Heresy!!!
If I were trapped on a desert island and forced to choose between reading Gobbo and Chi's article on expertise in children* and an empty cereal box, I would probably choose the cereal box. Both are equally informative and entertaining, but the cereal box does not require me to translate jargon.
The professor who assigned me this article finds it "beautiful." Though I admire this teacher and enjoy his classes, I can't for the life of me figure out what about this article could be deemed "beautiful." Certainly not the language. A direct quotation from the first page:
"The cohesiveness of a knowledge structure was operationally defined to be the pattern of interrelations among the dinosaur concepts, either through direct linkages (where dinosaur concepts are directly associated to each other) or indirect linkages (where dinosaurs are linked via an attribution node), when a semantic network of the nodes and links were derived from the child's production protocols."
Attribution nodes? Production protocols? If I were to introduce an "unacceptable level of clarity," the paragraph might read like this:
"We define the cohesiveness of a knowledge structure as the pattern of interrelations among dinosaur concepts. Such concepts may be directly associated or indirectly associated on the basis of some attribute. As a child learns facts about dinosaurs, s/he arranges these facts into a network based on the categories into which these facts fit, such as diet, habitat, or defense."
"So there's a lot of jargon," you say. "It's a scientific paper. What do you expect? That doesn't make it worthy of comparison with a cereal box." Normally I would agree, but once translated, this article consists of a repetition of the obvious.
They predict that experts will have more complex representations of knowledge than novices. In other words, experts organize their knowledge into more categories and more meaningful categories. These categories, in turn, are related to each other.
Are we really surprised? Of course if you know more about, say, dinosaurs, the more you know about what categories are relevant. If you knew nothing about dinosaurs, you might think of organizing them by whatever features stand out to you most--size, say, or fearsomeness of appearance. As you learn about what different sorts of dinosaurs eat, where they live, and how they defend themselves, you realize that many very different dinosaurs are a similar size and both predators and herbivores can look fearsome, so that your former categories aren't meaningful. You then recategorize the dinosaurs you've learned about by means of diet, habitat, and defense. If you've recently gained expertise in some new area of knowledge--and you almost certainly have--then this study's proposition should seem so obvious that it's hardly worth mentioning, let alone making the subject of a study.
Furthermore, the researchers add, experts will be able to draw more inferences about new dinosaurs they know nothing about than will novices, because their database is structured in a more meaningful way and provides more basis for comparison. Again, if you've ever watched yourself build knowledge and solve problems, this should be obvious.
The entire paper repeats these two points in different words and in relation to the different methods the researchers use to measure this quality...to a soporific degree.
There is one point here that the teacher deems "radical": "If differences in performance are found between the expert and novice children, then one could conclude that domain knowledge can influence how children reason and make inferences, and thus be a potential source of developmental differences." It doesn't seem radical to say that abstract reasoning abilities are at least partially based on the knowledge one has to work with. After all, in order to reason, one must reason about something. If one doesn't know anything about the assumptions the domain of "history" works with, and if one doesn't know the complex web of alliances that existed in early 20th-century Europe, one won't be able to analyze the causes of World War I with any degree of sophistication. It would seem incomprehensible that all of Europe would go to war because of an assassination. Does that mean one lacks the capability to reason in a sophisticated manner? Anyone who has observed her own learning, let alone other people's, will see this premise as reasonable, perhaps even obvious.
Furthermore, studies such as Piaget's that show children to be incapable of abstract reasoning pose problems that interest adults, but not children. Perhaps children failed Piaget's tests at certain ages because they weren't interested enough in the sorts of counting games he proposed to develop the relevant concepts.
The article would only be radical if it suggested that abstract reasoning could not exist in the absence of a representational structure, an idea it never explicitly states. (The closest it gets to saying so is "we propose that children's bilities to reason are dictated largely by the sophistication of their domain knowledge as opposed to a possible alternative view, that reasoning and inferencing are abstract skills children acquire as they mature," two propositions which don't necessarily have to be taken as contradictory). Just so you know, I believe that abstract reasoning is almost always based in some sort of meaningful context, be it a school subject or an area of daily life, and one's experience with these contexts will necessarily affect one's ability to reason in these areas. However, I find it reasonable to assume there is some general ability to reason which applies to and is affected by all contexts. After all, we regularly observe that very intelligent people can make reasonable judgments about subjects where they have little knowledge; some sort of general reasoning ability must exist to explain this.
If an article demonstrates something that common sense, observation and experience could reveal, and does so in jargon rather than plain English, what's the point? Haven't I wasted my time?
*This article, so you can better recognize and avoid it, is "How Knowledge is Structured and Used by Expert and Novice Children," by Camilla Gobbo at the University of Padova and Michelene Chi at the University of Pittsburgh. It appeared in the journal Cognitive Development in 1986.
The professor who assigned me this article finds it "beautiful." Though I admire this teacher and enjoy his classes, I can't for the life of me figure out what about this article could be deemed "beautiful." Certainly not the language. A direct quotation from the first page:
"The cohesiveness of a knowledge structure was operationally defined to be the pattern of interrelations among the dinosaur concepts, either through direct linkages (where dinosaur concepts are directly associated to each other) or indirect linkages (where dinosaurs are linked via an attribution node), when a semantic network of the nodes and links were derived from the child's production protocols."
Attribution nodes? Production protocols? If I were to introduce an "unacceptable level of clarity," the paragraph might read like this:
"We define the cohesiveness of a knowledge structure as the pattern of interrelations among dinosaur concepts. Such concepts may be directly associated or indirectly associated on the basis of some attribute. As a child learns facts about dinosaurs, s/he arranges these facts into a network based on the categories into which these facts fit, such as diet, habitat, or defense."
"So there's a lot of jargon," you say. "It's a scientific paper. What do you expect? That doesn't make it worthy of comparison with a cereal box." Normally I would agree, but once translated, this article consists of a repetition of the obvious.
They predict that experts will have more complex representations of knowledge than novices. In other words, experts organize their knowledge into more categories and more meaningful categories. These categories, in turn, are related to each other.
Are we really surprised? Of course if you know more about, say, dinosaurs, the more you know about what categories are relevant. If you knew nothing about dinosaurs, you might think of organizing them by whatever features stand out to you most--size, say, or fearsomeness of appearance. As you learn about what different sorts of dinosaurs eat, where they live, and how they defend themselves, you realize that many very different dinosaurs are a similar size and both predators and herbivores can look fearsome, so that your former categories aren't meaningful. You then recategorize the dinosaurs you've learned about by means of diet, habitat, and defense. If you've recently gained expertise in some new area of knowledge--and you almost certainly have--then this study's proposition should seem so obvious that it's hardly worth mentioning, let alone making the subject of a study.
Furthermore, the researchers add, experts will be able to draw more inferences about new dinosaurs they know nothing about than will novices, because their database is structured in a more meaningful way and provides more basis for comparison. Again, if you've ever watched yourself build knowledge and solve problems, this should be obvious.
The entire paper repeats these two points in different words and in relation to the different methods the researchers use to measure this quality...to a soporific degree.
There is one point here that the teacher deems "radical": "If differences in performance are found between the expert and novice children, then one could conclude that domain knowledge can influence how children reason and make inferences, and thus be a potential source of developmental differences." It doesn't seem radical to say that abstract reasoning abilities are at least partially based on the knowledge one has to work with. After all, in order to reason, one must reason about something. If one doesn't know anything about the assumptions the domain of "history" works with, and if one doesn't know the complex web of alliances that existed in early 20th-century Europe, one won't be able to analyze the causes of World War I with any degree of sophistication. It would seem incomprehensible that all of Europe would go to war because of an assassination. Does that mean one lacks the capability to reason in a sophisticated manner? Anyone who has observed her own learning, let alone other people's, will see this premise as reasonable, perhaps even obvious.
Furthermore, studies such as Piaget's that show children to be incapable of abstract reasoning pose problems that interest adults, but not children. Perhaps children failed Piaget's tests at certain ages because they weren't interested enough in the sorts of counting games he proposed to develop the relevant concepts.
The article would only be radical if it suggested that abstract reasoning could not exist in the absence of a representational structure, an idea it never explicitly states. (The closest it gets to saying so is "we propose that children's bilities to reason are dictated largely by the sophistication of their domain knowledge as opposed to a possible alternative view, that reasoning and inferencing are abstract skills children acquire as they mature," two propositions which don't necessarily have to be taken as contradictory). Just so you know, I believe that abstract reasoning is almost always based in some sort of meaningful context, be it a school subject or an area of daily life, and one's experience with these contexts will necessarily affect one's ability to reason in these areas. However, I find it reasonable to assume there is some general ability to reason which applies to and is affected by all contexts. After all, we regularly observe that very intelligent people can make reasonable judgments about subjects where they have little knowledge; some sort of general reasoning ability must exist to explain this.
If an article demonstrates something that common sense, observation and experience could reveal, and does so in jargon rather than plain English, what's the point? Haven't I wasted my time?
*This article, so you can better recognize and avoid it, is "How Knowledge is Structured and Used by Expert and Novice Children," by Camilla Gobbo at the University of Padova and Michelene Chi at the University of Pittsburgh. It appeared in the journal Cognitive Development in 1986.