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.

Practiced readers, chess grand masters, and other experts do not possess any special mental equipment that novices lack, and they do not perform any better than novices on formally similar yet unfamiliar tasks. Nonetheless, experts are able to perform remarkable feats of memory with real-world situations such as mid-game chess positions and actual sentences. How do they manage?

Activating the Knowledge Bank

The sentence "The cat is on the mat" consists of six words that are easily remembered. Expert readers can easily reproduce the 16 letters, not because the letters are individually remembered, but because they are reconstructed from previous knowledge of written English. What de Groot found, and subsequent research has continually confirmed, is that the difference in higher-order skill between a novice and an expert lies not in mental muscles but in what de Groot called "erudition," a vast store of available, relevant, previously acquired knowledge.

Despite the narrow limitations of working memory, the wealth of contents that can be manipulated by experts through this previously acquired "erudition" is immense. If I already know a lot about baseball, the term "sacrifice fly" can represent a page or two of exposition. Such shorthand representation is a chief timesaving technique of higher-order skills. A short, manageable element (like a phrase) can represent a much larger complex of already-learned meaning. The phrase "World War II" is short and therefore easily remembered, but the content represented by the phrase is enormous. It cannot be grasped by those who, however skillful in other ways, lack that relevant knowledge.

I use this example as a rapid way of indicating why an academic skill like reading depends on learning much more than the foundational ability to form sounds from symbols, turn the sounds into words, and put the words together in sentences. While such formal skills are critically important, they are quite insufficient to comprehend a passage about World War II in the absence of relevant background knowledge. A shorthand way of saying this is that the skill of reading (and listening) depends on, among other things, a previous knowledge of what most of the words in a text mean and refer to.

Developing Expertise

De Groot showed that being an expert in chess does not improve one's memory for randomized chess positions. Tracing the implications of that discovery, psychologists have found that being a critical thinker in chess is even less likely to improve one's skills in areas that are still more remote from chess, like mathematical problem solving or the ability to think logically about politics.

Being good at one mental skill does not necessarily train the mind to be skilled in other domains. This is one of the most solid findings in psychology, confirmed and reconfirmed many times--tested so often possibly because it has been such a surprising and unwelcome finding. People who have just finished a course in logic are barely more logical than those who have never taken such a course. People who have been carefully trained how to solve a problem in one domain are rarely able to solve a problem that has identical structure but lies in a different domain. Those who are skilled at diverse tasks in various domains are people who have managed to acquire broad general knowledge that includes knowledge relevant to those diverse domains. Such generalized skill is in fact a practical aim of a broad, general education. Students who score well on the verbal SAT invariably possess a broad vocabulary that represents broad general knowledge--which is hardly surprising, given that the verbal SAT is essentially an ad vanced vocabulary test.