K12 Underpinnings

What do we know about learning, and how should it drive what we do for kids? Surprisingly, whether in the textbook publishing industry, or in the preparation of teachers to teach , there is very limited use of what's already known about cognitive science.

A reasonable starting place for anyone making a complex journey is to ask, "Where are we going?" Sadly, even that obvious question is not often asked, or answered, by adults guiding the journey of kids through learning: "What do experts end up knowing? What does expertise in a domain look like?" At K12, we’re working to understand where experts wind up to help build courses that take kids in that direction. This is the first of two posts looking at expert-novice research, and how we apply it at K12.

It turns out cognitive scientists have been studying what makes experts different from novices for more than 30 years. There's detailed work based on mathematics, medicine, history, physics, and many more areas, all of which seem to suggest certain common principles of expertise:

• Experts' knowledge is domain-specific, and highly structured into patterns.
• Much expert knowledge comes into play with very little conscious effort.
• Expertise requires lots of practice, as well as targeted teaching and thinking about underlying structures and principles.
• Experts themselves are not necessarily the ideal teachers.

We'll look at the first two principles in this article, and the remaining two (along with some references) in the next issue.

Expertise is domain-specific and highly structured
In spite of the popularity of "critical thinking skills" courses, cognitive scientists have found that expertise in a domain does not use a generic problem-solving ability that's unrelated to the subject matter. Instead, expertise appears to be highly discipline-specific.

It's also clear from cognitive science work that expertise is not mere recall of facts. Experts have the ability to recognize and think about a situation using organized structures combining a wide array of specific insights, facts, and principles that apply to new problems and ideas. These chunks (sometimes called "schema") are unique to a discipline, and in many cases are wired deeply into the brain, even showing up as changes in how parts of the brain fire off in response to, say, visual inputs. Chess masters, for example, literally "see" the board differently. Physicists looking at an inclined-plane problem approach and organize the information completely differently than novices do, before they even begin to consciously think about the problem.

Because each domain has its own schema, K12 has done its own research work to tease out the fundamental "big ideas" (major organizing categories and principles) within major areas of the curriculum: physics, chemistry, history, mathematics through algebra, and more.

This lets us "see," for each new course we build, where expertise needs to be headed.

Expertise means rapid, fluent performance
Think about the difference between you reading the word EXIT and a five year old who’s just barely starting to read. Or an adult whose first language is Chinese, but is now learning the English language and alphabet. For you, the full word EXIT (not each letter alone) simply appears in your conscious mind, along with a wide variety of associations—danger, use in theaters, freeways, etc. However, for a child or an adult just learning our alphabet, you can hear them struggle with the sounds: There are multiple ways the "E" and the "I" can sound, "X" is pretty unfamiliar as a letter, etc., so they stumble along for a bit until they recognize the word (if they do).

Most of you reading this are, indeed, expert readers. That doesn’t mean you don’t occasionally stumble on a word, or wonder what a phrase means. But it does mean that much of what you do when you read happens outside of your conscious "working memory"—the part of your mind that is always talking to itself.

Experts in anything have vast arrays of processing that happen subconsciously—and it happens fast. This provides fuel for the very hard-working conscious mind, which takes what’s on offer from all these subconscious systems, and tries to meet complex goals or questions using the array of ideas and options delivered by them.

Part of what K12 is designed to do for you is to build up that kind of rapid, fluent capability over time, especially in areas like math and language arts, where new skills and ideas are best built on what’s been truly mastered before.