Implications for the Classroom

Students Are Ready to Comprehend but Not to Create Knowledge

After reading this chapter you should have a good idea of how mathematicians, scientists, and historians differ from novices. They have worked in their field for years, and the knowledge and experience they have accumulated enables them to think in ways that are not open to the rest of us. Thus, trying to get your students to think like them is not a realistic goal. Your reaction may well be, "Well, sure. I never really expected that my students are going to win the Nobel Prize! I just want them to understand some science." That's a worthy goal, and it is very different from the goal of students thinking like scientists.

Drawing a distinction between knowledge understanding and knowledge creation may help. Experts create. For example, scientists create and test theories of natural phenomena, historians create narrative interpretations of historical events, and mathematicians create proofs and descriptions of complex patterns. Experts not only understand their field, they also add new knowledge to it.

A more modest and realistic goal for students is knowledge comprehension. A student may not be able to develop his own scientific theory, but he can develop a deep understanding of existing theory. A student may not be able to write a new narrative of historical fact, but she can follow and understand a narrative that someone else has written.

Student learning need not stop there. Students can also understand how science works and progresses, even if they are not yet capable of using that process very well or at all. For example, students could learn about landmark findings in science as a way of understanding science as a method of continual refinement of theory rather than as the "discovery" of immutable laws. Students might read different accounts of the Constitutional Convention as a way of learning how historians develop narratives. Again, the goal is to provide students with some understanding of how others create knowledge rather than to ask students to engage in activities of knowledge creation.

Activities That Are Appropriate for Experts May at Times Be Appropriate for Students, but Not Because They Will Do Much for Students Cognitively

I've said that a key difference between the expert and the well-informed amateur lies in the expert's ability to create new knowledge versus the amateur's ability to understand concepts that others have created. Well, what happens if you ask students to create new knowledge? What will be the result if you ask them to design a scientific experiment or analyze a historical document? Nothing terrible is going to happen, obviously. The mostly likely outcome will be that they won't do it very well; for reasons I've described in this chapter and in Chapter Two, a lot of background knowledge and experience are required.

But a teacher might have other reasons for asking students to do these things. For example, a teacher might ask her students to interpret the results of a laboratory experiment not with the expectation that she is teaching them to think like scientists but instead to highlight a particular phenomenon or to draw their attention to the need for close observation of an experiment's outcome.

Assignments that demand creativity may also be motivating. A music class may well emphasize practice and proper technique, but it may also encourage students to compose their own works simply because the students would find it fun and interesting. Is such practice necessary or useful in order for students to think like musicians? Probably not. Beginning students do not yet have the cognitive equipment in place to compose, but that doesn't mean they won't have a great time doing so, and that may well be reason enough

The same is true of science fairs. I've judged a lot of science fairs, and the projects are mostly—not to put too fine a point on it—terrible. The questions that students try to answer are usually lousy, because they aren't really fundamental to the field; and students don't appear to have learned much about the scientific method, because their experiments are poorly designed and they haven't analyzed their data sensibly. But some of the students are really proud of what they have done, and their interest in science or engineering has gotten a big boost. So although the creative aspect of the project is usually a flop, science fairs seem to be good bets for motivation.

The bottom line is that posing to students challenges that demand the creation of something new is a task beyond their reach—but that doesn't mean you should never pose such tasks. Just keep in mind what the student is or is not getting out of it.

Don't Expect Novices to Learn by Doing What Experts Do

When considering how to help students gain a skill, it seems only natural to encourage them to emulate someone who already knows how to do what you want them to do. Thus, if you want students to know how to read a map, find someone who is a good map reader and start training them in the methods this person uses. As logical as this technique sounds, it can be a mistake because, as I've emphasized, there are significant differences between how experts and novices think. Consider this example: How should we teach reading? Well, if you look at expert readers, when they read they make fewer eye movements than unskilled readers do. So it could be said that the better way to read is by recognizing entire words, and that students should be taught that method from the start, because that's how good readers read. Indeed, an older educational psychology textbook on my shelf cites the eye movement data shown in Figure 8 and makes exactly this argument.⁹

Such arguments should be viewed with suspicion. In this case we know from other data that expert readers can take in whole words at a time, but they didn't necessarily start off reading that way. In the same way expert tennis players spend most of their time during a match thinking about strategy and trying to anticipate what their opponent will do. But we shouldn't tell novices to think about strategy; novices need to think about footwork and about the basics of their strokes.

Whenever you see an expert doing something differently from the way a nonexpert does it, it may well be that the expert used to do it the way the novice does it, and that doing so was a necessary step on the way to expertise. Ralph Waldo Emerson put it more artfully: "Every artist was first an amateur."¹⁰