Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education by Nat Bartels

BARTELS 15accuracy. However‚ when shown a picture of a chess board with pieces randomly placed‚they were no better than chess novices. This difference was attributed to the chessmasters’ well developed schemata for chess positions. Similar results have been found inother domains such as electronics (Egan & Schwartz‚ 1979)‚ computer science(McKeithen‚ Reitman‚ Reuter & Hirtle‚ 1981) and music (Halpern & Bower‚ 1982).Recognition tasks have also revealed the superiority of experts’ schemata for more thanmemory. Allard and Burnett (1985) found that‚ when shown diverse pictures of avolleyball game‚ expert volleyball players were no better than novices at rememberingfeatures such as players‚ the referee or the ball‚ but they did notice the location of theball much more quickly than novices. In the domain of education‚ Carter and hercolleagues (1988) found that when shown slides of classroom situations‚ experiencedteachers’ schemata showed evidence of deeper categorization than novice teachers’schemata. For example‚ while novices talked about “students around a table”‚ expertssaw “group work”. Research findings with this method have shown strong generaltrends‚ but it is not yet clear if such tasks can reveal specific‚ detailed data on teachers’knowledge.Knowledge Organization TasksThe following data collection tools focus on knowledge organization. Generally‚ it is notdifficult to set up the tasks and quantify the results. What is difficult is to designing tasksto give detailed data on the kind of knowledge you are interested in.Sorting TasksSorting tasks involve giving participants a number of cards with either concepts‚ such ascategories in biology (i.e. “photosynthesis”)‚ examples of the aspect of knowledge understudy (i.e. examples of “Wh- questions”)‚ objects or scenes pictured on them. Theparticipants sort the cards into groups‚ name each group and describe the differencesbetween the groups. The participants can also be asked to try to combine their groupsinto bigger groups or to subdivide each group into smaller groups. There are many