Deconstructing Expert Cognitive Skills and Knowledge.

Training to achieve expert performance requires the trainees to have intense deliberate practice performing the physical and cognitive skills of experts. Designing effective training requires explicitly identifying what experts do and the reasons for their actions. This identification is deconstructing their expertise. We discuss methods for deconstructing expertise, particularly the cognitive skills of high performing endoscopists. Through structured interviews we determined what information they sought, and how they applied that information to make decisions. We particularly focused on key features they noticed when identifying lesions and making treatment decisions. We give examples of applying this deconstruction to training endoscopists.