General programmes contrived to teach general skills are ineffective' declaimed E D Hirsch in 'Cultural Literacy' as recently as 1987, 'We should direct our attention undeviatingly towards what schools teach', by that he means the content. Experts, it was noted, had better memory for items in their area of experience, than elsewhere. Specialists also have the ability to 'cluster' related materials of considerable complexity. Research from the early 1980's, however, suggested that domain specific knowledge and skills are, of themselves, not sufficient - there is more to intelligence and expert performance than just subject knowledge. Thorndyke would have liked that.
Metacognitive instruction attempts to transfer the critics role from the teacher to the student.
We have got to do a lot fewer things in school. The greatest enemy of understanding is 'coverage'. As long as you are determined to cover everything, you actually ensure that most kids are not going to understand. You have got to take enough time to get kids deeply involved in something so they can think about it in lots of different ways and apply it - not just at school, but at home and on the street and so on. It is with such a combination of high order skills that Intelligent Novices can use their knowledge flexibly to solve ill-structured, novel problems.