Negative expertise: comparing differently tenured elder care nurses' negative knowledge

Abstract

Negative expertise is conceptualised as the professional's ability to avoid errors during practice due to certain cognitive agencies. In this study, negative knowledge (i.e. knowledge about what is wrong in a certain context and situation) is conceptualised as one such agency. This study compares and investigates the negative knowledge of elder care nurses at three different levels of professional experience. Thereby, various forms of negative knowledge-declarative, procedural, self-reflective and vicarious-are investigated. Moreover, the specificity of negative knowledge is compared across different levels of professional experience. Verbal data was collected from a prompting task study of 37 elder care nurses. These were prompted 20 diagnoses of varying typicality for the professional field. The nurses were asked what was critical to pay attention to and what ought to be avoided in case of these diagnoses. The study's results reveal a significant superiority of highly tenured elder care nurses in vicarious negative knowledge, as well as in highly specified negative knowledge. Procedural and procedural negative knowledge (PNK)-which are the most important facets in quantitative termsshow an approximately parallel developmental pattern among the different groups. For declarative knowledge, a U-shaped intermediate effect was discovered. It is concluded that PNK has the most immediate error-preventive function. With regards to future research, the great specificity of highly tenured elder care nurses' negative knowledge discovered in this study is discussed here as one possible explanation as to why they are able to intentionally avoid errors (i.e. their negative expertise).Résumé L'expertise négative est conceptualisée en tant que la capacité professionnelle à éviter les erreurs lors de la pratique dues à certains agents cognitifs. Dans cette étude, les connaissances négatives (c.-à-d. les connaissances relatives à ce qui est erroné dans un contexte ou une situation donné) sont conceptualisées en tant qu'agent de ce type. Cette étude compare et étudie les connaissances négatives des infirmières prodiguant des soins aux personnes âgées à trois stades d'expérience professionnelle différents. Nous étudions donc plusieurs formes de connaissances négatives, à savoir les connaissances déclaratives, procédurales, auto-réflectives et vicariantes. De plus, la spécificité des connaissances négatives est comparée en fonction des différents niveaux d'expérience. Des données verbales ont été collectées à partir d'une étude de tâches proposées à 37 infirmières soignant des personnes âgées. On leur a proposé 20 diagnostics de typicalité variable dans leur domaine professionnel. Il a été demandé aux infirmières ce qu'il était crucial de surveiller avec attention et ce qui devait être évité dans le cas de ces diagnostics. Les résultats de cette étude révèlent une supériorité importante des infirmières soignant des personnes âgées les plus gradées en matière de connaissances négatives vicariantes ainsi qu'en ce qui concerne les con...

Interactional Processes of Handling Errors in Vocational School: Students Attending to Changes in Vocational Practices

“…Heimbeck et al, 2003;Ingold, 2001;Keith, 2012). This adds to prior studies (Gartmeier et al, 2008;Gartmeier et al, 2011;Hetzner et al, 2012;Oser et al, 2012) having emphasized how learning from errors results in the development of negative knowledge and certainty in persons' work methods and procedures. Instead, the current study suggests that students and teachers share reflections of how what are judged to be proper procedures are negotiable and changeable in relation to the task context, rather than being fixed and stable.…”

“…In particular, prior research has been concerned with how persons are given opportunities to participate in and experience the making of errors (Dalehefte et al, 2012;Gartmeier et al, 2008;Heimbeck et al, 2003;Keith, 2012). For example, in a study of care nurses, it was found that their experienced knowledge about various workplace errors was important for their ability to actively avoid errors in their work (Gartmeier, Lehtinen, Gruber, & Heid, 2011). This implies that the active experiencing of errors is important for persons' learning of how to improve their practices.…”

“…From a cognitive perspective, it has been argued that reflections on errors may lead to the development of negative knowledge (Gartmeier et al, 2008;Gartmeier, Gruber, & Heid, 2010;Gartmeier et al, 2011;Hetzner et al, 2012). Negative knowledge can be specified in terms of, for example, negative procedural knowledge of "what not to do" and, as such, it constitutes persons' active ability to avoid errors.…”

“…In regard to situations in which a student's work practices do not lead to the desired goals, this person develops knowledge of what to do and negative knowledge of what not to do. Another form of negative knowledge has been defined as declarative knowledge of "what or how something is not" (Gartmeier et al, 2008;Gartmeier et al, 2011;Minsky, 1994;Oser et al, 2012). In addition to the mentioned two dimensions of negative knowledge, recent studies have added another aspect termed "self-reflective negative knowledge" (Hetzner et al, 2012).…”