The August issue of Scientific American takes a deep look at how experts–chess grandmasters, musicians, physicians–develop their ability to make the right decisions, so often, in an instant. A better understanding of how expertise is acquired might help educators teach more effectively. The article uses studies of chess grandmasters as a port-of-entry into this exploration of how experts are made not born. From Scientific American:
The history of human expertise begins with hunting, a skill that was crucial to the survival of our early ancestors. The mature hunter knows not only where the lion has been; he can also infer where it will go. Tracking skill increases, as repeated studies show, from childhood onward, rising in “a linear relationship, all the way out to the mid-30s, when it tops out,” says John Bock, an anthropologist at California State University, Fullerton. It takes less time to train a brain surgeon.
Without a demonstrably immense superiority in skill over the novice, there can be no true experts, only laypeople with imposing credentials. Such, alas, are all too common. Rigorous studies in the past two decades have shown that professional stock pickers invest no more successfully than amateurs, that noted connoisseurs distinguish wines hardly better than yokels, and that highly credentialed psychiatric therapists help patients no more than colleagues with less advanced degrees. And even when expertise undoubtedly exists–as in, say, teaching or business management–it is often hard to measure, let alone explain.
Skill at chess, however, can be measured, broken into components, subjected to laboratory experiments and readily observed in its natural environment, the tournament hall. It is for those reasons that chess has served as the greatest single test bed for theories of thinking–the “Drosophila of cognitive science,” as it has been called.
UPDATE: And, from the new issue of Wired, here’s Stephen Colbert’s directions on how to “Be an Expert on Anything.” Link