So I’m just starting on Accelerated Expertise and my god is this a heavy lift.
I’m going to leave these book screenshots here and see if anyone picks up on the bombshell implications.
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- Teaching simplified concepts and then progressively complexifying is bad.
- Recall memory doesn't help with inferential understanding/advanced knowledge acquisition.
- So spaced repetition recall of facts are bad! (You need to promote 'adaptive schema assembly'.)
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- Storehouse model of memory is bad (fact memorisation, practice + immediate feedback — bad)
- Cognitive load theory is true but not useful (experts operate with distractions).
- 'Learning advances (only?) when flawed mental models are replaced, stable when model is refined'
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- 'Advanced learning is promoted by emphasising the interconnectedness of multiple cases and concepts along multiple dimensions, and use of multiple highly organised representations.' -> holy shit.
I might need to rethink what I know about expertise acquisition.
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Word of warning if you want to read this: this was written for the Department of Defence, and is intended for other org psychologists and military training program designers. It assumes you have a background in existing expertise research.
It is not written for the layperson.
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The context (as I understand it) is more “you’ve spent years developing training programs that accelerate expertise acquisition for various military/org/business applications for us, please tell us what you know before the knowledge vanishes with you.”
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Is there a specific example of how to learn from this book? Seems to contradict learning how to learn
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Yes but I haven’t reached those chapters yet. (First few chapters are, in true academic fashion, a lit review).
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We'll see ;-) The connections aren't useful if they are spurious, and a novice is more likely to produce spurious connections than an expert.
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This reads like a capsule description of what it is that good teachers do. So it's plausible. Looking forward to your summary!
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Oh yeah, that aligns with our intuition for sure. It's very much not what any primary school methodology in common use is trying to do, although Montessori has some adjacent ideas (teaching mental models through exploration rather than explanation).
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The focus here seems to be on things that happen much later in people's lives, but it has clear implications for education policy.
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Indeed knowledge is most useful not in discrete pieces or understood only in the domain it ostensibly originates in, but contextualised in different ways. Like a kaleidoscope.
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