De Groot’s Lesson, Geary’s Evolutionary Educational Psychology, and Cognitive Load Theory

• In Event: Cognitive Science Goes to College: Scaling Up What We Know About Learning and Instruction

Abstract

Many decades ago, de Groot (1965) discovered that memory of chess board configurations taken from real games provided the major distinction between novice and expert players. Chess masters can recognise tens of thousands of board configurations and know the best move for each configuration. Similar results have been obtained for a variety of educationally relevant areas. These findings suggest that the major function of instruction is to assist learners to acquire a large range of domain specific schemas stored in long-term memory. They indicate to us when and how to act. De Groot’s lesson suggests that domain-specific knowledge held in long-term memory provides the major distinction between more and less knowledgeable people. An alternative view is that knowledge of general cognitive strategies provides the major, learnable distinction between individuals.

Several years ago, Geary (e.g. Geary, 2008) indicated a distinction between biologically primary and biologically secondary knowledge. Primary knowledge is knowledge we have evolved to acquire over many generations. Secondary knowledge is cultural knowledge that humans have required more recently and have not specifically evolved to acquire. The domain-specific knowledge identified by de Groot is biologically secondary. Societies have devised educational institutions to assist learners in acquiring such knowledge because unlike biologically primary knowledge, it is not acquired automatically and needs to be explicitly taught. In contrast, very general cognitive strategies that apply to a wide variety of areas are likely to be biologically primary and so unteachable because they are acquired automatically.

Cognitive load theory (Sweller, Ayres, & Kalyuga, 2011) assumes that the aim of instruction is to: (a) Assist learners to acquire domain-specific, biologically secondary information stored in long-term memory; (b) That information is most easily acquired if it is explicitly presented during instruction; (c) Novel information is processed by a limited capacity, limited duration working memory; (d) While working memory is limited when processing novel information, those limits disappear when working memory processes familiar information transferred from long-term memory.

Cognitive load theory has used these assumptions to devise many instructional effects including the worked example effect under which learners presented with worked examples to study rather than problems to solve become more proficient problem solvers. The worked example effect has been demonstrated frequently in many curriculum areas. That empirical work provides strong evidence for cognitive load theory’s assumption that problem solving competence in educationally relevant areas derives from the acquisition of large numbers of biologically secondary, domain-specific schemas stored in long-term memory. The theory can be contrasted with theories that assume that the function of instruction is to have learners acquire general cognitive strategies rather than domain-specific knowledge structures.

Author

• John Sweller, University of New South Wales