Getting Students to Notice What Matters

A significant line of research in education has been examining the differences between how experts and novices perform tasks within a given field, and understanding these differences can help us more effectively guide novices towards expertise.

In their summary of research on how people learn, the National Research Council of the United States outlined some key findings relating to the differences between experts and novices:

1. Expert knowledge is organized around important concepts.

2. Expert knowledge is “conditionalized.” In other words, they know when, where, and how it applies.

3. Experts are able to access relevant knowledge relatively easily.

Other research suggests the reason why expert knowledge is so easily accessible. Experts seem to make use of the connections between important concepts in their field to analyze cases or problems.

Key cases that illustrate variations in these connections are logged in memory and when experts face a novel problem, they are able to notice critical similarities and differences between the novel case and the key cases they have stored in memory.

The problem for us as educators is how we get our students to initially organize their knowledge around the important concepts of the particular field. A recent study conducted by researchers in Germany and the Netherlands observed expert problem-solving behavior more closely, in order to try and shed some light on this question.

In the study, expert and novice biologists were given the task of identifying the locomotion patterns of various fish based on short video clips. The participants’ eye movements were tracked to determine what they focused on.

In a second phase of the investigation, the participants were shown the videos again, this time with a red dot included indicating their gaze patterns. They were asked to explain their thinking during the first viewing.

What were the results of the study?

• Novices viewed the videos for significantly longer than experts.

• Experts performed the task significantly more accurately.

• Data from both the eye tracking and the retroactive self-reports indicated that experts considered more of the relevant information at the beginning of their task processing than novices.

• Expert attention remained focused on the relevant areas, whereas novices spent a significant amount of time focusing on irrelevant areas.

What might this mean for our classrooms?

The researchers suggest that novices may benefit from “instruction that contains attentional guidance” (p. 153). We need to find ways to help students notice what matters. It is impossible to focus on everything in the input we receive. We focus in on what our brains perceive as salient, but this salience is affected strongly by our past experience.

This reminds me of the research I did for my own Master’s thesis. I had observed that a number of my Japanese students not only did not use “the” and “a” when speaking English, but also often left them out when reading, even though, of course, they were present in the texts they were reading from.

I suspected that since their own language contained no articles, their past experience may be filtering the articles out as irrelevant. It seemed they may not have even been noticing the articles in the input.

For a period of six weeks, students received texts with all the articles highlighted in yellow. They also listened to recordings of the same text that contained a slight pause before and after each article, in order to make the article more salient.

They received no explicit instruction in the use of articles in English, nor did they receive an explanation as to the highlighting or pausing. Nevertheless, after only six weeks a number of the students showed a significant improvement in article use in English.

While the strategies will vary depending on what happens to be salient in a given situation, it seems imperative that we as teachers curate the content we provide to our students in ways that make the concepts that are important to the ideas under consideration salient.

If students do not notice what matters, they are unlikely to be able to make the connections that will lead to expert performance.

References

Jarodzka, H., Scheiter, K., Gerjets, P. & van Gog, T. (2010) “In the eyes of the beholder: How experts and novices interpret dynamic stimuli.” Learning and Instruction, 20 pp. 146-154.

Bransford, J., Brown, A. and Cocking, R. (Eds.) (2000) How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. National Academy Press: Washington D.C.

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