People become experts in something by actively doing it rather than by preparing for it
Schools have extrapolated form chess professionals that storing information into long-term memory ahead of time will prepare them for expertise later. However, there is a major problem with this approach, which even those of us who lack the massive amount of background knowledge necessary to be designated an ‘expert’ might have noticed. Chess players are highly adept and have enormous amounts of background knowledge about chess. The theory says that this is why they are adept and if we could teach children lots of background knowledge, they would become experts, too.
Except that the way to learn to play chess is to actually do it. It’s a process of playing, testing strategies, learning from others, perhaps reading books or websites. But never involves of sitting in a classroom learning lots of chess facts and strategies and then waiting for the day in the future when they will be deemed professional enough to actually start to play chess. The endpoint for those expert chess players might be lots of chess configurations in their long-term memory, but most of those they will have worked out as they played. They will make sense to them because they deeply understand the structure of the game of chess. The information might not even be available to them verbally, but be coded in Implicit memory.
References
- Fisher, Naomi. (2021). Changing Our Minds Chapter 2. Learning – Scientists, Processors and Rats (p. 48). London, UK: Robinson Publishing.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Politics / Education / Psychology Status:☀️