I Can Figure It Out!
I want to begin this post by quoting from my 2016 book, Unforgettable: Enabling Deep and Durable Learning.
The reality emerging from cognitive science is that each student must build his own understanding of an idea through a process of logically justifying the idea into his existing conceptual framework. The logical justification is aided by the process of disciplined systematic questioning. . . . One school of thought in cognitive science says that our brains index an idea as a logical answer to a question. (pp. 9-10)
This season is all about helping your child thrive in an unfavorable educational environment. As you’ll see below, many defend the traditional educational environment as an accommodation of intrinsic cognitive limitations among young learners in general. I don’t think those limitations are real. Rather, they are the product of defective curriculum and instruction.
The workaround I’m going to highlight here is the need to motivate your child with “disciplined systematic questioning.” Young learners often have trouble articulating questions when they are struggling. Most adults have never been taught how to ask good questions that are intriguing and that motivate thinking rather than fact retrieval. If there is one place to concentrate your own development as your child’s learning coach, questioning is that place.
Chapter 8 of my book, “Ask, Don’t Tell” is the appropriate place to develop specific questions about the nine components of thinking that are cited in the podcast (those nine come from chapter 3, “Thinking Like an Expert” in my book).
One aspect of Daniel Willingham’s argument that students are not capable of thinking like an expert that I was unable to address in my podcast is his argument that,
Experts not only understand their field [which he acknowledges students can do], they also add new knowledge to it. (p. 159, emphasis mine)
Adding new knowledge to their field is a very artificial criterion for expertise. Willingham spends a good deal of time talking about medicine. It should be obvious that most physicians don’t create new medical knowledge. That’s not what patients expect. They expect competence in diagnosing and treating disease. They expect their physician will keep up with developments in the field. A physician who creates new knowledge is an anomaly—and exception.
Many master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation make only minor contributions to the field. Not only do many acknowledged experts fail to create new knowledge; some neophytes do create it. Undergraduate research is common for science majors. Most is fairly routine, but not all of it. Some of it creates new knowledge that is later developed by experts in the field. An example in biology is the Hershey-Chase experiment which in 1952 helped establish the role of DNA in heredity. Martha Chase had only a bachelor’s degree she earned in 1950. She was a research assistant to Alfred Hershey when this work was done. She began graduate school in 1959 and finished her PhD in microbiology in 1964.
Wikipedia. Creative Commons
The bottom line is that there is nothing cognitively unique about expertise.
What follows is an approximate transcript of the podcast, “I can figure it out!”
Intro:
“The spirit of critical thinking says, ‘there is a logic to this, and I can figure it out.”
So said the late Richard W. Paul. In today’s podcast we’ll explore the idea that every domain of human thought—every subject—at its root makes sense. When something makes sense, you can understand it and not just memorize it. When something makes sense, you can use it in practical ways.
I believe these things. This is the heart of my view of how learning works. I wrote a whole book about this very thing. Hang on for a stimulating twenty minutes or so as I take on a doubter, cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham.
See especially Chapter 3, “Thinking Like An Expert.”
Podcast:
Cognitive psychologist, Daniel Willingham in Ch. 6 of his book, Why Don’t Students Like School? asks a question and then challenges the thinking behind the question:
“What can be done to get students to think like scientists, historians, and mathematicians? This protest against school curricula has a certain plausibility….But a flawed assumption underlies the logic, namely that students are cognitively capable of doing what scientists or historians do.” (p. 143)
Students are not “cognitively capable.” That’s a strong challenge to my view that teaching should always be done within a way of thinking. Biology is a way of thinking, history is a way of thinking, mathematics is a way of thinking. Certainly those types of thinking are very different in some respects, but underlying those differences are fundamental similarities.
Teach a Way of Thinking
When I say a way of thinking I mean each way shares nine components. At its core a way of thinking is to adopt a point of view with a particular motivation to answer certain kinds of questions. To think like a historian is to look at the past to try to construct an explanatory narrative to answer a historical question. Such a question might be “what factors led to Germany precipitating a second world war only 21 years after the first world war ended with its’ defeat?
A way of thinking also speaks to the assumptions practitioners make as well as what their fact base, and framework of ideas consist of. A biologist assumes basic principles of chemistry such as atomic structure. This is an area of active questioning for a chemist, but not for a biologist. The fact base for a biologist includes the reality that life is organic, that is, it is carbon-based. The ideas that enable the answering of biological questions include the cell theory (all living things are composed of cells and the smallest form of life is a single cell) and the central dogma (that DNA controls life through the manufacture of RNAs, most of which enable the production of proteins).
The final components of a way of thinking include explanation as well as immediate logical implications and longer-range applications or consequences of certain actions or processes. If we flip back to historical thinking, historians will answer the question about the short interval between the two world wars in terms of social forces, political leaders, economic conditions, etc. That’s what it means to explain if you are a historian. Logical implications might include the way the military contributes to totalitarianism. Consequences of authoritarian regimes might be diminished economic output, loss of personal freedom, etc.
Nine components of thinking according to Unforgettable: Enabling Deep and Durable Learning:
Core:
Point-of-view
Motivation for the thinking
Questions appropriate to the thinking
Working Layer of Thinking:
Assumptions
Fact base (information)
Ideas (concepts)
Output:
Explanation
Implications (inferences)—short-term
Consequences (applications)—long-term
These nine components come into play in any subject matter when you are thinking as opposed to trying merely to absorb assertions. They are equally true of novices just starting out and experts with decades of experience. Most thinking within working memory consists of information from sensory channels interacting with ideas pulled up from long-term memory. Again, this is true of raw beginners, and it is true of seasoned practitioners. Certainly, the fact base and the framework of ideas are much larger for experts, but the process of building ideas and logically linking them together (including chunk formation) is the same for everyone.
With this background, Willingham’s cognitive principle #6,
Cognition early in training is fundamentally different from cognition late in training. (p. 144, emphasis mine)
is a disruptive proposition. Willingham says the assumption that there is continuity in cognitive processes from early to late in learning is “flawed.” He maintains, “students are [not] cognitively capable of doing what scientists or historians do.”
Willingham doubles down,
It’s not just that students know less than experts; it’s also that what they know is organized differently in their memory. Expert scientists did not think like experts-in-training when they started out. (p. 144, emphasis mine)
That’s quite an assertion. So, what are these differences in cognition early and late in intellectual development? He references a flawed traditional science curriculum on p. 144 as evidence of what students are cognitively unable to do. We don’t ask students to actually do science, because they can’t—seems to be the message. In other words, the traditional curriculum is merely an accommodation to a cognitive limitation. As a cognitive psychologist, he should know better. This is not about fundamentally limited cognitive processes in beginners. Rather, it is about a fundamentally flawed curriculum.
When immersed in a curriculum rooted in answering compelling questions through purposeful systematic building of a fact and concept base, students do learn to think like scientists. They are embedded in a junior version of the real game. Their thinking can be expert-like, but it will take perhaps 10 years of effortful study continually tackling challenges that are just beyond their current competence before they are in striking distance of true expertise.
I would be the last to denigrate expertise and put it in reach of virtually anyone. My alarm bells go off when I hear people with almost no science knowledge talk about “doing their own research” about raw milk, or vaccinations, or the value of handwashing—don’t even get me started! (For a glimpse you could go to my first season podcast “Who Needs Experts?” recorded in the early days of the COVID pandemic).
Expert-like is enough for laypeople to try out the authentic thinking of a scientist, historian, economist, etc. Learning within a way of thinking adopts a point of view with a motivation to answer the kinds of questions an expert answers. Certainly not with the same depth of understanding of an expert, at least not at the outset. In the process of working within the framework of a way of thinking students should learn intellectual humility—they aren’t equally good at all types of thinking. If all of their school subjects are taught as ways of thinking, students are embedded in different points of view with different assumptions, different questions to answer using different explanatory systems. In truth, most significant problems involve contributions from multiple viewpoints (types of expertise). The development of interdisciplinary concepts can lead to new insights. It leads to well-roundedness. Well-rounded means improved ability to interact productively with those who aren’t like you.
One of the areas that never attracted me is history. My lack of interest was due to the emphasis on names and dates and other facts to memorize for a test and then forget for the rest of my life (or so it appeared to me). It was like smelling salts when a friend who is a historian told me she was not big on names and dates either. She was upset at the way history was taught because it misrepresented what it means to think like a historian, and it killed interest in most students.
While history doesn’t explain like science, it does seek to construct a causal narrative. While history cannot repeat controlled experiments as we expect in science, it can look for parallels between different events in the past and even developing situations in the present. In that sense it seeks to predict. History is not science, but it seeks to answer questions that science is not motivated or equipped to answer. Questions that humanity would like someone to try to answer!
Gregory House, MD. Wikipedia. Creative Commons
One of the illustrations Willingham uses to establish the differences between how novices think and how experts think is from the TV show, House. Gregory House, MD is a diagnostician par excellence. He is also the embodiment of Willingham’s curiously constrained view of what constitutes expertise. If you can’t match wits with Dr. House, you can’t think medically. That eliminates not just novices, but virtually all of House’s colleagues.
Willingham adoringly says,
House can access the right information from memory with great speed and accuracy. It’s information that the more junior doctors have in their memories but just don’t think of. (p. 147)
If junior doctors have the same information as House, how did it get there if as Willingham says elsewhere, “experts actually think in ways that are qualitatively different [from novices].” (p. 158)
Expertise is in the eye of the beholder.
In many families with no other reference point nurses are medical oracles. Junior doctors are treated as experts by many patients they treat, just less experienced experts. The reality is that the information dense medical school curriculum is to blame for their limited diagnostic skills, not their cognitive limitations as mere junior doctors.
Willingham speaks of having the right Information as a doctor, but information is quite different from ideas. We’ve talked about this multiple times this season. This lack of clarity plagues much of cognitive psychology. The brain stores ideas, not information per se. Knowledge is justifiable belief.
During grand rounds with senior medical staff physicians-in-training experience a curriculum that finally gets around to an emphasis on logic and problem-solving that should have been core to increasing proficiency in learning to think like a physician. Junior physicians haven’t been adequately prepared for this transition.
Willingham observes,
Beginning medical students can recognize patterns of symptoms they’ve memorized, but they don’t think functionally, so when they encounter an unfamiliar pattern, they aren’t sure how to interpret it. (p. 152)
Once again this does not point to a cognitive limitation that invariably accompanies beginner status. They don’t know how to think functionally (in terms of cause-effect or what we call physiology), not because they can’t but because it isn’t an emphasis in the early medical school curriculum. It could be and it should be, but it isn’t.
I’m still looking for Willingham to specify exactly what is fundamentally different between the cognition of beginners and that of experts. Real cognitive limitations can’t be overcome by curriculum. But my life work with innovative curriculum has repeatedly shown me the contrary. When curriculum embeds students in answering compelling questions a discipline (a way of thinking) was invented to answer and if it scaffolds the systematic development of robust conceptual frameworks, novices make rapid progress that surprises and satisfies them. That’s what hundreds of my students mean when they say I taught them how to think. Specifically, I taught them how to think like a biologist, even if only for one semester.
Willingham defends a short list of cognitive attributes that he says distinguish expert thinking from that of novices. Among these attributes are the ability to determine the important from the relatively unimportant, they ability to think in terms of cause-effect rather than mere descriptions, and the ability to generate hypotheses and test them.
Willingham summarizes by saying,
We can generalize by saying that experts think abstractly. [He says] Remember that in Chapter 4 I said that people find abstract ideas hard to understand because they focus on the surface structure, not the deep structure. (p. 149)
If Willingham were consistent with his thesis of a profound discontinuity between the cognition of neophytes and that of experts, he would have said abstraction is out of reach of newbies because of intrinsic cognitive limitations. He didn’t say that. He said “abstract ideas are hard to understand because [the novice] focuses on the surface structure.
Abstraction is always created from the concrete
Focus can be changed by what the curriculum prioritizes. As I developed in podcast #4 this season, abstraction is always created from the concrete, and we do it all the time. Concepts are abstractions. Novices who are not thinking conceptually have only a welter of information (surface orientation) and it doesn’t have much structure. Concepts, however, exist in interconnection with each other. Conceptual organization is how we think. That’s what instruction needs to focus on. All the attributes of expert thinking Willingham identifies are within the cognitive range of newcomers; it is only a difference of proficiency. No one should argue that novices are just as capable as experts; 10 years of practice counts. However, no one should argue as Willingham does that novices are cognitively incapable of thinking like an expert.
Image by ai subarasiki from Pixabay
What frustrates me most about Willingham’s writing is that he waffles at the end of his arguments. We’ve seen that earlier this season. He equivocates in this chapter also.
The last major heading of the chapter is unwarranted by his argument. He asks,
How can we get students to think like experts? (p. 153)
What? He’s been arguing that can’t happen.
Now he says, “The key ingredient to becoming an expert is extended practice.” (p. 158)
Practice what? You practice what you’re capable of, not what you’re unable to do. How do we bridge the hypothetical gap he set-up when he said, “what [students] know is organized differently in their memory. Expert scientists did not think like experts-in-training when they started out.” (p. 144)
As the chapter closes Willingham imagines dialog with those he has failed to convince:
[You may say, ‘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. (p. 158, emphasis kept)
My response is that science is a process, not a product. Have you heard of the stereotypical “scientific method?” That’s shorthand for scientific thinking. To understand some science is to personally and individually construct the logical justification for an idea and to marshal key experimental evidence that supports it.
Willingham pats doubters on the head:
A more modest and realistic goal for students is knowledge comprehension. (p. 159, emphasis kept)
You can’t have knowledge without comprehension! Knowledge is justifiable belief. It is only in the justification that you show true comprehension.
A few sentences later, Willingham concedes,
Students can also understand how science works and progresses, even if they are not yet capable of using that process very well… (p. 159, emphasis kept)
Not doing it very well is a far cry from not having the cognitive capacity to do it. Expertise grows by degrees over time. It is developmental and continuous. There is no momentous cognitive discontinuity that stands as a developmental obstacle along the path to expertise.
Outro:
For many of you this podcast will land just before or during your spring break. I’m going to take one too. The next episode will appear in your feed on April 26 as we move toward the conclusion of this season.
We’ll discuss Willingham’s Cognitive Principle #7: “Children are more alike than different in terms of learning.” Willingham has a very strong position on learning styles and I find his work convincing.
I’d love to hear from you with questions or suggestions for podcast topics. Go to my website deepanddurable.com to contact me.
See you soon!
Here’s an interesting story of Bill Gates’ development of expertise. You’ll see that practice was a component, but that there was nothing profoundly different about the early years of his development as a coder.