{"id":6315,"date":"2021-10-12T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-10-12T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/braindevs.net\/blog\/blog\/?p=6315"},"modified":"2022-10-23T14:24:10","modified_gmt":"2022-10-23T19:24:10","slug":"how-do-experts-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/how-do-experts-think\/","title":{"rendered":"How Do Experts Think?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Perhaps you’ve heard the saying: “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”<\/p>\n

It means, more or less,\u00a0we see what we’re trained to see<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

If I bring a problem to a plumber, she’ll think about it like a plumbing<\/em> problem. An economist, like an economics<\/em> problem. A general, a military<\/em> problem.<\/p>\n

What does research tell us about this insight? And, does that research give us guidance about teaching and learning?<\/p>\n

<\/h2>\n

The Geoscientists and the Balloon<\/h2>\n

A research team led by Dr. Micah Goldwater wanted to explore this topic<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So, they asked a few hundred people these questions:<\/p>\n

“A balloon floating is like _________ because _________.”<\/em><\/p>\n

“Catching a cold is like _________ because _________.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Those who answered the question fell into four distinct groups:<\/p>\n

Expert geoscientists — who had an MA or PhD in geoscience<\/p>\n

Intermediate geoscientists — who were studying geoscience<\/p>\n

Expert vision scientists –who had an MA or PhD in vision science<\/p>\n

Non-expert adults — who had not studied science in college<\/p>\n

Goldwater’s team wanted to know: how often would people offer\u00a0causal<\/em> analogies? “A balloon floating is like\u00a0hot water rising in a cold sea<\/em> because they result from the same underlying causal principle<\/em>.”<\/p>\n

Deeper still, they wanted to know how often people offer those causal analogies spontaneously<\/em>, and how often they need to be prompted<\/em> to do so. (The research details get tricky here, so I’m simplifying a bit.)<\/p>\n

Archimedes Catches a Cold<\/h2>\n

Sure enough, expert geoscientists\u00a0spontaneously<\/em> offered causal<\/em> analogies for the balloon question — because they have a relevant geoscientific rule, called “Archimedes’ principle.”<\/p>\n

However, expert vision scientists did not spontaneously give causal analogies, because their branch of science does not include a causally relevant analogy.<\/p>\n

And neither group spontaneously proposed many causal analogies for “catching a cold,” because neither field builds on underlying relevant principles.<\/p>\n

This finding — along with other parts of Goldwater’s research — suggests this conclusion:\u00a0hammers typically see nails<\/em>.<\/p>\n

That is: experts spontaneously perceive,\u00a0<\/strong>contemplate<\/strong>,\u00a0and understand\u00a0<\/b><\/span>new information (“floating balloons”) through core principles of their field (“Archimedes’ principle”) — even though balloons don’t come up very often in geoscience<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Teaching Implications: Bad News, and Good<\/h2>\n

As I visit schools, I often hear teachers say “I want my students to\u00a0think like historians<\/em>” or “think like scientists<\/em>” or “think like artists<\/em>.” To accomplish this goal, some pedagogies encourage us to give students “expert tasks.”<\/p>\n

Alas, Goldwater’s findings (and LOTS of other research) suggest that this bar might be MUCH too high. It takes years — decades? — to “think like a researcher” or “think like a coach.”<\/p>\n

Even people with PhD’s in vision science don’t think causally about floating balloons unless explicitly prompted to do so.<\/p>\n

As Dan Willingham writes in\u00a0Why Don’t Students Like School?<\/em>, “cognition early in training is fundamentally different from cognition late in training” (127).<\/p>\n

This message often feels like bad news.<\/p>\n

All those authentic tasks we’ve been giving students might not have the results we had hoped for. It’s extraordinarily difficult for students to think like a mathematician, even when we give them expert math tasks.<\/p>\n

However, I see glimmers of hope in this gloomy conclusion.<\/p>\n

My students (I teach high school English) won’t think like literary critics<\/em>. However, I think they can and do become “experts” in much smaller sub-sub-sub-fields of English. (Warning: I’m about to switch from\u00a0summarizing research<\/em> to\u00a0speculating about a classroom anecdote<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

When Comedy is Tragic<\/h2>\n

For instance: I recently gave my students a fairly complex definition of “comedy and tragedy.” This section of the unit required LOTS of direct instruction and LOTS of retrieval practice. After all: I’m the expert, and they’re novices.<\/p>\n

My students then read a short story by Jhumpa Lahiri called “A Temporary Matter.” I asked them to look for elements of comedy and tragedy in that story.<\/p>\n

Not only did they find those elements, they SPONTANEOUSLY pointed out Lahiri’s daring: she uses traditionally comic<\/em> symbols (food, music, celebration, childbirth) as indicators of tragedy<\/em> (“death and banishment”).<\/p>\n

And, since then, they’ve been pouncing on tragic\/comic symbolism, and other potentially innovative uses thereof.<\/p>\n

These students aren’t (yet) expert literary critics. But on this very narrow topic, they starting to be flexible and inventive — a sign of budding expertise.<\/p>\n

As long as I have a suitably narrow definition, a focused kind of pre-expertise is indeed a reasonable and achievable goal.<\/p>\n

In Sum<\/h2>\n

Like lots of research in the field of “novices and experts,” Goldwater’s study warns us that experts really do think differently from novices<\/em>, and that true expertise takes years to develop<\/em>.<\/p>\n

However, that insight shouldn’t scare us away from well-defined tasks that build up very local subsections of developing expertise. Our students aren’t yet capital-E Experts. And, the right-sized educational goals can move them towards ultimate Expertise.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Perhaps you’ve heard the saying: “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” It means, more or less,\u00a0we see what we’re trained to see. If I bring a problem to a plumber, she’ll think about it like a plumbing problem. An economist, like an economics problem. A general, a military problem. What does research tell […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":6318,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[41],"class_list":["post-6315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lb-blog","tag-experts-and-novices"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6315"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6794,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6315\/revisions\/6794"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.braindevs.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}