Chapter 6: Getting students to think like experts

Why Don't Students Like School? by Daniel T. Willingham (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).

What's the secret to getting students to think like real scientists, mathematicians, and historians?

This is the chapter I alluded to in the introduction where Willingham teased us with the suggestion that we might NOT want to teach our students to "think like real scientists." He makes a good argument here, but it helps first to understand what that means and doesn't mean.

We do want our students to be able to think like experts. As a science teacher, I don't want students to just learn an encyclopedia of science facts - after all, "facts" (as we know them presently) are subject to change or modification. I want students to be open to new ideas, but "skeptical" in the sense of demanding evidence to support those ideas. This requires a deep understanding of how science works, how the physical world works, and what constitutes evidence in support of a claim.

I don't necessarily expect students to go so far as Willingham does in defining an expert as someone one who is capable of generating new knowledge in a given area of study. Of course that would be great if a student wants to enter a scientific or medical field, and I do need to think of the very real possibility that any one of my students might in fact move in that direction - indeed some already have. But ultimately it may not make any difference in terms of how I should teach students at the high school level.

The problem, as Willingham explains, is that thinking like an expert can only come about from years of experience and practice. The kind of thinking an expert engages in is qualitatively different from how novices think. Novices tend to focus first on the surface structure of problems, whereas experts can more readily determine the underlying deep structure of a problem and therefore come to a solution more quickly. In some cases "novices" (that's a relative term) may have extensive knowledge that is equal to or even surpasses experts, but that knowledge is poorly organized and less accessible.

Willingham uses the fictional television doctor House to illustrate the idea, which I will not try to summarize at length here. ( I do recommend watching an episode if you've never seen it). The key idea is that House does not necessarily know more than the medical students and residents around him. Instead he is able to focus in on the important details and ignore the irrelevant symptoms of sometimes bizarre and rare disorders. This expert way of thinking is essentially, as you might hope from a doctor, the scientific method, or more to the point, "hypothesis testing." For House, a set of symptoms suggests a tentative diagnosis, a hypothesis, which in turn leads to further testing to verify the hypothesis. If the test turns out negative, the hypothesis is discarded and a new hypothesis is generated. But the wrong hypothesis is useful because it brings up questions that may never have occurred to anyone before. Thus an initially wide and seemingly contradictory field of possibilities is narrowed and focused until the correct diagnosis is determined.

So why not just look at how experts like House solve problems and then teach students to think that way? Willingham says there is simply no way to become an expert without first being a novice. We can certainly teach the process of hypothesis testing, but the skill of separating fruitful hypotheses from dead ends can only come with experience. That seems self-evident but it speaks to the notion that our curricula are doing a disservice to students by focusing on "knowledge" rather than 'critical thinking" or the movement in science education to have students "doing what scientists do."


Implications for teaching

Students are able to comprehend the knowledge aquired by experts but they are not able to generate knowledge (Willingham's definition of "thinking like scientists"). Our goal should be to expose students to the work of experts in our fields and help them understand both the knowledge itself and the context in which it is developed. Thus, the history (as well as the content) of science is important so that students see science as a process of gradual accumulation of increasingly refined knowledge over time.

Asking students to engage in creative, knowledge generating activities, like writing their own historical narratives or producing authentic scientific investigations can be fun and motivating, but set your expectations accordingly. It will likely be a poor example of the actual work done by experts or it will be a replica of someone else's work. It is no coincidence that almost all of the winners (if not most of the entrants) of the Intel (formerly Westinghouse) Science Talent Search work hand-in-hand with a mentor, typically at an institution of higher learning, with access to sophisticated equipment and high-level expertise.

In some cases it might do more harm than good to try to teach students to use expert strategies as novices. An expert tennis player thinks more about strategy than technique. A novice tennis player needs to do the opposite - strategy is useless if you can barely hit the ball over a net consistently.

Next: Chapter 7: How should I adjust my teaching for different types of learners?