“The cognitive principle that guides this chapter is:
Cognition early in training is fundamentally different from cognition late in training.”
“In truth, no one thinks like a scientist or a historian without a great deal of training. ”
“If we’re not giving students practice in doing the things that historians and scientists actually do, in what sense are we teaching them history and science?”
This gives credence to what we are trying to do with the VIP (http://vip.colostate.edu/) program, get undergrads involved in the research process so they learn the research process.
What Do Scientists, Mathematicians, and Other Experts Do?
“Expertise extends even to the types of mistakes that are made. When experts fail, they do so gracefully. ”
“Experts show better transfer to similar domains than novices do.”
“Compared to novices, experts are better able to single out important details, produce sensible solutions, and transfer their knowledge to similar domains.”
When it comes to technology skill, today's students can barely figure out the important details and produce sensible solutions. They expect everything to work right the first time and don't try different methods to complete a task. Then they email wanting the answer given to them...
What Is in an Expert’s Mental Toolbox?
“Experts don’t have trouble understanding abstract ideas, because they see the deep structure of problems.”
“They have representations of problems and situations in their long-term memories, and those representations are abstract. That’s why experts are able to ignore unimportant details and home in on useful information; thinking functionally makes it obvious what’s important. That’s also why they show good transfer to new problems. New problems differ in surface structure, but experts recognize the deep, abstract structure. ”
“The second way to get around the limited size of working memory is to practice procedures so many times that they become automatic.”
“So, experts save room in working memory through acquiring extensive, functional background knowledge, and by making mental procedures automatic.”
How Can We Get Students to Think Like Experts?
“What was singular was their capacity for sustained work. Great scientists are almost always workaholics.”
OK well that explain a few things... here I thought i worked too much because I was behind all the time. Turns out I'm a workaholic (hehehe).
“Great scientists have incredible persistence, and their threshold for mental exhaustion is very high.”
“A number of researchers have endorsed what has become known as the “ten-year rule”: one can’t become an expert in any field in less than ten years, be it physics, chess, golf, or mathematics.”
https://expertadvantage.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/ericsson-accumulated-deliberate-practice.jpg
Malcom Glawell's book Outliers is a really great book in this area of more practice leads to greater achievement. I'm seriously thinking about adding this book to my class to get students to understand it takes a LOT of hard work to achieve great things.
“There’s nothing magical about a decade; it just seems to take that long to learn the background knowledge and to develop the automaticity that I’ve been talking about in this chapter. ”
If this is generally accepted knowledge, then why do "people" (i.e. the higher up in the faculty/administration) think it's OK not to teach technology skills in college when a) technology is consistently changing and b) students don't have 10 years experience using technology as a tool not just for entertainment.
Implications for the Classroom
Students Are Ready to Comprehend but Not to Create Knowledge
“Drawing a distinction between knowledge understanding and knowledge creation may help.“
"Experts not only understand their field, they also add new knowledge to it.”
"Again, the goal is to provide students with some understanding of how others create knowledge rather than to ask students to engage in activities of knowledge creation.”
Activities That Are Appropriate for Experts May at Times Be Appropriate for Students, but Not Because They Will Do Much for Students Cognitively
“Assignments that demand creativity may also be motivating.”
Don’t Expect Novices to Learn by Doing What Experts Do
“Whenever you see an expert doing something differently from the way a nonexpert does it, it may well be that the expert used to do it the way the novice does it, and that doing so was a necessary step on the way to expertise.”
No comments:
Post a Comment