When I was at SUNY Geneseo as a Math major, I took a course designed for high school math teachers. In addition to having to complete a New York State Regents exam for homework every night (very humbling), Dr. West made us do math all semester long in base 12. That meant that we got to use all the regular digits (0-9) but also t for ten and e for eleven. For example. 8 in base 10 (base 10 is what we use every day) is also 8 in base 12. But 10 is t. And 50 is 42. And 58 is 4t. Weird, right?
Dr. West did this because he wanted us to remember what it feels like to do hard math (Regents exams are not super easy) while still wrestling with everyday math that we took for granted.
Dr. West recognized that as math majors, we suffered the Curse of Knowledge. As Peter Brown says in Make it Stick:
What psychologists call the curse of knowledge is our tendency to underestimate how long it will take another person to learn something new or perform a task that we have already mastered. Teachers often suffer this illusion—the calculus instructor who finds calculus so easy that she can no longer place herself in the shoes of the student who is just starting out and struggling with the subject (p. 115).
As functional experts in our domain we fall victim to this often. Brown continues “As you get more expert in complex areas, your models in those areas grow more complex, and the component steps that compose them fade into the background of memory” (p. 119).
And it’s not just educators! In The Extended Mind, Annie Murphy Paul reminds us that many experts are only able to clearly articulate about 30% of what they know! There was an interesting study in 2012 that asked trauma surgeons to clearly describe the insertion of a shunt into the femoral artery:
Surgeons neglected to cite nearly 70 percent of the actions they performed during the procedure. A study of expert experimental psychologists found that they omitted or inaccurately characterized an average of 75 percent of the steps they took when designing experiments and analyzing data. And a study of expert computer programmers revealed that they enumerated fewer than half of the tasks they actually carried out when debugging a computer program (p. 181).
Granted, that procedure – like many surgical procedures – has many steps. But to only recall 30% is surprising. I am teaching a Python course this semester and I, too, have the curse. One tell-tale sign of the curse of knowledge is failure to recognize the micro-steps. I’ve been programming for most of my life, so I “chunk” my understanding:
number_of_eggs = int(input("Enter the number of eggs: "))To me, this is one line of code that asks the user how many eggs they have and stores it in a variable. But someone new to programming is confronted with all sorts of questions:
- Why is the variable name typed funny? Do I have to do it that way? If so, how do I know a good variable name?
- What is
int? - Why aren’t we using
print()to display things on the screen – is that whatinput()does?
The line of code is basic. It’s the bare minimum of any computer language. And after a few weeks of writing programs to elicit information from the user and storing it in a variable for later, Python students will also consider it basic. But the first few times students encounter this challenge will require immense recollection, parsing, and trial and error. In this case, my disadvantage is that I know what to look for. I don’t know the blind spots that most Python students are experiencing. Again, Paul:
Experts have another edge over novices: they know what to attend to and what to ignore. Presented with a professionally relevant scenario, experts will immediately home in on its most salient aspects, while beginners waste their time focusing on unimportant features (p. 183).
One way to combat the Curse of Knowledge is to practice “re-enactive empathy”. Devoting considerable thought to how novices experience what experts take for granted can inform better instruction. Paul points out a 2015 study called Back to the Beginning: Rediscovering Inexperience Helps Experts Give Advice:
Zhang enlisted a group of experienced guitarists to play their instruments; half of them were asked to play as they normally would, while the other half were instructed to reverse the position of their instrument and play it with their non-dominant hand. All the musicians were then asked to watch a video clip of a beginning guitar student trying to form basic chords, and to offer him advice. The guidance provided by the guitarists in the reversed instrument condition—those who had so recently struggled themselves to play in an unfamiliar manner—was judged to be especially helpful (p. 182).
For me, that means when I’m reviewing code in front of the entire class, my inner monologue is dictated for the whole class to hear. And that inner monologue is digesting every single word on every single line of code and offering up explanations for each atom of code.
In addition to re-enactive empathy, teachers can cultivate a community of curse breakers – encourage your students to ask for elucidation often. Prompts like “What questions do you have?” and “Please help me break this process into smaller steps” are good ways to actively engage learners.
Good luck breaking your curse!
Photo by Gwendal Cottin on Unsplash
