Educational Leadership - October 2017

n May 2009, a momentary glitch on Air
France Flight 447 sealed the fate of all 288
souls aboard. As the Airbus left the coast of
Had Bonin and his (equally inexperienced)
copilot done nothing at all, they likely could’ve
landed the plane safely. Instead, as related in an
article by William Langewiesche (2014), Bonin
panicked. He pulled back on the stick, pitching
the plane steeply upward and sending it into a
spin-stall. Again, he could’ve solved the problem
by doing nothing; the plane would’ve returned to a
level path. Yet he kept trying to solve the problem
the only way he could think of—by pulling back
on the stick. By the time his senior captain awoke
from a nap and rushed to the cockpit, it was too
late. Moments later, they plunged into the dark
ocean.

This tragic case of inexperience in the cockpit illustrates an important insight from research about what it takes to solve complex problems: expert schemas.

Learning from Chess

Much of what we know about how experts solve problems comes from studying chess grandmasters, who can quickly memorize the location of pieces on a chess board—unless those pieces are placed randomly on the board. As this latter detail indicates, the masters don’t have photographic memories, but rather an acquired ability to see patterns resulting from moves (De Groot, 1966). Similar abilities have been found among experts who solve complex problems in other arenas. Experts see problems more clearly and can select among multiple possible strategies to solve them.

According to seminal work on the topic (Newell

& Simon, 1972), what experts have that novices lack are schema that allow them to ( 1) categorize a problem; ( 2) construct a mental representation of it; ( 3) search for appropriate problem-solving strategies; ( 4) retrieve and apply those strategies; ( 5) evaluate the problem-solving strategies; ( 6) repeat steps 1 to 4 if they don’t arrive at a solution; and ( 7) store that solution for later use. At the heart of these schema are two kinds of knowledge— declarative (knowing what) and procedural knowledge (knowing how)—that experts integrate. When they face a complex problem, the experts rely on their declarative knowledge to understand it and their procedural knowledge to solve it (Nokes, Schunn,

& Chi, 2010).

A small-scale comparison of novices ( first-year college students) and experts (doctoral students) further illustrates how experts use schema when tackling complex problems—in this case, researching and writing a 400-word essay on whether it’s best to follow printed expiration dates