Novice and expert knowledge of individual student's achievement

This is a study of expertise in teaching, and is related to studies of expertise in physics, radiology, chess, etc. Novice teachers, who had considerable experience observing a group of students, and expert classroom teachers each estimated the degree of overlap between the curriculum a child was exposed to and the criterion test used to assess performance. Through think‐aloud protocol analysis novice and expert differences were revealed. Although novices and experts were about equal in their abilities to assess performance on the criterion test, the experts had much more understanding of how and why they made their assessments. Implications for teacher education and research on teaching are discussed.