Monday, September 7, 2015

Week 3 Readings

      Our week 3 readings are centered  around two different topics with the same theme.  Both tips deal with what constitutes a master and what constitutes a novice.  Both go in depth to determine how these individuals  do what they do. Chase Simon is a critical review  taken from (Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa )on the ability of chess players to recreate patterns   and structures on the board  after only seeing them for a short span of time.

      The  hypothesis was stated to be that While novice players would spend more time analyzing what happens if a move goes awry ,while a master players search for the right moves . The  scope of the study is , Do slight mental adjustments such as Chunking and Rapid eye movements assist  in speeding up brain executing and functionality. Three players one master/intermediate/and beginner were all chosen as the sample size. All were given 28 positions delegated al through out a normal game play, some positions were randomly selected and rarely seen in actual game play and others were set at random. Three task were  chosen 1) Perception task  2) Memory Task  3) Reconstruction Accuracy.

      In the End is was found that  Chunking or smashing large bits of information together  was very useful in the beginning of a game the higher the skill level yet less effective as the game went on.  Chunking also adversely effected  short term memory span. The Individual players memorized and stuck with the combinations that they were most familiar and comfortable with and their eyes and brains seemed to light up when seeing these combinations almost as if using bread crumbs to find the way back home. 

  In the second reading by Chi ,Feltovich , and Glaser  analyzed ways expert and novice physics problem solvers investigate and group how to solve these problems based on their prior knowledge or presentation. The hypothesis called for when an individual see's a particular problem they will organize it in the way they would solve it and the particular topic it covers. 

Reaeserchers found that their were no differences in the number of categories produced by each group and that the majority of the problems were grouped correctly by each.  They also found that it took experts longer about 6 mins longer to sort these type of problems. This is where the differences began. The novices and the experts then grouped  problems with out solving in way of importance and  only 5 categories out of 14 were shared by both groups.

Novice  physics  grouped  problems on surface dependence and very shallow groupings because that is what was covered or addressed in the title. While the  experts classified problems due to Newtons three laws .  Both groups used what is know as a Schemata to solve the problems . Yet graduate students expressed a deeper way of thinking allowing them to then  break the problem down into smaller sub categories.


Both of the studies showed that individuals with a higher understanding of the material whether physics or chess were able to make deeper linkages in the material to assist them in problem solving.  As this transfers to education if we as future teachers can push children to think deeper about school work can we teach them to think deeper still about the world around them. A student might not on the surface understand force equals math times acceleration at surface value. Yet the will understand that to get to the end zone I have to use my legs to propel me through to the endzone and I have to beat all three people chasing me .  If we as teachers can do that everything else better test scores higher learning curves and student moral will all increase

1 comment:

  1. I like how you used the word linkages; it is these deep connections that are present in expert problem solving that we want to bring to the minds of novice students. You also brought up a good point that relevancy in the classroom; students might understand force as you said but in the context of a running problem. Relevant problems provide a great way to bridge gap between surface features and deep connections.

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