Inducing Expertise in History Doctoral Students via Information Retrieval Design

Abstract

In a previous study of doctoral history students, I observed that a common practice of these students was to collect names of people from the era and geographical area they were studying, then to place data about these names on 3 × 5-inch index cards. The names and data about the names were used as access points to the material the student was reading, but they also seemed to induce a cognitive effect that was advantageous to the student's task performance. This article investigates the cognitive effect that results from collecting names when the doctoral students recognized patterns among the data elements written down on the 3 × 5-inch index cards. The pattern recognition leads to original thesis formation and expert thinking, which is a requirement of a doctoral dissertation. This article describes this technique of name collecting, illustrates it with a case study from a larger study of doctoral history students, then uses schemata theory and theories on expert cognition to create a theory that explains how the name collecting behavior induces expert thinking in the novice student. Finally, the article describes a design concept for an information retrieval system device specifically designed to facilitate the history student's names-collecting activity and to induce expert thinking.

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