First Published in 1987. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1987. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this book, Carl Bereiter--a distinguished and well-known cognitive, educational psychologist--presents what he calls "a new way of thinking about knowledge and the mind." He argues that in today's Knowledge Age, education's conceptual tools are inadequate to address the pressing educational challenges and opportunities of the times. Two things are required: first, to replace the mind-as-container metaphor with one that envisions a mind capable of sustaining knowledgeable, intelligent behavior without actually containing stored beliefs; second, to recognize a fundamental difference between knowledge building and learning--both of which are essential parts of education for the knowledge age. Connectionism in cognitive science addresses the first need; certain developments in post-positivist epistemology address the second. The author explores both the theoretical bases and the practical educational implications of this radical change in viewpoint.
The book draws on current new ways of thinking about knowledge and mind, including information processing, cognitive psychology, situated cognition, constructivism, social constructivism, and connectionism, but does not adhere strictly to any "camp." Above all, the author is concerned with developing a way of thinking about the mind that can usher education into the knowledge age. This book is intended as a starting point.

In this book, Carl Bereiter--a distinguished and well-known cognitive, educational psychologist--presents what he calls "a new way of thinking about knowledge and the mind." He argues that in today's Knowledge Age, education's conceptual tools are inadequate to address the pressing educational challenges and opportunities of the times. Two things are required: first, to replace the mind-as-container metaphor with one that envisions a mind capable of sustaining knowledgeable, intelligent behavior without actually containing stored beliefs; second, to recognize a fundamental difference between knowledge building and learning--both of which are essential parts of education for the knowledge age. Connectionism in cognitive science addresses the first need; certain developments in post-positivist epistemology address the second. The author explores both the theoretical bases and the practical educational implications of this radical change in viewpoint.
The book draws on current new ways of thinking about knowledge and mind, including information processing, cognitive psychology, situated cognition, constructivism, social constructivism, and connectionism, but does not adhere strictly to any "camp." Above all, the author is concerned with developing a way of thinking about the mind that can usher education into the knowledge age. This book is intended as a starting point.

Expertise has been around since the dawn of civilisation, but until recently the creation of experts was able to go on without anyone having to understand it, or pay any attention to its social impact. Today, as societies compete to produce more and better experts, the need grows to understand expertise - what lies behind expert performance, how it is acquired, and what keeps people functioning like experts. The authors examine the nature of expert knowledge, both the part that shows and the much larger part that is hidden, and offer an explanation of how it comes about. Hard work, practice, and experience are not enough to make an expert. The expert is recognised by an ability to solve nonroutine problems in a given domain. The expert's secret is their willingness to work at the edge of their competence and to keep reconstructing their skills at higher levels. Expertlike tendencies have been found in some university students, and even some schoolchildren function more like experts than like the other students in their classes. Yet schooling often undermines the development of expertise. Bereiter and Scardamalia describe a kind of classroom culture, the "knowledge-building community" which supports expertlike learning, and extend these ideas to the picture of an "expert society", in which expertise is normal rather than exceptional. Expertise is an expression of the uniquely human potential to go beyond the competencies given us by nature.