At the precipice of assessing adaptive expertise?

Abstract

Adaptive Expertise is widely invoked as essential for navigating the uncertainty and complexity of contemporary professional practice, yet its conceptualization and measurement remain fragmented and imprecise. Building on the critical scoping review by Hissink et al. (Advances in Health Sciences Education, 1–27, 2025), this commentary argues that adaptive expertise assessment is currently at a precipice – a hazardous situation in which conceptual ambiguity, psychometric overreach, and operational vagueness threaten the construct’s theoretical integrity and practical utility. I trace the roots of adaptive expertise to Piaget’s interdependent processes of assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration, emphasizing that adaptive expertise emerges from their dynamic interplay rather than from schema-changing accommodation alone. Contemporary uses of adaptive expertise, however, frequently conflate these processes or privilege accommodation, obscuring important distinctions in the cognitive work required of learners and professionals. This imprecision extends to existing adaptive expertise instruments, many of which rely on self-report, collapse vast psychological domains into coarse categories, or measure outcomes without interrogating underlying mechanisms. I argue that such approaches fail to capture the situated, practice-based nature of adaptive expertise and risk distorting the construct beyond recognition. To move forward, adaptive expertise assessment must shift from abstract traits to observable adaptive practices situated within real-world tasks, drawing on ecological and embodied theories of cognition while treating their vocabulary as a proxy for adaptive expertise, rather than a way for true introspection. Ultimately, if adaptive expertise is to serve as a meaningful guide for assessment and pedagogy, the field must resist the temptation to measure everything at once and instead develop context-sensitive, theoretically grounded, and explanatory assessments that honor the complexity, and promise, of adaptive expertise.