Reflections on Chapters 1 and 2 of How People Learn

Essentially, How People Learn concludes that experts differ from novices not only in the amount of information they possess on a particular topic, but how they access and think about that knowledge. They draw on a number of studies (most of them conducted in the 1970s) in order to make this claim, using experts in the fields of physics, history, mathematics, and chess. The chess study, for example, discovered that a Grand Master differs from an A Class player not in the number of possible moves they consider, but simply the effectiveness and suitability of these moves. In other words, they don't try out every possible permutation before deciding on a move, just the ones that their brains have already cross-referenced for deployment in this scenario. Less experienced players, on the other hand, are much more likely to take a sequential approach for considering plays.