Introduction to Michelene Chi's Rumelhart Paper

The Rumelhart Prize was awarded to Professor Michelene (Micki) T. H. Chi in 2019. In honor of that award and its recipient, we are pleased to publish the paper which was inspired by her Rumelhart address at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. In that paper, she asks three core questions: (1) why decades of research have made only minor impacts on classroom teaching and learning, (2) whether this is a problem of diagnoses or application, and (3) what can be done, at this point in history, to close the gap between research findings and classroom implementation. Micki's beginnings as a researcher were contemporaneous with the beginnings of Cognitive Science itself—both began in the early 1970s. Early in her graduate career, she published her first paper, Chi and Chase (1972), “Effects of modality and similarity on context recall” in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. Her 1981 paper, “Categorization and representation of physics problems by experts and novices” (Chi, Feltovich, & Glaser, 1981), has become a citation classic with 2,984 citations to date. Indeed, of her five most cited papers, four have been cited more than 1,000 times each. However, as the past Executive Editor of Topics in Cognitive Science I am pleased that I solicited her fifth most cited paper for the first issue of this journal in January 2009. As this Chi (2009) paper is 12 years younger than any other of her top five, we are pleased that it has been cited 736 times. Indeed, we look forward to having that paper, as well as her newest paper, surpass all of her current top four papers in scholarly impact! Micki's research has focused on different issues across the decades. The 1970s were her period of looking at differences in basic cognitive processes between children and adults. With the 1980s, newer techniques and questions arose which reflected the modern beginnings of cognitive science. In this period, her above-mentioned 1981 paper, published in our sister journal Cognitive Science, captured the zeitgeist of the times and, as of May 2021, has also captured 2,985 citations. A less well cited but an equally good representative of the explosion of new questions and new directions was the Chi and Koeske (1983) paper titled “Network representation of a child's dinosaur knowledge,” which focuses on a single subject—a 4-year old boy, with an encyclopedic knowledge of over 40 different types of dinosaurs. The 1990s began with a shift in Micki's work towards the topic of “self-explanations.” This topic arrived with a roar in her 1989 paper titled “Self-explanations: How students study and use examples in learning to solve problems” (Chi, Bassok, Lewis, Reimann, & Glaser, 1989). A series of papers on self-explanation followed, including seminal work on the role of self-explanation in learning (e.g., Chi, 1997, 2005, 2009, 2011; Chi & VanLehn, 1991; Chi & Wylie, 2014; Chi et al., 2018; Chi, De Leeuw, Chiu, & Lavancher, 1994; Chi, Roscoe, Slotta, Roy, & Chase, 2012; Chi, Siler, Jeong, Yamauchi, & Hausmann, 2001; Chi, Slotta, & De Leeuw, 1994; Hashem, Chi, & Friedman, 2003; VanLehn, Jones, & Chi, 1992). This annotated history of Chi's work brings us more or less to the present. The stream of her life's work, especially in the past 20 years, has shown that theory can be applied to improve teaching and learning. However, knowing what produces results is a very different type of knowledge than is knowing how to get others to understand what they must do to produce results—especially when each class of students, each classroom teacher, and each set of classroom resources differ one from the other. How can the key insights gained by laboratory research and the occasional, classroom implementation of laboratory insights, be brought to bear in the everyday world of primary and secondary school teaching? How can the research be packaged so as to avoid what might seem to be vacuous generalities while enabling classroom elementary and high school teachers to first understand and then harness the insights of cognitive science theory for everyday classroom practice? That is the question which Michelene T. H. Chi addresses in her current work and that is the focus of her Rumelhart Paper published in this invited paper of topiCS.