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HOW DO STUDENTS DEVELOP MASTERY?, Stages, Based on a book chapter. …

- - - - Decomposing complex tasks helps instructors pinpoint skills that students need to develop through targeted practice.
        
        When this happens students’ performance on the overall task often improves significantly.
      - Challenges
        
        Expert blindspot
        
        When a instructor has "unconscious competence" and struggles to "unpack" complex tasks.
        
        In my experience
        
        It is very frustrating as a student to experience the "expert blindspot" of a teacher. When I worked as a pedagogical assistant I noticed how common this was among faculty and I had the opportunity to give them feedback about it and think together about ways to be aware of the blindspot and improve the learning experience of their students.
        
        Wether to encourage practice of isolated skills or in combination
      - Strategies
        
        Being aware of own expert blindspots
        
        Instructors can ask themselves: "What would students have to know or know how to do in order to achieve what I am asking of them?"
        
        Ask for help to do task decomposition
        
        Ask to graduate students, colleagues or people from outside the discipline to review your syllabus or study plan.
        
        Diagnose weak component skills and provide practice opportunities
    - - Complex tasks also require to integrate the component skills and to practice them in combination.
      - Challenges
        
        Cognitive load
        
        The total information-processing demands imposed by a given task exceed what students can manage.
        
        Can be addressed through scaffolding, whereby instructors temporarily relieve some of the cognitive load so that students can focus on particu- lar dimensions of learning.
        
        In my experience
        
        As a pedagogical assistant I recognized how important scaffolding is. Not many teachers apply it but when they do, you can actually see how much the student learning improves.
        
        In my experience
        
        Students performance can be reduced if their cognitive load is high. Sometimes teachers are not aware of this because of their own expert blindspot but once they do, they get to really understand their students and seek for ways to help them learn better.
      - Strategies
        
        Facilitate practice to increase fluency
        
        Give clear expectations to students on what you expect from their performance and what they can do to reach that level.
        
        Temporarily constrain the scope of the task
        
        It can be helpful to minimize cognitive load temporarily while students develop greater fluency with component skills or learn to inte- grate them.
        
        Explicitly include integration in your performance criteria
        
        Include the effective integration of component parts in the performance rubrics of complex tasks.
        
        In my experience
        
        When the expectations are clearly set, the whole learning experience improves. I have seen students (and sometimes I have been one of them) getting frustrated because teachers are requiring skills that were not stated in the rubric or that there were not even taught. Being transparent to students actually makes them feel in a safe learning environment and, in that way, they can benefit from the class and achieve the goals set.
    - - Mastery also requires that students know when and where to use what they have learned
        
        Transfer
        
        To apply skills (or knowledge, strategies, approaches, or habits) learned in one context to a novel context
      - Challenges
        
        Over specificity or context dependance
        
        Students associate knowledge too closely with the context in which they originally learned it and don't know how to apply it outside that context.
        
        Misunderstanding or lack of understanding of the underlying principles and deep structure of knowledge.
        
        Students know what to do but not why.
        
        In my experience
        
        This happens a lot with disciplines like math. Traditional ways of teaching focus on repeating formulas and at the end students didn't know what they were doing, they were just repeating and never got to really learn and transfer that knowledge.
      - Strategies
        
        Give students opportunities to apply skills or knowledge in diverse contexts
        
        Diverse contexts can help students overcome context-dependence and prepare them better to transfer that skill to new contexts.
        
        Discuss conditions of applicability
        
        Explicitly explain the contexts in which particular skills are or are not applicable
        
        Use comparisons to help students identify deep features
        
        Providing structured comparisons helps students learn to differentiate the main features of the problem from the surface characteristics.