Week 3 Memo:
This week the two studies we were assigned to read focused
on expert versus novice thinking. In the Chase paper, the authors repeated work
previously done with chess players. They used several levels of chess players,
ranging from grand master to beginner and found that the grand masters were
better able to reproduce chess piece position in every case, except where the
pieces were placed randomly. This was identified as chunking. The experts were
better because of their familiarity with placement. The more familiar you are
with something the more likely you are to be able to reproduce it. At first, I
thought this study seemed silly. Why do we care? But after reading it, I
started to understand that they weren’t really interested in chess.
Understanding how our brains work and how we learn, as well as the differences between
immature vs mature brains, is incredibly relevant for a teacher to understand.
How new information is presented to a student can have a large impact on how well
the information is retained and understood. Also, I think this paper touches on
the importance of repetition. Experts are experts because of practice and
familiarity. Implementing those techniques in the classroom is essential for
retention.
The Chi paper takes a different approach and looks at
experts and novices ability to solve physics problems. Basically they say that
experts analyze a problem and take cues from the problem to aid them in solving
it. This is very similar to the Chase paper. The experts has some advantage
brought about by familiarity with the subject. The schema, or principle
oriented knowledge structure, that the expert employs allows for identification
and classification of the type of problem. The novice would not have this
knowledge or know how to use it and are, therefore, less capable. Overall, I
think it was easier for me to grasp the chess comparison, however, by using
physics problems Chi et al. really focus on how students learn. How we, as
educators or scientists, present data is incredibly important for learning. If
you present something in a terrible way, the students are not going to learn it
and will probably not retain anything that is taught. Being an effective
teacher means understanding how students learn and I think, even though we don’t
understand everything, we have figured out how to study learning in very
effective ways.
Thank you for linking these two articles to applications in the classroom. I hadn't thought through how to do this, and your comments on it helped me out. I especially liked your comments on how the Chase paper emphasizes repetition. I think that many people view repetition as an outdated method, but I have found it to be a practical and beneficial technique for learning material. We should make sure students know the basically building blocks by memory, then they can use this framework to structure their "chunks."
ReplyDeleteI liked your comment about familiarity. Often science classes feel alien and foreign. Sometimes it's even hard to grasp the relationships between the different fields within science. Perhaps by focusing on what students might have already learned will not only help make our lessons more relatable, but also improve student ability to understand and remember core ideas and overarching principles. .
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