Skill formation
How a skill is built, and how it is measured. The topic gathers two literatures that usually stay on separate shelves — the cognitive science of skill acquisition (deliberate practice, cognitive apprenticeship, cognitive load, the transfer problem) and the assessment scholarship of grading and feedback (formative assessment, the feedback-effectiveness research, the ungrading movement). What runs between them is the gap between what builds a skill and what a grade rewards. Research, writing, and working with AI are the worked examples the topic returns to.
view the territory →◊ concepts
Cognitive apprenticeship · Cognitive load · Deliberate practice · Feedback loop · Formative assessment · Intrinsic motivation · Lateral reading · Mastery learning · Specifications grading · The transfer problem · Ungrading
❡ people
Alfie Kohn · Allan Collins · Benjamin Bloom · Daniel Willingham · Dylan Wiliam · Ethan Mollick · John Hattie · John Sweller · K. Anders Ericsson · Linda B. Nilson · Mike Caulfield · Paul Black · D. Royce Sadler · Ruth Butler · Sam Wineburg · Susan D. Blum
§ sources
- Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment
- The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring
- Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead)
- Enhancing and Undermining Intrinsic Motivation: The Effects of Task-Involving and Ego-Involving Evaluation on Interest and Performance
- Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers
- Cognitive Apprenticeship: Teaching the Crafts of Reading, Writing, and Mathematics
- Transfer on Trial: Intelligence, Cognition, and Instruction
- The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance
- Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
- The Power of Feedback
- The Case Against Grades
- Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI
- Specifications Grading: Restoring Rigor, Motivating Students, and Saving Faculty Time
- Formative Assessment and the Design of Instructional Systems
- Cognitive Load During Problem Solving: Effects on Learning
- Why Don't Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom
- Lateral Reading and the Nature of Expertise: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information