features held in memory is matched against the features presented by the patient, or as a template-matching scheme.

Novices and experts have access to the same information. The information gathered by more experienced therapists appears to be more clearly defined and organised. The novice may not see where to look or how to look for additional information. The novice may rely on black and white textbook patterns and lack information on the relationships and shared features across different clinical patterns

Once students or novices are exposed to real clients, they begin to take certain shortcuts in their reasoning. With continued exposure only knowledge relevant to the client will be activated. The expert can make use of abstract relationships, which assist to categorise similar and opposing bits of information in memory. Schmidt, Norman, &

Chapter six Expert and Novice Differences: The Dreyfus Model

Boshuizen, (1990) suggests that these abstract relationships, termed by novice student “propositional networks” which may be “causal, temporal, spatial, and part-whole”, so may be viewed from different perspectives.

The novice does not have the repertoire of experience on which to base judgment. As suggested by Dreyfus &Dreyfus (1986), the novice practitioner develops through several stages of skill acquisition, starting with that of rule-follower able to recognise facts and features and make analogies, but unable to use this information flexibly or creatively or to deal with unfamiliar situations. Novices are less able to think quickly through a situation than are experts (Schmidt, Norman, & Boshuizen, 1990). This may be related to either the way in which information is stored in memory or the difficulty with decision making because of lack of automaticity. In the first explanation, information appears to be organized into a network of related facts, concepts, generalisations and experiences. The organised structures, called schemata, constitute our understanding of the world and allow individuals to store and access large bodies of information with enormous speed. The second explanation concerning automaticity suggests that automatic scripts allow experts to handle common routines almost without conscious thought -Schön’s “knowing in action” (Schön, 1991) and Benner’s “intuition”(Benner & Tanner, 1987).

Schemata do not automatically appear in a practitioner’s mind. They are constructed though experience. This may be seen as a dual process of assimilation (fitting the new in with the old) and accommodation (changing the old mental organisation to incorporate the new) (Piaget, 1971). It is a process of perceiving and storing related information, which can be recalled and used as a kind of prototype when a suitable stimulant is presented (Greenwood, 2000). Practitioners may accumulate these patterns or schemata that represent cases they have seen (Roberts, 1996). Experts

Chapter six Expert and Novice Differences: The Dreyfus Model

have the ability to think in and out of the box, backward and forward in time using the concept of problem space (Hagadorn, 1996).

Expert practitioners can model their skills and, through case discussion and demonstration of dealing with ill-structured problems, pass on some of their skills to less experienced therapists, but the skills and knowledge gained by the novice must then be internalised and become part of the novice’s repertoire in order to be useful. Thus the technical rational approach of prescribing and proscribing all the practitioners’ activities, used in many departments, may be seen as a way to cut down risks and ensure the safety of the client (Fish & Coles, 1998) and may be the foundation on which the novice can build his/her own repertoire with relative security. The problem with this approach in many departments is that the therapist may depend too much on information drawn from authority, not move beyond this adherence to specific protocol, and therefore may not develop his/her own reflective approach to practice

Experts’ planning can be described as a process of combining from existing schemata to fit particulars of a given lesson. Because experts have well-developed and easily accessible schemata for aspects of teaching such as instructional activities, content, and students, they are able to plan quickly and efficiently. Novices, on the other hand, often have to develop, or at least modify and elaborate, their schemata during planning. Their schemata for pedagogical content knowledge seem particularly limited. While experts’ knowledge structures include stores of powerful explanations, demonstrations, and examples for representing subject matter to students, novices must develop these representations as part of the planning process for each lesson. Further, because their pedagogical reasoning skills are less well developed than experts’, this planning is often inefficiently carried out.

Chapter six Expert and Novice Differences: The Dreyfus Model

information on the relationships and shared features across different clinical patterns. Once a student or novice is exposed to real patients, he/she begins to take certain shortcuts in his/her reasoning he/she is no longer has to activate all possible relevant knowledge in order to understand what is happening with the patient. With continued exposure only knowledge relevant to the patient will be activated. The expert can make use of abstract relationships, which assist the categorisation of similar and opposing bits of information in memory. Schmidt, Norman, & Boshuizen, (1990) suggests that these abstract relationships termed by him “propositional networks” may be causal, temporal, and spatial, part whole, or family-type.

Experts, on the other hand, have the ability to think in and out of the box, backward and forward in time using the concept of problem space (Hagadorn, 1996). Over-reliance on a familiar condition schema, however, might lead a therapist to skimp on the information gathering and analysing process, and jump from pattern recognition to stereotypical solution. It is also possible that a wrong fit be made between pattern and schema, so that the problem is incorrectly named and framed.