Not so grand a strategy: A National at Risk emphasized the importance of learning so-called "higher-order skills" in the early grades. But even chess grand masters need to learn the basics first - Feature

Education Next, Spring, 2003 by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

Working Memory

By the time Risk was published in 1983, cognitive psychology had achieved a degree of consensus about the fundamental nature of academic skills. Yet the science of psychology was not often alluded to in Risk. Even today, 20 years later, there is little crossover between cognitive science and education policy. Risk simply assumed that gaining an academic skill, such as reading, is independent of the curricular content through which the skill is taught. This formalistic conception continues to dominate American education circles. It is a misleading oversimplification that will have to be corrected if our schools are to teach "higher" skills successfully.

The conscious mind, where higher-order skills mostly rake place, is limited by a universal, highly democratic constraint called "working memory," whose narrow limits are on average the same for child and adult, rich and poor. It is the "place" where we put things together and create meaning, where we solve problems and process language.

In the 1950s George Miller wrote a famous article about the limitations of working memory called "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two." The title was Miller's way of saying that the number of bits of information we can handle in the brief span of working memory is very, very limited--five to nine items at most. The acquiring of academic skills, including, notably, a big vocabulary, consists of building efficient mental systems that enable us, despite this very constrained bottleneck, to perform huge feats of analysis and synthesis.

A famous experiment conducted by Dutch psychologist Adrian de Groot illustrated this universal bottleneck in human processing skills. He noticed that chess grand masters have a remarkable skill that we amateurs cannot emulate. They can glance for five seconds at a complex mid-game chess position of 25 pieces, perform an intervening task of some sort, and then reconstruct the entire chess position on a blank chessboard without making any mistakes. Performance on this task correlates almost perfectly with one's chess ranking. Grand masters make no mistakes, masters a very few, and amateurs can get just five or six pieces right. (Remember the magical number seven, plus or minus two.)

On a brilliant hunch, de Groot then performed the same experiment with 25 chess pieces in positions that, instead of being taken from an actual chess game, were just placed at random on the board. Under these new conditions, the performance of the three different groups--grand masters, masters, and novices--was exactly the same, each group remembering just five or six pieces correctly.

The experiment suggests the skill difference between a master reader who can easily reproduce the 16 letters of "the cat is on the mat" and a beginning reader who has trouble reproducing the same letters: t-h-e-c-a-t-i-s-o-n-t-h-e-m-a-t. If, instead of providing expert and child with that sentence, we change the task and ask them to reproduce a sequence of random letters, the performance of the 1st grader and the master reader will become much closer. If the 16 letters were "rtu kjs vb fw nqi pgf," the expert would exhibit little skill advantage over the novice; on average, neither will get more than a short sequence of the letters right.