ABSTRACT
The latest wave of cognitive learning theories have categorized teaching in a rather different way from past generations of psychologists. The metaphors of ‘conditioning responses’ and ‘pouring information into memory stores’ have been replaced by a new approach to learning. This asks the question: how can the world view of a novice be transformed into the world view of an expert? It is generally agreed that humans have an enormous amount of knowledge stored in memory about actions, probable consequences and the likely reactions of other people. The processes which enable us to understand language depend not only on knowing how to speak a language but also on the purposes of a conversation. Knowledge of objects which are eatable, rigid, dangerous, good for writing, represent just a tiny fraction of what we know about the world. From this pont of view most people can be thought of as experts in living, although even in this wide arena some people seem to have more expertise than others.
