experts and novices

When do novices become experts?

2020-02-17T19:59:30+00:00February 17th, 2018|psychology|

It's a fairly well established principle of cognitive science that experts and novices think differently. Being aware of these differences can make a big difference to teachers. For instance, if we assume that most children in most situations are likely to begin as novices this could help point the way to more effective instruction. Here's a summary of some of the main differences between experts and novices. One of the most interesting findings to come out of the research into Cognitive Load Theory is the finding that experts and novices both experience cognitive overload, but experience it differently. Novices, by definition, [...]

A Novice→Expert Model of Learning

2018-01-07T15:09:36+00:00June 21st, 2017|learning|

Every artist was first an amateur. Ralph Waldo Emerson One of the best understood principles of cognitive psychology is that novices learn and think differently to experts. These labels are domain-specific, not person-specific; I can be an expert at particle physics whilst still being a novice at evolutionary biology. Or skateboarding. Similarly, you could be an expert skateboarder whilst knowing little of nothing about theatre design or ancient Tibetan languages. What this means is that we're all novices at something, and many of us will be experts in at least one domain. To demonstrate how you think differently as an expert [...]

20 psychological principles for teachers #4 Context

2015-06-29T14:55:29+01:00May 28th, 2015|psychology|

This is the fourth in a series of posts unpicking the Top 20 Principles From Psychology for Teaching And Learning. In this post I investigate Principle 4: "Learning is based on context, so generalizing learning to new contexts is not spontaneous but instead needs to be facilitated." The fact that learning occurs in context is well established. Our ability to retrieve information is heavily context dependent - we link it to related subject matter, times, places, people and feelings. I've written before about the variation effect and troubling finding that students often struggle to transfer what they have been taught from one [...]

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