In this week’s readings, I was most struck by the relatively straightforward “How Experts Differ From Novices” chapter, particularly in its treatment of the clearly varied skill sets of experts and novices. Some examples, such as the comparison of veteran teachers with inexperienced teachers, seemed to paint a simple picture of a lack of understanding and pattern-recognition that would eventually be gained through experience. My expectation, and I am assuming the general expectation of others observing these two groups, is that the novices would learn how to recognize details and patterns over time and with practice. The same might be said of the master chess players and their “chunking” abilities in relation to novice players: they are seeing the same things as the beginners, but they are effortlessly and automatically recognizing, sorting, and prioritizing complex patterns within the game. With enough practice and guidance from the Experts, the Novices should eventually become Experts themselves, right?

The mention of “chunking” reminded me of my time working as an SAT and ACT teacher for a major standardized test prep company (there is a reading prompt on one of the practice tests about chess masters “chunking”), and how the approach of test prep classes diverges from this notion of turning Novices into Experts by emphasizing pattern recognition and de-emphasizing rote memorization of facts. In our classes, we teach that pattern recognition is far more useful on the test than memorizing facts, particularly because the ACT and SAT tests don’t actually test a student’s knowledge of facts. Being able to see patterns and blaze through problems almost by reflex is much more important than being able to provide complex proofs or even show one’s work.

At the same time, Expertise, as it is presented in the case of the historians and the history students, is very bad on these tests. Being able to get a bunch of multiple choice questions right is actually much more important than being able to really create an essay full of nuance and conjecture. Simply plugging numbers into formulas, as Novices apparently do, is much more effective on a standardized test than complex, overarching understanding of concepts. A physicist might go into the ACT Science section and try to understand the broad patterns and ideas behind the sections, and while that is all well and good in for a laboratory or PhD program, he would end up with a very bad score on the test because he would probably fail to recognize that specific understanding of scientific concepts is completely irrelevant there. The same goes for essay-writing skills, reading comprehension, and math on these tests: breadth of knowledge is much more important than depth on a standardized test; being an Expert in that context can actually be quite harmful.

I suppose, then, this brings up a question: should we always be striving to make Novices into Experts? Is being an Expert in this sense always a good thing? The academic value (or lack thereof) of standardized tests aside, is depth of understanding always superior to breadth? I am not a physicist, and I do not ever intend to be one; is my Novice understanding of a series of facts and formulas bad? Should I have been taught physics differently? There’s a value judgment here that I think needs to have attention brought to it, especially when we are using such loaded terms as “Expert” and “Novice”. Who doesn’t want to be an Expert instead of a Novice?