Adaptive Expertise: Teach for the Problem Students Haven't Met Yet

Your students can do the standard consolidation question in their sleep. Then the exam changes one unfamiliar detail, and the hall goes very, very quiet.

Maria Mylopoulos and three Toronto colleagues call the missing skill adaptive expertise. It is the ability to adapt to uncertain, complex or new situations while staying effective and efficient in routine ones.

Their central claim is reassuring. When teaching aims at conceptual knowledge, which is knowing why, students do well on tests of routine efficiency and of preparation for future learning, according to studies they cite. So you needn't choose between efficiency and future learning.

Try this first: since knowing why seems to pay off on both kinds of test, attach a "because" to every journal entry you show. Rather than just "debit expense, credit prepaid", say why the asset shrinks. That's our suggestion, adapted from the paper's examples.

What they found

The paper starts from two kinds of knowledge. Procedural knowledge is knowing what to do, and it pairs with the conceptual knowledge above. Adaptive expertise needs both, because the "why" is what lets people build new solutions when the known ones don't fit.

The aim, they argue, is preparation for future learning, which they describe as the ability to learn new information, use resources well and invent new procedures. Hence Tip 1, which says teachers prepare future experts rather than produce finished ones.

Tip 2 warns against judging teaching on short-term results alone. Teaching aimed at future learning may only show its benefit later, the authors explain, which can lead educators to doubt it.

Tip 3 says teaching can be designed for both short-term success and long-term learning.

The remaining tips cluster around three ideas. The first is linking kinds of knowledge, so Tip 4 contrasts "proximate instruction", where related facts merely sit side by side, with "integrated instruction", which spells out the link.

Tips 5 and 6 add that almost any knowledge explaining clinical content can be integrated, including social and systems knowledge, and that regular "why" questions help even when answered wrongly.

The second idea is productive struggle, which Tips 7 and 8 cover and Article 04 explores in full. Tips 9 and 10 bring in varied cases and "what if" questions, which make students explain what each change means for the concept.

The third idea is assessment. Tip 11 recommends frequent, low-stakes assessment for learning, and Tip 12 asks for assessment that matches the teaching. Otherwise, the authors warn, standard tests can make careful integrated teaching look like wasted time.

What they did

This is a Twelve Tips guidance paper. Mylopoulos, Naomi Steenhof, Amit Kaushal and Nicole Woods report no new data, so each tip leans on studies they cite.

Article 04's paper comes from the same group, Mylopoulos and colleagues at the University of Toronto's Wilson Centre, so read the two as one school of thought.

Before you rebuild a module around twelve tips, though, it helps to weigh what sits behind them.

The reality check: this is guidance for medical curricula, not an experiment. Its supporting studies are cited rather than presented, and none involved accounting students.

Recall, too, the practical catch the authors concede in Tip 2. Teaching aimed at future learning may not lift short-term scores, so a standard exam may not show the benefit.