Apparently students who attend Ivy League schools are good memorizers

Yale students seem to have spent so much time memorizing history facts and dates that Professor Joanne Freeman feels compelled to warn students against the Revolutionary War "fact bubble":

Tip number one is don't get lost in the dreaded Revolutionary War fact bubble, which I have to say it makes me think of the first time that I taught this course. I was actually a brand new professor and I had just come to Yale and it was my first course and it was my first lecture in my first course and I'm [sound cuts out] It actually was in Connecticut Hall, which, for those of you who don't know, dates back to the period when this course is talking about and was Nathan Hale's -- essentially his dorm. So there I am. I'm a brand new professor to Yale and I'm teaching a course about the Revolution and it's in a building that dates to the Revolution, so I'm having sort of a "wow" Yale moment as it is, and I'm off, I'm giving my lectures, and I'm really excited. I give about three of them and someone raises their hand after about three lectures and they have a kind of a puzzled expression on their face. I said, "Yes?" And he says, "Excuse me, Professor Freeman. What are we supposed to be memorizing? Where are the facts and dates?" [laughs] So as a new professor my first impulse was: Darn! I forgot the facts and dates. [laughter] I got it wrong. [laughs] But actually, the fact of the matter is, they're not the star of the show. Certainly, dates are not the star of the show. There are dates you're going to have to remember so don't think Easy Street; there's not a date I have to know. There will be some dates, but this isn't a story about dates. It's obviously something a lot more interesting and a lot broader than that. Okay. Avoid fact bubble.

Joanne Freeman "American Revolution" | Lecture 1 Introduction: Freeman's Top Five Tips for Studying the Revolution

Obviously, excessive memorization didn't keep these students out of Yale.

I'm sure there's a reason for that, the reason being that excessive memorization actually helped.

And here is Daniel Willingham:  prior knowledge & working memory in 1 paragraph

Prior knowledge gets around working memory limits

[I]t’s well known that extensive background knowledge allows one to circumvent the limitation of working memory. To take an obvious example, if I ask you to hold six letters in mind for one minute, it will be much easier to do with B-R-A-K-E-S than with X-P-W-M-Q-R. Although both are a string of six letters, the first forms a word, so you can treat it like a single unit. It’s like holding one thing in working memory, not six. Naturally, this saving of space in working memory only works if you know the word “brakes.” The same phenomenon is observed in many other domains. The chess expert looking at a board does not see 16 white pieces—she sees several clusters of pieces, each cluster defined by the relationship of the pieces to one another and to opposing pieces. Whether it’s chess pieces or letters in a word, the compacting of many things into one thing in working memory is based on prior knowledge.
Have Technology and Multitasking Rewired How Students Learn? by Daniel T. Willingham

Why students need to memorize, Common Core edition

"...anything that occupies your working memory reduces your ability to think."
- Daniel Kahneman | Thinking Fast and Slow

The only way to clear space in working memory is to store knowledge in long-term memory.

AND SEE:
Why students have to memorize things
#whystudentsneedtomemorize

Deeper shmeeper

Fabulous post by Tom Loveless:

Deeper Learning is the current term for an old idea. The notion is that schools spend too much time focused on the acquisition of knowledge, especially knowing facts. In the past century, several alternatives have arisen to dethrone the prominent role of knowledge in schools: project-based learning, inquiry and discovery learning, higher-level thinking, critical thinking, outcome based education, and 21st Century Skills. Now it is deeper learning.

These ideas represent a variety of approaches to curriculum and pedagogy. They are not all the same, but they share one characteristic. All are advertised as transcending, and therefore superior to, academic content organized within traditional intellectual disciplines.

The Banality of Deeper Learning

"21st century skills" are gone?

Really?

That was quick. At least, it seems quick. I was just hearing the words "21st century skills" for the first time in 2005. Eight years ago.

What is the life-cycle of K-12 jargon, anyway?

AND SEE:
Why students have to memorize things

Jeff Hawkins: memory is intelligence, intelligence is memory

I've just read the transcript of Hawkins' talk, which is posted along with the video.

Maybe this is overstating matters, but on a quick read-through of the transcript my impression is that pretty much everything Hawkins says it as odds with pretty much everything constructivist educators believe:

Intelligence is not behavior.

Intelligence is not computation.

Intelligence is memory.

Memory is memory of sequence.

The point of memory is to predict what comes next.

"[T]he neocortex is just memorizing."
"You cannot learn or recall anything outside of a sequence."
"[I]ntelligence is defined by prediction."
"[P]rediction of future inputs is the desired output."

The education establishment has for many years denigrated both memory and sequence in favor of critical thinking, problem solving, spiraling and history taught as themes instead of narratives.

Meanwhile actual experts persist in knowing stuff and in organizing the stuff they know in coherent sequences.

On the other hand, constructivists have picked up on the idea of 'pattern' and 'prediction' in a way instructivists arguably have not....but the injunction that students must 'look for a pattern' (math) and 'make predictions' (reading) seems often to be a means of avoiding sequence (math) and the kind of ordinary nouns-come-after-prepositions-type prediction Hawkins is talking about.

I don't know whether Hawkins is right, of course. Reading the transcript, I wanted to hear him talk about cognitive illusions and the invisible gorilla. (I don't remember whether he discusses illusions in his book with Sandra Blakeslee.)

From the transcript :

So what is the intuitive, but incorrect assumption, that's kept us from understanding brains? Now I'm going to tell it to you, and it's going to seem obvious that that is correct, and that's the point, right? Then I'm going to have to make an argument why you're incorrect about the other assumption. The intuitive but obvious thing is that somehow intelligence is defined by behavior, that we are intelligent because of the way that we do things and the way we behave intelligently, and I'm going to tell you that's wrong. What it is is intelligence is defined by prediction.

[snip]

The AI people said, well, the thing in the box is a programmable computer because that's equivalent to a brain, and we'll feed it some inputs and we'll get it to do something, have some behavior. And Alan Turing defined the Turing test, which is essentially saying, we'll know if something's intelligent if it behaves identical to a human. A behavioral metric of what intelligence is, and this has stuck in our minds for a long period of time.

Reality though, I call it real intelligence. Real intelligence is built on something else. We experience the world through a sequence of patterns, and we store them, and we recall them. And when we recall them, we match them up against reality, and we're making predictions all the time. It's an eternal metric.

[snip]

You're all being intelligent right now, but you're not doing anything. Maybe you're scratching yourself, or picking your nose, I don't know, but you're not doing anything right now, but you're being intelligent; you're understanding what I'm saying. Because you're intelligent and you speak English, you know what word is at the end of this -- (Silence) sentence.

[snip]

You still have that alligator brain. You do. It's your emotional brain. It's all those things, and all those gut reactions you have. And on top of it, we have this memory system called the neocortex. And the memory system is sitting over the sensory part of the brain. And so as the sensory input comes in and feeds from the old brain, it also goes up into the neocortex. And the neocortex is just memorizing. It's sitting there saying, ah, I'm going to memorize all the things that are going on: where I've been, people I've seen, things I've heard, and so on. And in the future, when it sees something similar to that again, so in a similar environment, or the exact same environment, it'll play it back. It'll start playing it back. Oh, I've been here before. And when you've been here before, this happened next. It allows you to predict the future. It allows you to, literally it feeds back the signals into your brain; they'll let you see what's going to happen next, will let you hear the word "sentence" before I said it. And it's this feeding back into the old brain that'll allow you to make very more intelligent decisions.

[snip]

So what is the recipe for brain theory? First of all, we have to have the right framework. And the framework is a memory framework, not a computation or behavior framework. It's a memory framework. How do you store and recall these sequences or patterns?

Look it up

Have just this moment realized I forgot to post an account of my exchange with the WNET staffer at the "Celebration."

Unfortunately, I'm fresh out of energy.

Boiled down, the encounter began with the WNET person saying Salman Khan should not be "allowed" to teach in New York schools because "he's 19th century."

It ended with the WNET person saying there's no reason for people to memorize things because—and here she held her cell phone aloft—"I can look things up on my phone."

When I said, "Can you look up calculus on your phone?" she made a face.

Why students have to memorize things

re: Larry Summers' claim that "in a world where the entire Library of Congress will soon be accessible on a mobile device..., factual mastery will become less and less important":

Larry Summers is wrong.

Factual mastery has not and will not become less important, for the simple reason that it is not possible to think about something stored on Google.

While you are thinking about something, that something has to be lodged inside working memory, not Google.

Biology does not work the way Larry Summers thinks it works.

Working memory

If I ask you to multiply 36 by 3 inside your head, working memory is what you use to do it.

Working memory (WM) does three things:

1. Holds the problem -- "multiply 36 by 3" -- in consciousness 
2. Retrieves the relevant knowledge from long-term memory (the times tables, in this case)
3. Performs the calculation

Boiling it down, working memory is:

1. a form of storage
2. a search engine 
3. a "computer" or thinker

"Critical thinking" is accomplished by working memory.

3 to 5

The fact that we can think only about things stored inside working memory leads directly to the need for "factual mastery."

Factual mastery—knowledge stored inside long-term memory—is essential because although long-term memory is vast, working memory is tiny:

...cognitive tasks can be completed only with sufficient ability to hold information as it is processed. The ability to repeat information [you have just heard or read] depends on task [difficulty]... but can be distinguished from a more constant, underlying mechanism: a central memory store limited to 3 to 5 meaningful items in young adults.

The Magical Mystery Four: How Is Working Memory Capacity Limited, and Why? by Nelson Cowan

Working memory can hold three to five items at once. That's it. That's the limit.

Three to five.

I hit this limit all the time trying to write about new topics. The basal ganglia, for instance. For well over a year, I have been endlessly working and re-working a project on the basal ganglia, a subject I knew essentially nothing about going in. Where the basal ganglia were concerned, my long-term memory was a blank slate.

The upshot: I was not able to write about the basal ganglia until I actually learned about the basal ganglia: learned as in committed the material to memory. It didn't matter how many times I looked up basal ganglia on the internet. I looked up the basal ganglia on the internet a lot, as a matter of fact; then I forgot whatever it was I had looked up while I was looking up something else to do with the basal ganglia, after which I'd have to go back and re-look up the first thing all over again.

Try it if you don't believe me.

Here are some terms related to the basal ganglia:

Dorsal striatum
Ventral striatum
Putamen
Nucleus accumbens
Ventral tegmental area
Orbital frontal cortex
Dopamine
Two pathways
OCD
Addiction
Habit
Impulsive
Compulsive
Intuition
Probabilistic learning
Associative learning
Statistical learning
Serotonin
Orbitofrontal cortex
Cortico-striatal circuit

Now supposing I handed you a laptop and asked you to look up each term on Wikipedia, then write a coherent, reasoned 5-paragraph essay on the basal ganglia: what it is and what it does. Just a quick summary organized into 5 coherent paragraphs.

You couldn't do it.

You couldn't do it because every time you wrote about the ventral striatum, the dorsal striatum, and the orbitofrontal cortex, you would forget the VTA and the putamen—and you would forget the VTA and the putamen because your working memory will hold only 3 to 5 things at once. Something has to go.

That's what happened to me when I took the SAT with a calculator I didn't know how to use. Each time I swapped the steps for using the calculator into working memory, my brain swapped the information for the problem I was doing back out of working memory. Then, when I tried to cram the information for the problem back into working memory, the calculator steps got squeezed out again.

I could remember the problem, or I could remember the calculator, but I couldn't remember both at the same time. Too much information, literally.

My calculator fiasco illustrates the reason you need to practice until you learn content and skills to the point of 'automaticity.' (Automaticity is another basal ganglia term, by the way. The basal ganglia are the part of the brain that underpins automaticity.) Once you've learned something so well you don't have to think about it, you free up space in working memory to hold other things.

Thus if you know the times tables "by heart," you don't need to pull "3x6=18" into working memory. Working memory can locate "3x6=18" inside long-term memory and use it without displacing "36x3."

Knowledge stored inside the brain is different from knowledge stored outside the brain

Experts always possess factual mastery of their fields. Always.

The reason experts always possess factual mastery of their fields is that knowledge stored in long-term memory is different from knowledge stored on Google.

Knowledge stored in long-term memory is (or becomes) biologically connected, or "chunked." Thus to an expert on the basal ganglia, ten facts about the basal ganglia are just one or two big facts about the basal ganglia.

Chunking is the magic, because working memory doesn't care about chunk size. Working memory can hold 3 to 5 small and simple items or 3 to 5 large and complex items. Either will do. Chunking gets around the limits on working memory.

Dan Willingham's demonstration of working memory

For a demonstration of the chunking principle, read the list below, then look away and try to remember what you've read:

CN

NFB

ICB

SCI

ANC

AA

How many letters did you recall?

To find out how many letters you would have recalled via prior chunking inside long-term memory, see Daniel Willingham's explanation in "How Knowledge Helps" (American Educator | Spring 2006).

(The answer is all of them.)

You can't Google knowledge chunks

Knowledge chunks can be created only inside the brain, via learning. You can't Google someone else's complex knowledge chunks and swap them into your own working memory. It doesn't work that way. Your own brain has to do the work of chunking, and your brain does that work through the process of learning, bit by bit and step by step.

Which means that the process of storing content in long-term memory is not a simple matter of "memorizing facts" so you can "regurgitate" them later.

Over time, memorization creates the complex knowledge chunks that allow knowledgeable people to engage in complex thought.

Experts think better than novices because experts have factual mastery

To a gratifying degree, I can now think about nearly all 19 items on the basal ganglia list at the same time. I'm still struggling with "putamen" and "ventral tegmental area," but the other 17 are stored in memory: my memory, not Google's. So, for me, those 17 items are no longer 17 separate items, but closer to 2 or 3. When I think about 1 item on the list, I'm thinking about the others.

I reached this point by committing these terms and concepts to memory. As the terms entered my long-term memory, they became biologically connected and chunked. Now that I can think about them at the same time, which means I can write about them, too.

What makes experts expert, to a large degree, is factual mastery of their fields. Factual mastery allows experts to think deeply and well because the content they are thinking about has been biologically connected and chunked inside their brains, and there is no obvious limit to the amount of chunked content working memory can manage so long as knowledge has been chunked into no more than 3 to 5 separate entities.

Factual mastery is required for complex thought.

Which brings me back to Larry Summers.

If our schools are going to ask students to 'think' about material they haven't learned, students are going to be thinking about 3 to 5 small, not-well-elaborated items at a time. Period. Their thinking will be superficial, and the conclusions they reach will be superficial, too.

Which is exactly what we see in Larry Summers' op-ed about education, a field in which he is neither expert nor learned.

AND SEE: 
Superior Memory of Experts and Long-Term Working Memory (LTWM)
Extremely fast learning & extended working memory
The Number and Quality of Representations in Working Memory by Weiwei Zhang and Steven J. Luck
How Knowledge Helps by Daniel T. Willingham American Educator Spring 2006
#whystudentsneedtomemorize

Larry Summers has a really bad idea

In today's Times, Larry Summers weighs in on the question of what college students ought to learn in college.

Larry's answer: not too much, because the entire Library of Congress will soon be accessible on a mobile device with search procedures that are vastly better than any card catalog!

Larry bases his novel and highly original thesis (to wit: "factual mastery will become less and less important") on "what we now understand about how people learn."

(Does Harvard have node chairs, I wonder? Sounds like no.)

OK, I'm going to go look up calculus on the internet. I've always been interested in calculus, so now that I've received a mobile device for Christmas, I'm going to look it up. Then I'm going to collaborate with some friends who also looked up calculus on the internet to figure out what to do about the 21st century global world meltdown.

I'm going to do this because I've noticed that economists use calculus in their collaborative group papers.

[pause]

There is a reason why students must commit content to memory as opposed to looking it up on a mobile device with search procedures that are vastly better than any card catalog.

That reason has to do with working memory.

More anon.

What You (Really) Need to Know by Lawrence A. Summers

update: Why students have to memorize things
and see: Extremely fast learning & extended working memory

AND SEE:
The founder, chair, and CEO of Netflix has a really bad idea
Larry Summers has a really bad idea
Wash U professor on Reed Hastings' really bad idea
Barry Eichengreen has a really bad idea
President Obama has a really bad idea

David Brooks has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2
David Brooks has a really good idea

The Daily has a really bad idea

The opposition

The Wall Street Journal has an op ed on Race to Nowhere today:

Directed by parent and first-time filmmaker Vicki Abeles, "Race to Nowhere" is marketed through a kind of partnership with local schools. The film suggests that if there are problems in American education, they are largely due to standardized tests, overambitious parents, insufficient funding, and George W. Bush. It also offers possible solutions, which include abandoning testing and grading and giving teachers more autonomy. 

[snip]

Parents in New Jersey suburbs have received numerous emails about the film and its upcoming show times from parent-teacher associations. Ms. Abeles and the schools split the revenue from ticket sales, but the director told the crowd in Bergen County that she is holding off on a DVD retail release while she explores a possible broadcast on PBS. She also said she is moving full speed ahead to hire companies in Washington to lobby for policy changes suggested in the film.

[snip]

Ms. Abeles argues that U.S. education is focused too much on giving kids "things to memorize and regurgitate," instead of developing the critical thinking skills that will be most useful in solving problems and thriving later in life.

Jeanne Allen, who leads the Center for Education Reform in Washington, reports that her sister back in Bergen County is one of those Jersey parents receiving a blizzard of email pitches to see the movie. Ms. Allen says that if U.S. tests are flawed it is because they demand that kids memorize too few facts, not too many. "You can't teach critical thinking," she says. She argues that kids cannot possibly develop problem-solving skills without a base of knowledge. How can one analyze a piece of literature, she asks, without knowing any vocabulary? Can students solve math problems without being able to multiply and divide?

Whether Ms. Abeles is ultimately advocating necessary reform or simply the latest educational fad, anything that changes the subject from unfunded pension liabilities is probably good news for the New Jersey teachers union. But that doesn't mean all the state's teachers will be thrilled if Ms. Abeles is successful.

Some of the most passionate advocates for rote memorization of critical facts can be found among the faculty in New Jersey public schools, a state that has traditionally scored highly on the standardized tests that may be going out of fashion. To put it another way, New Jersey may have more to lose from another nationwide shift in educational policy than states that are consistently ranked near the bottom.

Do American Students Study Too Hard?
By JAMES FREEMAN
APRIL 30, 2011

...she is moving full speed ahead to hire companies in Washington to lobby for policy changes suggested in the film...

Well, more power to her - but what about parents and teachers who like memorization and standardized tests?

We're out of luck.

For me, this is further evidence that we simply must have choice. Let the teachers and parents who want critical thinking without memorization have critical thinking without memorization.

Let the teachers and parents who want memorization and knowledge have memorization and knowledge.


critical thinking without content

In a recent comments thread, I mentioned visiting a Cambridge Pre-U Global Perspectives class at a local high school. The teacher and principal told us proudly that the class was "not content-rich." That was the selling point. Not content-rich.

All of the other courses the school offered, they said, were content-rich. This was a bad thing. In the content-rich classes, they said, students memorized but did not think. In Global Perspectives, students engaged in "critical thinking" and did not memorize.

So what happens in a class that is content-poor?

Students Google op-eds and feature stories and look for "bias."

For me, the idea of spending a year and a half (the course consumed 3 semesters and replaced English) Googling op-eds and looking for bias is almost unspeakably drear: not enough to keep the mind alive.

But the principal loved it, and the two team teachers loved it, and the other parent in our group loved it.

So let them create and attend the schools they believe in, and let the rest of us create and attend the schools we believe in.

Live and let live.


Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach? (pdf file)
Dan Willingham

On Intelligence

100 pages into On Intelligence and.... wow

If this guy is right, and he sounds right to me, our constructivist friends should quit while they're ahead. They are sooooooo not 21st century.

The book is a manifesto for a theory based on an elegantly simple premise: that intelligence is rooted in the brain's ability to access memories rather than in its ability to process new data.

Access memories.

Not process new data.

That would mean.... knowing stuff is the essence of intelligence.

Hawkins complains that thinking machines do not exist because scientists have been sidetracked. Too many subscribe to the widespread view that the brain is essentially a powerful computer, constantly processing and integrating incoming data. [ed.: processing and integrating incoming data - kind of like Piaget! except that's not what makes you smart! knowing stuff makes you smart!] Many computer experts believe that thinking machines will arrive once there are processors as powerful and as integrated as human neurons. There is a problem with this brain-as-computer analogy, however: Computers are already faster than brains. A neuron can manage 200 operations per second; a modern computer can race through 1 billion per second.

fast and stupid

Processing speed doesn't matter in the brain, says Hawkins, because the basis of thought is not data manipulation but memory retention and prediction. The brain, he says, accesses previous experiences, compares them with existing circumstances, and predicts what is most likely to happen next. When a ball is thrown, for example, we know from experience where it is most likely to land and move our hands to that spot. It's a simple action, but it has proved nearly impossible to build a robot smart enough to perform it. "The brain doesn't compute the answers to problems," he says. "It retrieves the answer from memory."

Very cool.

Intelligence, posits Hawkins, is essentially the capacity to remember and then predict patterns in the world.

Source:
Redefining Smart
Business Week
November 8, 2004I joined the mailing list.

Jeff Hawkins' Bold Brainstorm
21st century skills
On IntelligenceWayne Gretsky explains the world to you

Extremely fast learning

Drop whatever you're doing and go read Larry Squire's commentary on the Tse, et al study right this minute.

This is revolutionary.

Of course, that means it will take 20 years for these findings to filter out to the public schools (if they ever filter out at all).

Bob Koegel told us years ago that it takes 20 years for new research to be widely adopted in teaching practice. Ten years for other researchers to confirm the finding, another 10 years for dissemination.

Larry Squire, fyi, is a honcho.

highlights

We learn and remember better when new material can be related to what we already know. Professional athletes can remember details of particular plays that occurred in a long match. Experienced poker players can reconstruct the card distribution and betting sequence that occurred in previous hands. This is possible because these individuals have a rich background of relevant experience and therefore can organize new material into meaningful and orderly patterns.

[snip]

Memory consolidation refers to the gradual process of reorganization by which new memories become remote memories (3, 4). Initially, the learning of facts and events (declarative memory) depends on the hippocampus, a structure deep in the temporal lobe of the mammalian brain. As time passes after learning, the importance of the hippocampus gradually diminishes and a more permanent memory is established in distributed regions of the neocortex. This process typically takes a few years in humans and at least a month in rodents. According to one influential model (5), the process is slow because if changes were made rapidly, they would interfere with the preexisting framework of structured knowledge that has been built up from other experiences.

[snip]

The most surprising finding by Tse et al., and what connected the schema concept to memory consolidation, was that removal of the entire hippocampus as early as 48 hours after the rapid learning of two new flavorplace associations fully spared memory of the associations... It was not the case that memory of the new associations was never dependent on the hippocampus, nor that memory was somehow formed directly in the neocortex, because hippocampal lesions made 3 hours after learning abolished memory of the new associations. In short, the neocortex was able to incorporate new information rapidly. This is unexpectedly rapid for a process that, on the basis of as many as 20 studies in experimental animals, ordinarily takes at least a month (7). [ed.: a month in rats, years in people]

[snip]

It is tempting to suppose that memory consolidation proceeded rapidly because new information was fully compatible with what had already been learned—in other words, a good schema was available. If so, questions naturally arise about the minimum requirements for an effective schema. [ed.: yes, they do]

[snip]

caption:
Good schemas wanted. When a rat learns associations between flavors and spatial locations, as studied by Tse et al. (1), the associations are initially learned as individual facts (left). [ed.: precisely what cognitive science has been finding for at least 20 years] With extended training, the animal develops an organized structure or schema for flavors and places (middle). This organized knowledge structure (bold lines) can then support rapid learning of new associations in a single trial and the rapid consolidation of information into the neocortex (right).

Ericsson, expertise, and "extended working memory"

For months now I've been meaning to put up a post about Ericsson's concept of extended working memory.

Around here we've been accustomed to thinking that "knowledge is good" because knowledge and skills learned to the point of automaticity take a load off of working memory.

But it seems there's more to it. From The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance (pdf file):

[E]xpert performers have acquired skills that enable them to circumvent general memory and processing limits. Chase and Simon (1973) originally attributed experts' superior memory to chunking in short-term memory. This account has been revised, and the exceptional memory of experts has been shown to reflect rapid storage in long-term memory (Charness, 1976; Frey & Adesman, 1976; Lane & Robertson, 1979). ....The most important implication of these acquired memory skills is that they enable experts to circumvent the limited storage capacity of short-term memory. Thus these skills eliminate any restrictive influence of individual differences in this basic capacity (Ericsson & Smith, 1991b)

I assume Ericsson and his team are talking about the same phenomenon Tse and her team demonstrated in mice: extremely rapid learning that circumvents the normal constraints on working memory and new learning.

(an aside: the terminology researchers use to characterize memory has bewildered me for years, so let me point out that short-term memory and working memory are two different things)

In other words, it's not just that practicing knowledge to the point of automaticity "frees up space" in working memory so you can solve more complicated problems.

What Tse, Squire, and Ericsson all appear to be saying is that practicing knowledge to the point of automaticity also makes it possible to acquire new knowledge very rapidly.

and see:
why students have to memorize things