The way college courses generally work is that a teacher presents a group of students with some subject matter, then attempts through tests and papers to determine how well the students have mastered the subject matter. Those judgments are summarized in a letter grade. A list of those subject matters and grades constitutes the transcript that describes what the student has learned and what the student’s performance was overall.
The students and the teacher are focused on the subject matter, and the implied view is that the learning in college is captured in the exercises that inform those grades. The limitations of this “subject matter recall” model of higher education are hilariously captured in Don Novello’s comic performance on Saturday Night Live as Father Guido Sarducci, who marketed the “Five Minute University”: http://youtu.be/kO8x8eoU3L4
Sometimes, in some subjects, the mastery of specific subject matter is precisely what is at stake. Students aiming to be engineers will make pretty direct use of the principles they learn in a course in mechanics, for example. Students focused on other particular occupational qualifications, whether in certificate, associate-degree, or bachelors’-degree programs, will probably make direct use of some of the subjects they are taught.
However, the learning produced in large parts of a college education is—or at least should be—different from that, and the role of tests and grades is correspondingly different.
As economics professors, we have always understood that little of what students learned in advanced economics courses—neither the factual content nor the specific analytical techniques—was ever going to come up in their later lives (unless fate intervened and made them economists). We suspect that the same is true of other advanced courses, whether in mathematics or literature or psychology.
The real point of these courses is mainly to induce people to think hard about complex problems, to learn to sustain attention to challenging material, to learn how a disciplined body of thought can come to make sense, and so on. The point of the tests is less to certify mastery of the details of advanced topics in a subject like labor economics, but, first, to motivate students to do this hard work and, second, to gauge how well they are able to function at this level.
It’s a revealing fact that all this works better if both the teacher and the students view the subject matter as intrinsically important, rather than as an elaborate set of thinking exercises. Making the latter point explicit would tend to drain both the teacher’s and the students’ energy. But really what is at stake in these circumstances is not grasping the niceties of, say, the Hicks and the Slutsky derivations of the income and substitution effects in demand analysis, but rather the exercise and cultivation of a variety of capacities and dispositions. The desired outcomes for many course are improved thinking about complex problems, increased capacity for sustained attention to challenging (and sometimes intrinsically uninteresting) material, careful use of evidence, empathetic understanding of others’ perspectives, resilience in the face of failure, and so on.
The college transcript on this interpretation is less about indexing the mastery of a variety of specific subject matters and more about accumulating evidence on the successful exercise of these capacities and dispositions in the context of a variety of specific subjects.
No doubt this perspective finds its most natural home in traditional liberal education, but we do not think it should be limited to this context. Whether one thinks of business education, or computer programming, or problem-solving trades like plumbing or auto mechanics, the qualities we are discussing matter. We also think that nearly any worthwhile subject can be taught in a way that draws on and fosters these qualities.
If this perspective captures a good deal of what goes on (or should go on) in college, there are some important implications.
- Our point supports the claim that active learning is in many cases a more effective educational practice than passive transmission of information.
- The growing emphasis on short-term vocational success as a criterion for judging the worth of education may unintentionally undermine pursuit of these more subtle learning goals, with bad effects on the long run value of education, even in narrowly economic terms.
- When “competency-based learning” replaces seat time and course grades as an index of educational qualifications, we’d better make sure that we are measuring these more subtle competences education aims to produce, and not only measures focused on highly specific skills and content.
- The growing awareness that skills taught in traditional education, including college education, can be rendered obsolete by advances in computing (see writings by David Autor and by Frank Levy and Dick Murnane) argues not for less investment in education, but for education more geared to the kind of learning sketched here, which is harder for computers to duplicate.
