FIGURE 2.4   Explanations Novice 1: These deal with blocks on an incline plane. Novice 5: Incline plane problems, coefficient of friction. Novice 6: Blocks on inclined planes with angles.   Explanations Expert 2: Conservation of energy. Expert 3: Work-theory theorem. They are all straight-forward problems. Expert 4: These can be done from energy considerations. Either you should know the principle of conservation of energy, or work is lost somewhere. An example of sortings of physics problems made by novices and experts. Each picture above represents a diagram that can be drawn from the storyline of a physics problem taken from an introductory physics textbook. The novices and experts in this study were asked to categorize many such problems based on similarity of solution. The two pairs show a marked contrast in the experts' and novices' categorization schemes. Novices tend to categorize physics problems as being solved similarly if they "look the same" (that is, share the same surface features), whereas experts categorize according to the major principle that could be applied to solve the problems. SOURCE: Adapted from Chi et al.(1981).