Sublime

Slowly I began to formulate what I still consider the fundamental fact about learning: Anything is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection of models. If you can’t, anything can be painfully difficult.

Out of the crucible of computational concepts and metaphors, of predicted widespread computer power and of actual experiments with children, the idea of Piagetian learning has emerged as an important organizing principle. Translated into practical terms this idea sets a research agenda concerned with creating conditions for children to explore “nat

Skunk Works creator Kelly Johnson was a visionary on at least two fronts—designing airplanes and organizing genius. Johnson seemed to know intuitively what talented people needed to do their best work, how to motivate them, and how to make sure that the desired product was created as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In time, Johnson wrote down t

When confronted, therefore, with the task of inventing functions like literacy and numeracy, our brain had at its disposal three ingenious design principles: the capacity to make new connections among older structures; the capacity to form areas of exquisitely precise specialization for recognizing patterns in information; and the ability to learn

De Groot illustrated this in an elegant fashion in his 1944 study of chess players. He tested players of every level, from former world champions to beginners, seeking to unlock the secrets of master chess. He gave the players a set of positions from games to memorize, then recorded how well they could reproduce them. Predictably, the stronger the

Let us begin with a closer look at the problem of prerequisites. Someone who wanted to learn about aerodynamics might lose interest upon seeing the set of prerequisites, including mechanics and hydrodynamics, that follow an exciting course description in a college catalogue. If one wants to learn about Shakespeare, one finds no list of prerequisite

In retrospect, we know that the road that led from nineteenth-century transportation was quite different. The invention of the automobile and the airplane did not come from a detailed study of how their predecessors, such as horse-drawn carriages, worked or did not work. Yet, this is the model for contemporary educational research.

played games with my students, had them talk out loud before they made a move and after I made mine, and wrote down their thoughts. To my amazement, I was soon seeing problems that I never imagined they possessed. That last line is remarkable because Silman was far from