Deliberate Blending to Foster Expertise

Careful research shows that a critical factor in the development of expertise in domains from music to sports to chess is the amount of time spent practicing specific components of expertise, so-called "deliberate practice." The standard MIT approach to teaching 8.01 rests largely on having the students complete lots of problems. This approach does not generate conceptual expertise, in spite of the in-problem tutoring.

The aim of this proposal is to create Deliberate Practice Problems (DPPs) that emphasize deliberate practice of specific skills that experts possess. The heart of this proposal is the development and testing of DPPs targeted at the specific skills that characterize experts. Project instructors will write such problems, administer them in the blended class 8.011 (8.01 in the Spring semester), then put them in the summer edX MOOC "8.MReV" and collect student use data on them. Subsequent analysis of these data should show the possibilities of using these DPPs not only to improve performance on other DPP’s, but also to serve as test questions for expertise. Sophisticated psychometrics will be used to investigate two hypotheses: (1) DPPs of a specific type do in fact require separately identifiable student skills, and (2) different specific problem types designed to inculcate a particular expert skill show significant transfer between them, suggesting that they address the same skill.