Faculty development strategies for overcoming the “curse of knowledge”

Research shows that novices and experts organize knowledge very differently. Experts may make huge leaps up an educational ladder of inference and often forget how to explain the reasoning process through which they arrived at their complex, deep understandings. Shortcuts become invisible. In an educational setting, this phenomenon is called ldquocurse of knowledgerdquo. It describes how being an expert in something may make it more difficult to infer what a novice requires in order to develop a deep, working knowledge of engineering and scientific content. In the paper, the authors explore potential faculty development strategies to increase awareness of the ldquocurse of knowledgerdquo and offer approaches through which faculty can use their expertise for effective teaching. Several approaches are offered: (i) principles to make messages sticky, (ii) developing more reflective approaches to understanding learning and teaching, (iii) encouraging construction of teaching portfolios, and (iv) ascertaining knowledge that students have at the beginning and throughout a course.