The chunks by which the information is grouped are meant to improve the material's short-term retention, thus bypassing working memory's limited capacity.Ĭhunking makes chess masters look like geniuses because they have honed the different game boards by playing thousands of hours. What makes games like chess such prime targets for believers in the headstart? Let's get into chunking! ChunkingĪ process by which individual pieces of an information set are broken down and then grouped in a meaningful whole. But it is important to remember that this is a spectrum between kind and wicked. Seeing these definitions, I'm sure most of us work in more wicked environments. So the most wicked learning environments will reinforce the wrong types of behavior. Even when it isn't, feedback may be delayed it may be infrequent, it may be nonexistent, or it may be partly accurate or inaccurate in many cases. Wicked - often, some information is hidden. And in these kinds of 'kind' learning environments, if you're cognitively engaged, you get better just by doing the activity.Įxamples chess and golf.

Kind - you do something, all the information is available, you see the consequences, the consequences are immediate and accurate, and adjust accordingly. A paper co-authored by Gary Klein and Daniel Kahneman attempted to answer this question. The answer lies in learning environments. The question is: Do specialists get better with experience, or not? But how many of us want to become golf or chess champions? If you laughed, then we are on the same page. But the main problem is that the most widely cited options are golf or chess. Most of us know of examples like Tiger Woods. He builds on that discussion in his latest effort, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.It's commonplace to assume that starting anything young will lead to success. Author David Epstein argues that the embrace of hyper-specialization as the universal linchpin for success “infects not just individuals, but entire systems, as each specialized group sees a smaller and smaller part of a large puzzle” (12).Įpstein, who has written for Sports Illustrated and ProPublica, published The Sports Gene in 2012, in which he discusses how people who specialize in a particular sport later in life are more successful in the long run than those who specialize earlier in life. Similarly, businesses are implicitly and explicitly promoting deep specialization by cultivating and seeking out candidates with an alphabet soup of esoteric credentials. Parents, coaches, and teachers are pushing children at increasingly earlier ages to become specialists through lots of deliberate practice and repetition.

In recent years, many people have embraced specialization as the preferred method for cultivating elite performance in fields such as sports, medicine, music, and robotics.

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