The acquisition of expertise in the classroom: are current models of education appropriate?

Frontiers in Psychology

Craig P. Speelman¹ 

关键词: expertise;    skill;    numeracy;    mathematics;    computer games;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00580

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

According to the five principles of skill acquisition, overcoming the problems identified here with the traditional Western classroom would require children to be presented with a structured learning program that involved instruction regarding each level of a hierarchy of concepts, interspersed with practice opportunities. Further, each child would only be introduced to the next level of a concept when they have reached some degree of fluency with the previous level. Until that point they would continue practicing with problems at the previous level, possibly with some form of intervention by a tutor to ensure their understanding of the concept is appropriate. This is probably the aim of most teachers, however the level of monitoring required to ensure each child has reached the requisite level of fluency is possibly beyond the capacity of a teacher responsible for 20–30 children in the one classroom. An alternative model would be to develop computer software in the form of games and tailored training tasks. Such software can be developed to not only provide hours of practice opportunities, but it can do so in an exciting and enjoyable manner that will hold the attention of children and provide them with the motivation to spend many hours mastering a concept (Rosas et al., 2003). Further, the software can be designed to deliver feedback on every response, and monitor the level of performance (i.e., both accuracy and response time) such that a child will be allowed to move to the next higher level of the concept when they have mastered the previous level, as is the case with computer games designed purely for entertainment (Towne et al., 2014). A recent study (Main and O'Rourke, 2011) demonstrated the benefits of such software, where the speed and accuracy of performance on a standard arithmetic test was improved for children who had played a maths game (Dr Kawashima's Brain Training) on a hand held games console compared to children who received standard classroom lessons.

【 授权许可】

CC BY