“How can we expect to train the next generation of scientists if we are not training them to do what scientists actually do?” This sounds sensible, even insightful, but students are not cognitively capable of doing what scientists (or historians, writers, mathematicians, etc.) do. It’s not just that students know less than experts. As I’ll describe, what experts know is organized differently in their memory.
Even the greatest scientists do not think like experts when they start out. They think like novices. It’s not possible to think like a scientist or a historian without a great deal of training. Does this mean we shouldn’t ask students to write a poem or conduct a scientific experiment? Of course not. (Some great examples and ideas for history can be found at the National History Education Clearninghouse). But we should understand the difference between the thought processes of experts and novices.
Accomplished mathematicians, scientists, and historians have worked in their field for years, and the knowledge and experience they have accumulated enables them to think in ways that are not open to the rest of us. Thus, trying to get your students to think like them is not a realistic goal. “Well, sure,” you might be thinking. ” I never really expected that my students are going to win the Nobel Prize! I just want them to understand some science.” That’s a worthy goal, but it is very different than the goal of students thinking like experts.
Real scientists are experts. They have worked at science for forty hours (or more) each week for years. Those years of practice make a qualitative–not quantitative–difference in the way they think compared to how even a well-informed amateur thinks. It will surely not surprise you to learn that experts have lots of background knowledge in their area of expertise. But the expert mind has another edge over the rest of us. The information in long-term memory is organized differently than the information in working memory. We can generalize by saying that experts think abstractly. When confronted with a classroom management problem, for example, novice teachers typically jump right into trying to solve the problem, but experts first seek to define the problem, gathering more information if necessary. Thus expert teachers have knowledge of different types of classroom management problem. Not surprisingly, expert teachers more often solve these problems in ways that address root causes and not just the behavioral incident. For example, an expert is more likely than a novice to make a permanent change in seating assignments.
Seeing things abstractly enables experts to home in on important details among a flood of information, to produce solutions that are always sensible and consistent (even if they are not always right), and to show some transfer of their knowledge to related fields. In addition, many of the routine tasks that experts perform have become automatic through practice.
Sounds great. How can we teach students to do that? Unfortunately, the answer to this question is not exactly cheering. The only path to expertise, as far as anyone knows, is practice. One other interesting factor: Great scientists are almost always workaholics. They have incredible persistence, and their threshold for mental exhaustion is very high.
So if we can’t get students to think like experts what’s a reasonable goal? Drawing a distinction between knowledge understanding and knowledge creation may help. Experts create. For example, scientists create and test theories of natural phenomena, historians create narrative interpretations of historical events, and mathematicians create proofs and descriptions of complex patterns. Experts not only understand their field, they also add new knowledge to it. A more modest and realistic goal for students is knowledge comprehension. Student may not be able to develop their own scientific theory, but they can develop a deep understanding of existing theory. A student may not be able to write a new narrative of historical fact, but she can follow and understand a narrative that someone else has written.
Tomorrow: How can I help slow learners?
Daniel T. Willingham is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author of Why Students Don’t Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What it Means for the Classroom (Jossey-Bass, 2009) from which this post was adapted.