In this section are titles and reviews of books from developmental psychology, anthropology, archeology, and cognitive science.Most of these books focus on what the US National Research Council calls “the Science of Learning.

National Research Council, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School (1999).

An authoritative report from the American National Academy of Sciences detailing how current findings from the cognitive sciences require a reappraisal of dominant educational practices.

Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ (1995).

Drawing on groundbreaking brain and behavioral research Goleman shows the factors at work when people of high IQ flounder and those of modest IQ do surprisingly well. These factors add up to a different way of being smart. Emotional intelligence includes self-awareness and impulse control, persistence, zeal and self-motivation, empathy and social deftness.

From the publisher:

Is IQ destiny? Not nearly as much as we think. Daniel Goleman’s fascinating and persuasive book argues that our view of human intelligence is far too narrow, ignoring a crucial range of abilities that matter immensely in terms of how we do in life.

Drawing on groundbreaking brain and behavioral research, Goleman shows the factors at work when people of high IQ flounder and those of modest IQ do surprisingly well. These factors add up to a different way of being smart – one he terms “emotional intelligence.” Emotional intelligence includes self-awareness and impulse control, persistence, zeal and self-motivation, empathy and social deftness.

These are the qualities that mark people who excel in life: whose intimate relationships flourish, who are stars in the workplace. These are also the hallmarks of character and self-discipline, of altruism and compassion – basic capacities needed if our society is to thrive.

As Goleman demonstrates, the personal costs of deficits in emotional intelligence can range from problems in marriage and parenting to poor physical health. (New research shows that chronic anger and anxiety create as great a health risk as chain-smoking). Lack of emotional intelligence can sabotage the intellect and ruin careers. Perhaps the greatest toll is on children, for whom risks include depression, eating disorders and unwanted pregnancy, aggressiveness and violent crime.

But the news is hopeful. Emotional intelligence is not fixed at birth. Goleman’s argument is based on a highly original synthesis of current research, including new insights into the brain architecture underlying emotion and rationality. He shows precisely how emotional intelligence can be nurtured and strengthened in all of us. And because the emotional lessons a child learns actually sculpt the brain’s circuitry, Goleman provides detailed guidance as to how parents and schools can best use this window of opportunity in childhood.

The message of this eye-opening book is one we must take to heart: the true “bell curve” for a democracy must measure emotional intelligence. Daniel Goleman offers a new vision of excellence and a vital new curriculum for life that can change the future for us and for our children.

For on-line information about other Random House, Inc. books and authors, seewww.randomhouse.com.

Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of the Mind: The cognitive origins of art, religion and science (1996)

From the publisher:

Here is an exhilarating intellectual performance, in the tradition of Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind and Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct. On the way to showing how the world of our ancient ancestors shaped our modern modular mind. Steven Mithen shares one provocative insight after another as he answers a series of fascinating questions:

• Were our brains hard-wired in the Pleistocene era by the needs of hunter-gatherers?
• When did religious beliefs first emerge?
• Why were the first paintings made by humankind so technically accomplished and expressive?
• What can the sexual habits of chimpanzees tell us about the prehistory of the modern mind?

This is the first archaeological account to support the new modular concept of the mind. The concept, promulgated by cognitive and evolutionary psychologists, views the mind as a collection of specialised intelligences or “cognitive domains,” somewhat like a Swiss Army knife with its specialised blades and tools. Arguing that only archaeology can answer many of the key questions raised by this new concept, Steven Mithen delineates a three-phase sequence for the mind’s evolution over six million years – from early Homo in Africa to the ice-age Neanderthals to our modern modular minds.Here is an intriguing and challenging explanation of what it means to be human, a bold new theory about the origins and nature of the mind.

Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia, Surpassing Ourselves: An Inquiry Into the Nature and Implications of Expertise (1993).

From the Preface

It happens often in the physical and biological sciences, seldom in the behavioral sciences, that a line of research pursued for its theoretical interest intersects with a growing societal concern. Research on expertise is such a case. It started with efforts to understand what enables chess grandmasters to excel. Now it is being applied to finding out what it takes to be good at computer programming, medical diagnosis, instrument repair, sports of all kinds-virtually every skill that feeds society’s rampant needs for high performance.

The main thing this research shows is that expertise requires enormous amounts of knowledge far more than anyone, even the experts, had supposed. We should not minimize the importance of this finding. It radically changes the whole scale of problems related to expert knowledge and skill. But its practical upshot is the need for years of training and experience. This, it is fair to say, we already knew.

There is an important respect in which research on expertise has failed to make contact with society’s interest. Virtually all the research compares experts with many years’ experience to novices with very little. But as a society, we are not concerned with novices. Eventually they will quit being novices, without our having to do anything about it. The important question is what they will become. Will they become experts in their lines of work or will they swell the ranks of incompetent or mediocre functionaries? As scientists, engineers, or managers, how will they compare with their counterparts in other countries that seem to be gaining the upper hand in world commerce? As the builders of tomorrow, will they have creativity and breadth of vision? Will they be able to grasp, and make headway against, the large problems that face us? These are social concerns related to expertise, and expert-novice comparisons do not address them. We need to know what separates expertise from mediocrity and what is needed-besides training and experience-to foster continuing growth in competence. Those are the kinds of issues we hope at least to illuminate in this book.

There is a whole other set of social concerns about expertise that get summed up in statements like, “Today’s problems are too serious to be left to the expert,” or – one that we especially like – “If you define a problem in such a way that only experts can solve it, you have just made the problem unsolvable.” Some readers will feel we do not pay enough attention to these concerns. Others may feel that we pay too much. Priority, we believe, should be given to the more fundamental task of understanding expertise. Statements like those just quoted seem really to be referring to specialists, not experts; and treating expertise as if it were synonymous with specialization reveals a misunderstanding that can only lead to bad thinking. The capacity to acquire expertise is, we shall argue, one of the great and peculiar strengths of the human species. The challenge for social thought is how best to use this capacity to the benefit of all. But to meet that challenge, we need to understand better what it means to acquire expertise, what fosters and what stunts its development, and how it functions in people’s lives and work.

We came to the study of expertise from an unusual direction, through the study of writing. Writing, as it happens, violates the conventional wisdom about expertise on a number of counts. Conventional wisdom has it that practice makes perfect and that expertise is the natural outcome of years of practice. But few people become good writers, no matter how much they write. For many, the effect of years of practice is simply to produce increasingly fluent bad writing. Conventional wisdom, backed by scores of experiments comparing novices and experts in various fields, sees experts doing quickly and easily what novices do laboriously, if they can do it at all. Novices have to reason things out, whereas experts know what to do without thinking. Yet in our research we found consistently that, given the same assignment, experts would work harder and do a great deal more thinking. The paragons of effortless performance were fifth-graders who, given a simple topic, would start writing in seconds and would produce copy as fast as their little fingers could move the pencil.

What can be observed in expert writers is something rarely observable in typical expert-novice comparisons. One observes the growing edge of expertise. We assume that every expert, in whatever field, has a growing edge of expertise. Doctors often remark that the great majority of cases they see are unchallenging. Routine diagnostic and treatment procedures suffice. But then there are the five or ten percent of cases that are challenging. Those cases test the growing edge of the doctor’s expertise. The doctor who treats them in a routine way stops growing and is likely to drift into the category of the 15 percent of doctors whom the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons tags with “major deficiencies.”

There is a growing edge to everyone’s knowledge. But the poorer writers we studied approach the task in ways that minimize opportunities for growth, whereas the better writers maximize them. The result is a multiplier effect, where the more expert keep gaining in expertise while the less expert make little progress. Aided by research of our students, we went on to look at learners in other academic areas, and in music and medicine. The same results appeared. When working at the edge of their competence, the more expert people go about things in ways that result in their learning still more. Doesn’t this suggest something about how they got to be experts in the first place, and why so many people with the time and the opportunities fail to gain expertise? We thought so, and this book is the result of seeing how far this insight could carry us in gaining an understanding of expertise.

We wish the research base for this inquiry were stronger. Despite intense research on expertise during the past decade, hardly any of it contrasts experts with experienced nonexperts or examines the growth of expertise over time-and these are the kinds of research most relevant to issues about the growing edge. However, we suspect that the problem will not be that readers go away from the book unconvinced. The more likely problem, and one we have run into when we introduced early versions of this material in a university course, is resistance to a different way of thinking about expertise. That is thinking about it in terms of process – as something people do rather than as something they have.

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