I’ve found myself thinking and conversing a lot about learning and curiosity as I navigate this phase of transition in life. I keep returning to the idea of skill transfer and exploring ways to strategically maximize the joy filled dopamine hit of trying something interesting and/or hard and figuring it out. Here’s a talk I gave on my observations thus far.
The sheer joy that chasing curiosity brings me has always driven me to encourage that type of curiosity in others. I make a concerted effort to be active in my tech communities helping others and sowing the seeds of curiosity. Among those groups theres also many good conversations happening around mentorship and learning.
I recently fell in a late night internet rabbit hole as one is wont to do. I started reading psychology research on skill and knowledge transfer between individuals. I came across this interesting paper: Bothered by Abstraction: The Effect of Expertise on Knowledge Transfer and Subsequent Novice Performance. The findings described in the abstract echoed strains of my mental model of learning and skill transfer so I dove in.
In a nutshell, the research team was attempting to test the impact expertise has on knowledge transfer. They had beginners learn a simple skill they had no background in (constructing a simple electronic circuit). They had relative experts perform the same skill. Then both experts and beginners made instructional videos for novices. As some of you may have experienced, a relative beginner can be more effective than an expert in getting knowledge transferred to a novice, and that was the case here. The paper supports the idea that it is difficult for experts to separate out the early concrete skills from the larger, hierarchical abstract concepts they have built on top of them. This makes beginners potentially more effective teachers in this particular scenario.
In their instructional videos, the experts used more abstract and advanced statements to explain the task. The beginners gave more simple, concrete statements. The beginner-taught novices had a higher rate of success on the initial task. I remember when I was teaching Lighting Design realizing that I didn’t remember how I actually learned a good chunk of the material I was now teaching…I simply ‘knew it” and became painfully aware that wouldn’t really be particularly useful to my students. I couldn’t extract how I learned the fundamentals from the larger models and concepts I had built on them in my brain. For those with expertise, it may be difficult to get away from more complex abstractions and advanced language when trying to relate to the current learning experience of the novice. You’re too far removed from it.
Experts don’t fret - it got particularly interesting when they gave the novices a second task. Half of them got the same task again, the other half got a new variant in a similar domain. In this second round, those that learned the first task from the expert and repeated the original task saw larger improvements on their performance than the beginner-taught novices. Those that received a different, related task also performed better if they learned the first task from the expert.
My key takeaways from reading this paper through the lens of learning and teaching lots of new things lately:
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Relative beginners can be great teachers for skills they recently gained a level of competency in. They likely remember the experience of adding that bit of knowledge from a novice perspective. Leverage this when you’re doing something new and pay it forward while it’s fresh!
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Experts - be conscious when teaching basics to novices to emphasize simple statements and concrete steps for the first exposure to a new skill. You’re likely not doing it as much as you think you are.
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For all skill levels, the rate of success on learning a new skill is likely to be higher the first time if you focus on concrete, simple statements.
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Working outward from the concrete to the abstract accelerates learning and improvement on the target skill and transfer to adjacent skills.