ABSTRACT
Experts are able to think about these different levels because they understand that a word or symbol can be thought about in different ways and so can connect the descriptive, macroscopic levels to the explanatory submicroscopic, mathematical and cellular levels. This ‘jumping’ is very demanding when you are first learning science because it's not always clear how ideas at one level relate to ideas in another. The psychologist K. Anders Ericsson sees expertise like this as developing, not through experience, that is, exposing students to all levels at once and hoping that they will pick it up by osmosis, but rather through something called deliberate practice. Knowledge in the list above can be placed into one of two camps – procedural knowledge and conceptual knowledge. Thinking about these two types of knowledge can be helpful because it affects how we will design the practice activities.
