The Nature and Constructs of Relative Expertise in Economic Problem Solving: Preliminary Findings.

This paper reports preliminary research into the nature of relative expertise in economic problem solving. The first section briefly describes why such research is needed in the context of research on expert and novice problem solving. It also presents the problem explored in this study in the context of the existing research. Subsequent sections present the methods, results, and conclusions of the study. The researchers examined literal transcripts generated from the "talk-aloud" protocols of 28 participants responding to three economic problems. Each sub-group contained four participants: (1) high school students who had taken economics and those who had not taken economics; (2) undergraduate economics majors and non-majors; (3) graduate students in economics; and (4) Ph.D. economists employed in public and private forecasting and academic Ph.D. economists. The study employed a causal-comparative design with members of the seven sub-sample groups identified by the researcher. Three economics problems were employed in the study with several phases of data gathering involved in the analysis of data. Extensive charts and graphs accompany the text. Contains 32 references. (EH)