How People Learn

1
How People Learn

• Chapter 2
• How People Learn, National Research Council,
  Washington, D.C.. 2000

2
Key principles of experts knowledge

• Experts notice features and meaningful patterns
  of information.
• Experts have acquired a great deal of content
  knowledge.
• Experts knowledge is conditionalized on a set of
  circumstances.
• Experts can retrieve information with little
  effort.
• Experts may not be good at teaching others.
• Experts have varying levels of flexibility.

3
Meaningful Patterns of Information

• Short-term memory is enhanced when people are
  able to chunk information into familiar patterns.
• In a study with chess matches masters were more
  likely to recognize meaningful chess
  configurations and realize the strategic
  implications of these situations this allowed
  them to consider possible moves that were
  superior to others.

4
Context and Access to Knowledge

• Experts have a vast repertoire of knowledge that
  is relevant to their domain or discipline, but
  only a subset of that knowledge is relevant to
  any particular program.
• The concept of conditionalized knowledge also has
  important implications for assessment practices
  that provide feedback about learning.

5
Fluent Retrieval

• Peoples abilities to retrieve relevant knowledge
  can vary from being effortful to relatively
  effortless (fluent to automatic).
• Automatic and fluent retrieval are important
  characteristics for expertise.
• An important aspect of leaning is to become
  fluent at recognizing problems in particular
  domains.

6
Experts and Teaching

• Expertise in a particular domain does not
  guarantee that one is good at helping others
  learn it.
• Expertise sometimes can hurt teaching because
  experts struggle with understanding what is hard
  and easy for students.
• Expert teachers have acquired pedagogical content
  knowledge as well as content knowledge.

7
Adaptive Expertise

• An important question for educators is whether
  some ways of organizing knowledge are better at
  helping people remain flexible and adaptive to
  new situations than others.