There is currently great disparagement for learning “mere facts” in favor of
“active curiosity” and other high-sounding terms. But your ability to
flourish in a society depends on your ability to communicate, to put things together, solve problems effectively, and strategize effectively. And the more relevant knowledge you have in your long-term memory, the better you will succeed in real life.
There’s a famous experiment that shows that problem solving is not a generic skill but is based on the knowledge that you bring to the problem. It also shows that the more knowledgeable you are, the faster and better you are at problem solving. What better way of proving this than observing chess players? There’s no question about who is more of an expert at chess, the player who consistently wins or the player who consistently loses. And does the difference between winning and losing lie chiefly in knowing deep general principles and having an ability to think, or in knowing a lot of
“mere facts”?
Herbert A. Simon, one of the giants of cognitive psychology, noticed an obscure PhD thesis that ultimately made its author a hero of the new
science. Adriaan de Groot was a young doctoral student in psychology in the Netherlands who happened to be a very good chess player. For his doctoral dissertation (1946), he decided to analyze some of the elements of chess-playing skills. He must have been a rather charming young PhD student, considering that he persuaded the most eminent chess players to participate in his experiments: Paul Keres, Alexander Alekhine, Reuben Fine, Max Euwe, and Savielly Tartakower, as well as four masters, two women champions, a number of experts, and a range of amateurs, including various psychology professors and students. Chess is a particularly
favorable subject for determining one’s level of expertise, because its rankings are quite objective and precise. They are based on unimpeachable fact: who, on average, can beat whom.
The resulting book by De Groot16 in its 1965 translation—Thought and Choice in Chess—became famous. But, as in other cases of serendipity in science, it was not its analyses of chess players’ thinking about game
positions that made the book a milestone in psychology. Rather, what came to influence the field was a side experiment. It involved no strategic chess thinking at all: De Groot simply asked his subjects to reproduce on a blank board a midgame chess position that the subject had seen just for a few seconds. De Groot wanted to determine whether there was a correlation
between a chess player’s official ranking and the ability to reproduce accurately a midgame chess position.
Yes, there was an almost perfect correlation! The higher the player’s rank from novice to grandmaster, the more pieces that were accurately
reproduced. The lowest-ranked chess player could barely reproduce
30 percent of the pieces accurately, whereas a grandmaster was always able to reproduce accurately over 90 percent of them. De Groot postulated, quite correctly, as it proved, that this superior ability of the grandmasters did not depend on their having developed superior general skills, but rather on what he called their “erudition”—their encyclopedic knowledge of past games, which allowed them to quickly organize their perceptions into meaningful groupings that could then be reconstructed on a blank board.
This experiment ignited the interest of Simon, who with his colleague William Chase, took De Groot’s work a step further. They asked the subjects to reproduce board arrangements that had a similar number of pieces (more than twenty) placed at random. These helter-skelter pieces were not in a midgame position from an actual game. In this new, contrived, experiment, all the subjects—novices, masters, grandmasters—performed more or less the same. They all reproduced correctly around six pieces.
When it came to a brute memory task, equally novel to them all, they all performed as novices.
There is, then, no general chess-piece reproducing skill, no general
mental muscle developed by playing hundreds of chess games. In real-game situations, the more erudite masters and grandmasters had a ready mental inventory of midgame positions based on their knowledge of past games.
Simon and Chase ventured to estimate that their expertise derived from the stored memory of about fifty thousand chess games. It was ingrained, specific factual knowledge, stored in long-term memory, not some general mental skill, that explained the skilled performance.
But nobody holds fifty thousand chess games in long-term memory for quick retrieval. So there had to be a reason that the grandmasters possessed the ability to reproduce game positions and an ability to outstrategize their opponents consistently. It must be the case that the long-term memories of the grandmasters had organized their knowledge into kinds of situations and the individual situation of any particular game. Here’s an excellent quick summary17 by the distinguished cognitive scientist Paul A. Kirschner and his associates:
Our understanding of the role of long-term memory in human cognition has altered dramatically over the past few decades. It is no longer conceived as a passive repository of discrete, isolated fragments of information that permit us to repeat what we have learned. Nor is it seen only as a component of human cognitive architecture that has merely peripheral influence on complex cognitive processes such as thinking and problem solving. Rather, long-term memory is now viewed as the central, dominant structure of human cognition. Everything we see, hear, and think about is critically dependent on and influenced by our long-term memory.
After citing De Groot’s discovery and its subsequent expansion by Simon and Chase, and then several others, they sum up:
We are skillful18 in an area because our long-term memory contains huge amounts of information concerning the area. . . . Without our huge store of information in long-term memory, we would be largely incapable of everything from simple acts such as crossing a street . . . [to] solving mathematical problems. Thus, our long-term memory
incorporates a massive knowledge base that is central to all of our cognitively based activities. . . . The aim of all instruction is to alter long-term memory. If nothing has changed in long-term memory, nothing has been learned.
All this was summarized in Anders Ericsson’s remark “There is no such thing as developing a general skill.” The point applies to all school-learned activities and subject matters. It applies in spades to language use and reading comprehension.
It’s a paradox that one of the most important educational insights in history, one with high currency in the world of cognitive psychology, should have arrived just at the time when the fad for twenty-first-century non–domain specific, nonexistent skills should have reached a climax in the education world.