More than half a century later, in the late 1950s, psychologists began to apply computational insights to issues of expertise, intelligence and transfer. They identified certain methods and strategies which looked to be common to learning in different domains - study skills, thinking skills and structured approaches to problem solving. Such 'weak' methods were thought in the late 60s and early 70s to be of universal application, the explicit teaching of which would help the novice learner deal with completely new subject areas. 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'.