Novice to Expert
One way to think about learning is in the context of progressing from a novice to an expert. Students generally start as novices in a topic, and, as educators, we try to move them to a greater level of expertise. Most students will not become experts, but we work to help them move along a continuum to gain proficiency.
How does expertise develop? “Expertise develops as learners accurately combine simple ideas into complex ones.” (Van Merrienboer & Sweller, 2010). This complexity is reflected in the schema held in our long-term memory (e.g. mental models, networks, circuits). For example, A toddler may call every animal a dog. The toddler has a very simple schema of what an animal and dog are – e.g. a non-human with four legs and fur. As the toddler gains experience, they begin to refine their schema for animals and types of animals. If they are paying close attention, they can distinguish dogs, cats, and cows.
However, it’s not enough just to build schema. “Well-designed instruction should not only encourage schema construction but should also support schema automation for those aspects that are consistent across tasks” (Van Merrienboer & Sweller, 2010). Expertise develops as learners accurately combine simple ideas into complex ones – and these schemata become automated. For example, at a glance, an expert can tell the breed of the dog and likely its age, physical health, and mental state. Automation is critical to expertise – to progress from knowing to doing, from performing once to performing regularly. Anders Ericsson is a researcher in the science of expertise. He studies how people become experts in various fields such as chess, music, and sports. Ericsson states that, “the key to improved mental performance of almost any sort is the development of mental structures that make it possible to avoid the limitations of short-term memory and deal effectively with large amounts of information at once” (Ericsson, 2016).
All of us have limited slots available to us in working memory. How many? Around four slots. But an expert can process much more information at once. How do experts overcome the limitations of short-term memory? What are these mental structures Ericsson refers to? It is believed that even a highly complex schema can be a single element in working memory allowing us to process more information at once (Van Merrienboer & Sweller, 2010). “The amount of information that can be held depends strongly on whether the items can be grouped into meaningful units, or “chunks.” That is, by clustering information together one can exploit pre-existing information about concepts already stored in long-term memory, which allows more efficient storage in working memory, presumably by reducing the number of active elements that must be maintained in working memory” (Eriksson, Vogel, Lansner, Bergström, & Nyberg, 2015). Working memory slots are a conceptual simplification. Another way to think about it is that we have a limited numb