(2021-09-08) Chin Accelerated Expertise

Cedric Chin on Accelerated Expertise. Accelerated Expertise is not written for the lay person — it is a book primarily written for organisational psychologists, training program designers and researchers employed in the US military. If you must read it — say because you want to put the ideas in the book to practice — my recommendation is to read Chapters 9-13 and skim everything else

this is a book that pushes the limits of two lesser-known learning theories, and in so doing have created successful accelerated training programs in messy, real-world military and industrial contexts.

In 2008 and 2009, the US Air Force Research Laboratory convened a series of working meetings on ‘accelerated expertise and facilitated retention’, and invited a number of Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) researchers, expertise researchers, and military organisational psychologists

wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Junior officers and enlisted personnel were facing missions and tasks that our military had not had to face since the war in Vietnam, tasks such as counter-insurgency warfare and temporarily governing villages

highly dynamic tasks that require considerable cognitive flexibility

Part 2 presents several demonstrations of successful accelerated training programs, and then an underlying theory for why those training programs work so well. Part 2 also contains a generalised structure for creating these accelerated expertise training programs

This summary will focus on Part 2

The military wanted two things:

It wanted new training methods and learning technologies that could accelerate the achievement of high levels of proficiency

It wanted high retention of knowledge and skill

requirements from the military could be broken down into four granular subgoals

The reason there is a difference between ‘proficiency’ and ‘expertise’ is that the authors do not know if it is possible to accelerate ‘high proficiency’ (sometimes called ‘mastery’, or ‘expertise’)

there is a significant amount of evidence that developing expertise requires up to 10 years of experience, including practice at tough tasks

They conclude, tentatively, that perhaps it is only possible to accelerate proficiency between senior apprentice and junior journeyman levels (or between senior journeyman and junior expert levels).

And perhaps that is good enough!

How to Accelerate Expertise?

Let’s consider the problem from first principles.

I think most of us would first ask: what is the skill tree for this domain? We would attempt to figure out a set of atomised skills and lay them out from the most basic skills to the most advanced

The researchers say: No. Stop. Screw all of that.

What do you do if incremental complexification is off the table? The answer: you cheat.

I’ve talked about the Naturalistic Decision Making branch of psychology in the past. The NDM field contains methods to extract tacit mental models of expertise. These methods are loosely categorised under the name ‘cognitive task analysis’,

Once you have an explicated mental model of the expertise you desire, you may ask a simpler question: what kind of simulations may I design to provoke the construction of those mental models in the heads of my students?

With that in mind, this is the general structure of an accelerated expertise training program

Identify who the domain experts are.

Perform cognitive task analysis on these identified experts to extract their expertise.

As you do step 2, you will be building a case study library of difficult cases

Next, turn your case library into a set of training simulations. This step is a bit of an art

Some training programs may present abstract or generalised principles up front, which are then emphasised through training simulation

Finally, test the program: run your learners through your set of training simulations

a few remarkable things about this approach

case libraries and simulations may be easily updated

Skill retention is very compatible with this approach — experienced practitioners may be put on a spaced-repetition program where they do periodic training simulations

Simulation training gives trainers the option of asking students to perform — and therefore learn from — sensemaking, instead of seeking explicit feedback.

There are many other interesting ideas that I cannot get into, for the sake of brevity. For instance, one fascinating comment, presented in Chapter 14, is the idea that case libraries may serve as the basis of ‘organisational knowledge management’:

Take, for instance, the domain of power generation, where one of the authors was tasked with a project on capturing tacit expertise in a retiring workforce

at an electric plant there will be, say, five out of 1500 people who are irreplaceable

While expertise may be acquired in around 10 years, typically it takes 25-35 years to achieve very high-end proficiency

Case Study: IED Defeat

The Strategic Rehearsal or OpSim is an accelerated expertise training intervention developed by Lia DiBello, mostly used in the context of accelerating business expertise

The Department of Defence began throwing a lot of money at technology to detect and defeat IEDs

they also began looking into the human expertise element of detecting and defeating these devices. The DoD commissioned a handful of NDM researchers to extract expertise from Marines and Soldiers who appeared skilled at IED detection

adversary who is constantly evolving their tactics

realise that IED tactics differed greatly from region to region

extract expertise from the heads of Warfighters who were adapted to local contexts. These Warfighters seemed to be able to ‘see the invisible’

the most skilled Marines — the ones who were most successful at recognising a danger zone in advance — were able to put themselves in the adversary’s shoes

understand the constraints that these insurgents were working with.

you now have an extracted mental model of IED defeat expertise. How would you go about teaching it to novice Marines?

they took an existing military video game called VBS, and then built out a module in the game where the Marines had to role-play as insurgents

In the end, US Marines and Soldiers were required to play a few rounds of this game as part of their training

play a few hours of the game

The Underlying Theory

In Chapter 11, the authors assert that two core learning theories underpin their training approach, and may be combined:
Cognitive Flexibility Theory, or CFT, and
Cognitive Transformation Theory, or CTT

Because the two theories share the same core syllogisms, especially around mental model formation and knowledge shields, the researchers argue that they may both be combined

Cognitive Flexibility Theory

advanced learning is promoted by emphasizing the interconnectedness of multiple cases and concepts along multiple dimensions, and the use of multiple, highly organized representations.

Barriers to advanced learning include complexity, interactions, context-dependence, and illstructuredness (inconsistent patterns of concepts-in-combination).

Cognitive Transformation Theory

Learning consists of the elaboration and replacement of mental models.

Therefore learning must also involve unlearning.

Success of “cognitive conflict” methods at producing conceptual change.

Mental models are reductive and fragmented, and therefore incomplete and flawed.

Learning is discontinuous.

The emphasis of CFT is on overcoming simplifying mental models. Hence it advises against applying instructional methods that involve progressive complexity. CTT, on the other hand, focuses on strategies, and the learning and unlearning of strategies.

CFT and CTT each try to achieve increases in proficiency, but in different ways. For CFT, it is flexibility and for CTT, it is a better mental model, but one that will have to be thrown out later on

The implications of both theories are quite profound, and are expressed in the training approach presented at the heart of Accelerated Expertise. But they may also be found in many of the training approaches found in the NDM world.

By the middle of Part 2 of the book, the two theories are combined into one core theory, like so: The core syllogism of the CFT-CTT merger...

Wrapping Up

two biggest takeaways from the first half of the book

first, everything in the expertise literature is difficult to generalise. Some methods work well in some domains but not in others

a great many things about training can probably never be known. For instance, it is nearly impossible to isolate the factors that result in successful training in real world contexts

yet, given that we’ve mostly worked in applied domains, our training programs seem to deliver results for businesses and soldiers, even if we don’t perfectly understand how they do so.

We have discovered several things that work — the biggest of which is Cognitive Task Analysis, which enable us to extract actual mental models of expertise.

Perhaps we just have to keep trying things, and check that our learners get better faster, and we can only speculate at why our programs work; we can never know for sure.”