Progression skills module 4: Getting ahead: personal learning and thinking skills

Progression skills modules are designed to support schools in delivering practical pupil workshops to help focus gifted and talented (G&T) or potential G&T pupils to aim high and achieve their best. This module develops the work of Progression skills module 2 to explore further independent study skills, including higher level reading skills, précis and critical thinking skills. Comprises: teacher notes, slide presentation, & pupil handouts

Expertise and intuition: A tale of three theories

Several authors have hailed intuition as one of the defining features of expertise. In particular, while disagreeing on almost anything that touches on human cognition and artificial intelligence, Hubert Dreyfus and Herbert Simon agreed on this point. However, the highly influential theories of intuition they proposed differed in major ways, especially with respect to the role given to search and as to whether intuition is holistic or analytic. Both theories suffer from empirical weaknesses. In this paper, we show how, with some additions, a recent theory of expert memory (the template theory) offers a coherent and wide-ranging explanation of intuition in expert behaviour. It is shown that the theory accounts for the key features of intuition: it explains the rapid onset of intuition and its perceptual nature, provides mechanisms for learning, incorporates processes showing how perception is linked to action and emotion, and how experts capture the entirety of a situation. In doing so, the new theory addresses the issues problematic for Dreyfus’s and Simon’s theories. Implications for research and practice are discussed

Monte Carlo Planning method estimates planning horizons during interactive social exchange

Reciprocating interactions represent a central feature of all human exchanges. They have been the target of various recent experiments, with healthy participants and psychiatric populations engaging as dyads in multi-round exchanges such as a repeated trust task. Behaviour in such exchanges involves complexities related to each agent's preference for equity with their partner, beliefs about the partner's appetite for equity, beliefs about the partner's model of their partner, and so on. Agents may also plan different numbers of steps into the future. Providing a computationally precise account of the behaviour is an essential step towards understanding what underlies choices. A natural framework for this is that of an interactive partially observable Markov decision process (IPOMDP). However, the various complexities make IPOMDPs inordinately computationally challenging. Here, we show how to approximate the solution for the multi-round trust task using a variant of the Monte-Carlo tree search algorithm. We demonstrate that the algorithm is efficient and effective, and therefore can be used to invert observations of behavioural choices. We use generated behaviour to elucidate the richness and sophistication of interactive inference

Monte Carlo Planning method estimates planning horizons during interactive social exchange

Reciprocating interactions represent a central feature of all human exchanges. They have been the target of various recent experiments, with healthy participants and psychiatric populations engaging as dyads in multi-round exchanges such as a repeated trust task. Behaviour in such exchanges involves complexities related to each agent's preference for equity with their partner, beliefs about the partner's appetite for equity, beliefs about the partner's model of their partner, and so on. Agents may also plan different numbers of steps into the future. Providing a computationally precise account of the behaviour is an essential step towards understanding what underlies choices. A natural framework for this is that of an interactive partially observable Markov decision process (IPOMDP). However, the various complexities make IPOMDPs inordinately computationally challenging. Here, we show how to approximate the solution for the multi-round trust task using a variant of the Monte-Carlo tree search algorithm. We demonstrate that the algorithm is efficient and effective, and therefore can be used to invert observations of behavioural choices. We use generated behaviour to elucidate the richness and sophistication of interactive inference

The Roles of recognition processes and look-ahead search in time-constrained expert problem solving: Evidence from grandmaster level chess.

Chess has long served as an important standard task environment for research on human memory and problem-solving abilities and processes. In this paper, we report evidence on the relative importance of recognition processes and planning (look-ahead) processes in very high level expert performance in chess. The data show that the rated skill of a top-level grandmaster is only slightly lower when he is playing simultaneously against a half dozen grandmaster opponents than under tournament conditions that allow much more time for each move. As simultaneous play allows little time for look-ahead processes, the data indicate that recognition, based on superior chess knowledge, plays a much larger part in high-level skill in this task than does planning by looking ahead

How Do Real Options Concepts Fit in Agile Requirements Engineering?

Agile requirements engineering is driven by creating business value for the client and heavily involves the client in decision-making under uncertainty. Real option thinking seems to be suitable in supporting the client’s decision making process at inter-iteration time. This paper investigates the fit between real option thinking and agile requirements engineering. We first look into previously published experiences in the agile software engineering literature to identify (i) ‘experience clusters’ suggesting the ways in which real option concepts fit into the agile requirements process and (ii) ‘experience gaps’ and under-researched agile requirements decision-making topics which require further empirical studies. Furthermore, we conducted a cross-case study in eight agile development organizations and interviewed 11 practitioners about their decision-making process. The results suggest that options are almost always identified, reasoned about and acted upon. They are not expressed in quantitative terms, however, they are instead explicitly or implicitly taken\ud into account during the decision-making process at interiteration time

Thinking about Attention in Games: Backward and Forward Induction

Behavioral economics improves economic analysis by using psychological regularity to suggest limits on rationality and self-interest (e.g. Camerer and Loewenstein 2003). Expressing these regularities in formal terms permits productive theorizing, suggests new experiments, can contribute to psychology, and can be used to shape economic policies which make normal people better off

Disability: getting it “right”.

This paper critically engages with Tom Shakespeare’s book Disability rights and wrongs. It concentrates on his attempt to demolish the social model of disability, as well as his sketch of an “alternative” approach to understanding “disability”. Shakespeare’s critique, it is argued, does British disability studies a “wrong” by presenting it as a meagre discipline that has not been able to engage with disability and impairment effects in an analytically sophisticated fashion. What was required was a measured presentation and evaluation of the rich mix of theoretical and empirically based ideas to be found in the discipline, as the groundwork for forward thinking located within a social oppression paradigm. Shakespeare’s undermining of the discipline’s credibility in the eyes of outsiders and newcomers represents a diversionary missed opportunity by an influential writer and activist. Shakespeare’s book1 has certainly stirred up debate, and invited a flurry of angry reviews, in disability studies (DS) in the UK—the social science discipline that has been developing radical ideas about disability and disablism since the 1980s. Peopled by both disabled academics and like-minded non-disabled researchers and writers, the DS community recognises that Shakespeare’s book seeks to deliver a fatal wound to what he sees as its sacred cow: the British social model of disability. Shakespeare explains that what he calls the “strong” version of the social model of disability was formulated by Michael Oliver, a leading DS writer and disability activist, on the basis of the social and political ideas advanced in the 1970s by a group of disabled individuals fighting to free themselves from what they experienced as an oppressive care system that relegated and segregated people with serious impairments to residential institutions and to the category of the unemployable.2 3 In short, the social model asserts that “disability” is not caused