# Expertise and Memory

Memory is the residue of thought.

— Dan Willingham

The previous chapter explained what distinguishes novices from competent practitioners. This one looks at expertise: what it is, how people acquire it, and how it can be harmful as well as helpful. It then shows how concept maps can be used to figure out how to turn knowledge into lessons.

To start, what do we mean when we say someone is an expert? The usual answer is that they can solve problems much faster than people who are “merely competent”, or that they can recognize and deal with cases where the normal rules don’t apply. They also somehow make this look effortless: in many cases, they instantly know what the right answer is Parn2017.

Expertise is more than just knowing more facts: competent practitioners can memorize a lot of trivia without any noticeable improvement in their performance. Instead, imagine for a moment that we store knowledge as a network or graph in which facts are nodes and relationships are arcs. (This is definitely not how our brains work, but it’s a useful metaphor.) The key difference between experts and competent practitioners is that experts’ mental models are much more densely connected, i.e., they are much more likely to know of a connection between any two randomly-selected pieces of information.

This metaphor helps explain many observed aspects of expert behavior:

• Experts can jump directly from a problem to its solution because there actually is a direct link between the two in their mind. Where a competent practitioner would have to reason “A, B, C, D, E”, the expert can go from A to E in a single step. We call this intuition, and it isn’t always a good thing: when asked to explain their reasoning, experts often can’t, because they didn’t actually reason their way to the solution—they just recognized it.

• Densely-connected graphs are also the basis for experts’ fluid representations, i.e., their ability to switch back and forth between different views of a problem Petr2016. For example, when trying to solve a problem in mathematics, an expert might switch between tackling it geometrically and representing it as a set of equations to be solved.

• This metaphor also explains why experts are better at diagnosis than competent practitioners: more linkages between facts makes it easier to reason backward from symptoms to causes. (And this in turn is why asking programmers to debug during job interviews gives a more accurate impression of their ability than asking them to program.)

• Finally, experts are often so familiar with their subject that they can no longer imagine what it’s like to not see the world that way. As a result, they are often less good at teaching the subject than people with less expertise who still remember learning it themselves.

The last of these points is important enough to have a name of its own: expert blind spot. As originally defined in Nath2003, it is the tendency of experts to organize explanation according to the subject’s deep principles, rather than being guided by what their learners already know. While it can be overcome with training, it’s part of why there is no correlation between how good someone is at doing research in an area and how good they are at teaching it Mars2002.

The J Word

Experts often betray their blind spot by using the word “just” in explanations, as in, “Oh, it’s easy, you just fire up a new virtual machine and then you just install these four patches to Ubuntu and then you just re-write your entire program in a pure functional language.” As we discuss in s:motivation, doing this signals that the speaker thinks the problem is trivial and that the person struggling with it must therefore be stupid.

Don’t do this.

## Concept Maps

The graph metaphor explains why helping learners make connections is as important as introducing them to facts: without those connections, it’s hard for people to recall things that they know. To use another analogy, the more people you know at a party, the less likely you are to leave early.

Our tool of choice for representing someone’s mental model as a graph is a concept map, in which facts are bubbles and connections are labelled arcs. It is important that they are labelled: saying “X and Y are related” is only helpful if we explain what the relationship is. And yes, different people can have different concept maps for the same topic, but one of the benefits of concept mapping is that it makes those differences explicit.

As an example, f:memory-seasons reproduces a concept map taken from the IHMC CMap site showing why the Earth has seasons, and f:online-screencasting uses a concept map to explain how to create a good screencast.

To show how concept maps can be using in teaching programming, consider this for loop in Python:

for letter in "abc":
print(letter)


whose output is:

a
b
c


The three key “things” in this loop are shown in the top of f:memory-loop, but they are only half the story. The expanded version in the bottom shows the relationships between those things, which are as important for understanding as the concepts themselves.

Concept maps can be used in many ways:

Helping teachers figure out what they’re trying to teach.
Crucially, a concept map separates content from order: in our experience, people rarely wind up teaching things in the order in which they first drew them. (In technical terms, they reduce the teacher’s cognitive load—we will discuss this again in s:load.)
Aiding communication between lesson designers.
Teachers with very different ideas of what they’re trying to teach are likely to pull their learners in different directions; drawing and sharing concept maps isn’t guaranteed to prevent this, but it helps.
Aiding communication with learners.
While it’s possible to give learners a pre-drawn map at the start of a lesson for them to annotate, it’s better to draw it piece by piece while teaching to reinforce the ties between what’s in the map and what the teacher said. (We will return to this idea in s:load-split-attention.)
For assessment.
Having learners draw pictures of what they think they just heard shows the teacher what they missed and what was miscommunicated. Reviewing learners’ concept maps is too time-consuming to do as in-class formative assessment, but very useful in weekly lectures once learners are familiar with the technique. The qualification is necessary because any new way of doing things initially slows people down—if a student is trying to make sense of basic programming, asking them to figure out how to draw their thoughts at the same time is an unfair load.

Kepp2008 looked at the use of concept mapping in computing education. One of their findings was that, “…concept mapping is troublesome for many students because it tests personal understanding rather than knowledge that was merely learned by rote.” As someone who values understanding over rote knowledge, I count that as a benefit.

Some teachers are also skeptical of whether novices can effectively map their understanding, since introspection and explanation of understanding are generally more advanced skills than understanding itself. Like any other new tool or technique, concept maps have to be taught and practiced if they are to be effective.

Start Anywhere

When asked to draw their first concept map, many people will stare at the blank page in front of them, not knowing where to start. When this happens, write down two words associated with the topic you’re trying to map, then draw a line between them and add a label explaining how those two ideas are related. You can then ask what other things are related in the same way, what parts those things have, or what happens before or after the concepts already on the page in order to discover more nodes and arcs. After that, the hard part is often stopping.

Concept maps are just one way to represent our understanding of a subject; others include mind maps (which are usually radial and hierarchical), conceptual diagrams (which use predefined categories and relationships), and visual metaphors (which are striking images overlaid with text) Eppl2006. Maps, flowcharts, and blueprints can also be useful in some contexts, as can decision trees like Abel2009 that shows how to choose the right kind of chart for different kinds of questions and data.

What each does is externalize cognition, i.e., make thought processes and mental models visible so that they can be compared, contrasted, and combined. Cher2007 suggests that externalizing cognition may be the main reason developers draw diagrams when they are discussing things. They found that most developers can’t identify the parts of their own diagrams shortly after having created them—instead of archiving information for posterity, diagrams are actually a cache for short-term memory that lets a participant in the discussion point at a wiggly bubble and say “that” to trigger recall of several minutes of debate.

Rough Work and Honesty

Many user interface designers believe that it’s better to show people rough sketches of their ideas rather than polished mock-ups because people are more likely to give honest feedback on something that they think only took a few minutes to create—if it looks as though what they’re critiquing took hours to create, most will pull their punches. When drawing concept maps to motivate discussion, you should therefore use pencils and scrap paper (or pens and a whiteboard) rather than fancy computer drawing tools.

## Seven Plus or Minus Two

While the graph model of knowledge is wrong but useful, another simple model has a sounder physiological basis. As a rough approximation, human memory can be divided into two distinct layers. The first, called long-term or persistent memory, is where we store things like our friends’ names, our home address, and what the clown did at our eighth birthday party that scared us so much. It is essentially unbounded: barring injury or disease, we will die before it fills up. However, it is also slow to access—too slow to help us handle hungry lions and disgruntled family members.

Evolution has therefore given us a second system called short-term or working memory. It is much faster, but also much smaller: Mill1956 estimated that the average adult’s working memory could only hold 7±2 items at a time. This is why phone numbers are typically 7 or 8 digits long: back when phones had dials instead of keypads, that was the longest string of numbers most adults could remember accurately for as long as it took the dial to go around several times. As s:memory-pattern discusses, short-term memory may actually be as small as 4±1 items; our innate tendency to remember things together gives the illusion of it being larger.

Participation

The size of working memory is sometimes used to explain why sports teams tend to have about half a dozen members or be broken down into sub-groups like the forwards and backs in rugby. It is also used to explain why meetings are only productive up to a certain number of participants: if twenty people try to discuss something, either three meetings are going on at once or half a dozen people are talking while everyone else listens. The argument is that people’s ability to keep track of their peers is constrained by the size of working memory, but so far as I know, the link has never been proven.

7±2 is probably the most important number in programming. When someone is trying to write the next line of a program, or understand what’s already there, they need to keep a bunch of arbitrary facts straight in their head: what does this variable represent, what value does it currently hold, etc. If the number of facts grows too large, their mental model of the program comes crashing down (something we have all experienced).

7±2 is also the most important number in teaching. A teacher cannot push information directly into a learner’s long-term memory. Instead, whatever they present is first stored in the learner’s short-term memory, and is only transferred to long-term memory after it has been held there and rehearsed (s:individual-strategies). If the teacher presents too much information too quickly, the new will displace the old before it has a chance to consolidate in long-term memory.

This is one of the reasons to create a concept map for a lesson when designing it: doing so helps the teacher identify how many pieces of separate information the learner will need to store in memory as the lesson unfolds. In practice, I often draw a concept map, realize there’s far too much in it to teach in a single pass, and then carve out tightly-connected subsections to break the lesson into digestible pieces, each of which leads to a formative assessment.

Building Concept Maps Together

Concept maps can be used as a classroom discussion exercise. Put learners in small groups (2–4 people each), give each group some sticky notes on which a few key concepts are written, and have them build a concept map on a whiteboard by placing those sticky notes, connecting them with labelled arcs, and adding any other concepts they think they need.

The next time you have a team meeting, give everyone a sheet of paper and have them spend a few minutes drawing a concept map of the project you’re all working on—separately. On the count of three, have everyone reveal their concept maps simultaneously. Once everyone realizes how different their mental models of the project are, a lot of interesting discussion will ensue….

The simple model of memory presented here has largely been replaced by a more sophisticated one in which short-term memory is broken down into several modal stores (e.g., for visual vs. linguistic memory), each of which does some involuntary preprocessing Mill2016a. Our presentation is therefore an example of a mental model that aids learning and everyday work, but is eventually superseded by something more complicated.

Research also now indicates that the limiting factor for long-term memory is not retention, but rather the ability to recall memories that are present. Studying in short, spaced periods in a variety of contexts improves recall; the reason may be that doing so creates more cues than cramming (s:individual-strategies).

## Pattern Recognition

The preceding section said that short-term memory can only store 7±2 items at a time, and recent research have suggested that its actual size might be as low as 4±1 items Dida2016. In order to handle larger information sets, our minds create chunks. For example, most of us remember words as single items, rather than as sequences of letters. Similarly, the pattern made by five spots on cards or dice is remembered as a whole rather than as five separate pieces of information.

One key finding in cognition research is that experts have more and larger chunks than non-experts, i.e., experts “see” larger patterns, and have more patterns to match things against. This allows them to reason at a higher level, and to search for information more quickly and more accurately. However, chunking can also mislead us if we mis-identify things: newcomers really can sometimes see things that experts have looked at and missed.

Given how important chunking is to thinking, it is tempting to try to teach patterns directly. One way to do this is to identify design patterns, which are reusable solutions to common problems. Patterns help competent practitioners think and talk to each other in many domains (including teaching Berg2012), but pattern catalogs are too dry and too abstract for novices to make sense of on their own. That said, giving names to a small number of patterns does seem to help with teaching, primarily by giving the learners a richer vocabulary to think and communicate with Kuit2004,Byck2005,Saja2006. We will return to this in s:pck-programming.

## Becoming an Expert

So how does someone become an expert? The idea that ten thousand hours of practice will do it is widely quoted but probably not true: doing the same thing over and over again is much more likely to solidify bad habits than improve performance. What actually works is deliberate practice (also sometimes called reflective practice), which is doing similar but subtly different things, paying attention to what works and what doesn’t, and then changing behavior in response to that feedback to get cumulatively better.

A common progression is for people to go through three stages:

Act on feedback from others.
For example, a student might write an essay about what they did on their summer holiday and get feedback from a teacher telling them how to improve it.
Give feedback to others.
For example, they might critique character development in The Catcher in the Rye. For this to be effective, it’s essential that they get feedback on their feedback, i.e., that the teacher critiques their analysis.
Give feedback to themselves.
At some point, they start critiquing their own work in real time (or nearly so) using the skills they have now built up. Doing this is so much faster than waiting for feedback from others that proficiency suddenly starts to take off.

What Counts as Deliberate Practice?

Macn2014 found that “…deliberate practice explained 26% of the variance in performance for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports, 4% for education, and less than 1% for professions.” However, Eric2016 critiqued this finding by saying, “Summing up every hour of any type of practice during an individual’s career implies that the impact of all types of practice activity on performance is equal—an assumption that…is inconsistent with the evidence.” To be effective, deliberate practice requires both a clear performance goal and immediate informative feedback.

## Exercises

### Concept Mapping (pairs/30)

Draw a concept map for something you would teach in five minutes. Trade with a partner, and critique each other’s maps. Do they present concepts or surface detail? Which of the relationships in your partner’s map do you consider concepts and vice versa?

### Concept Mapping (Again) (small groups/20)

Working in groups of 3–4, have each person independently draw a concept map showing their mental model of what goes on in a classroom. When everyone is done, compare the concept maps. Which concepts and relationships are common? Which are different? Where do your mental models agree and disagree?

### A Concept Map for This Material (individual/30)

After you have finished going through this material (not just this chapter), pick one small topic, draw a concept map for it, and send it to us (s:joining). If we decide to add it to this book, we will add you to the credits in the introduction.

### Noticing Your Blind Spot (small groups/10)

Consider all the things you have to know to understand this one line of Python source code:

answers = ['tuatara', 'tuataras', 'bus', "lick"]

• The square brackets surrounding the content mean we’re working with a list (as opposed to square brackets immediately to the right of something, which is a data extraction notation).

• The elements are separated by commas, which are outside/between the quotes (rather than inside, as they would be for quoted speech).

• Each element is a character string, and we know that because of the quotes. We could have number or other data types in here if we wanted; we need quotes because we’re working with strings.

• We’re mixing our use of single and double quotes, and Python doesn’t care (so long as they balance around the individual strings).

• Each comma is followed by a space, which is not required by Python, but we prefer it for readability.

Each of these details might be overlooked by an expert. Working in groups of 3–4, select something equally short from a lesson you have recently taught or taken and break it down to this level of detail.