Designing Decision Aids to Promote the Development of Expertise

We investigate whether the use of decision aids that integrate experts' knowledge structures into their designs can effectively promote the acquisition of expertlike knowledge and improve future judgments. Results of two laboratory experiments (one involving 115 senior accounting students and one involving 78 master of accounting students) indicate that: (1) novice users of a decision aid that has an expert knowledge structure embedded into its interface make complex fraud risk assessments that are more similar to experts' risk assessments than do users of aids without expert knowledge structures; (2) users of a decision aid that has an expert knowledge structure embedded into its interface develop knowledge structures that are more similar to the knowledge structures of experts than do users of aids without expert knowledge structures; (3) knowledge structures mediate the relationship between decision aid design and judgment performance; and (4) novices develop expertise through decision aid use even when they are not instructed to learn from the decision aid.