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The best sentence I read today (so far)
Harvard’s system of general education should emphasize methodology over topic because methods are harder to teach and learn than facts.
That is Ed Glaeser, on the Harvard curriculum, more here. Thanks to Yan Li for the pointer.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on November 14, 2006 at 01:03 PM in Education | Permalink
Comments
That seems like a rationalization to me. Economists want students to learn Economics.
Posted by: joeo at Nov 14, 2006 3:19:17 PM
It does seem, though, that thinking like an economist is more difficult to teach than memorizing vocab words (yes, this is hyperbole).
How, though, is methodology taught (in general), particularly at lower levels? For example, in high school (or even in middle school), I'd love students to come away from science class thinking like Sherlock Holmes than for them to know what an atom is. But how is that process taught when methodology seems to be picked up in such different ways?
Posted by: nick at Nov 14, 2006 3:34:12 PM
Isn't that another way of saying "teach them how to think, not what to think?"
Posted by: David Andersen at Nov 14, 2006 4:11:53 PM
Physical sciences use real world examples and numbers while teaching methodology. I don't see why so many economic text books don't. To emphasize methodology does not mean you need to create a fact free zone.
To think like Sherlock Holmes you have to know a lot of facts.
Posted by: joan at Nov 14, 2006 4:58:19 PM
Amen to Joan's last sentence. I agree that being able to think is far more important than having mastery over facts per se. Its just that, while I've met plenty of people who have knowledge of a lot of facts but who can't think in a structured and original way, I've met just about zero people who could think in a structured and original way who didn't also have knowledge of a lot of facts.
Or put another way, the "methods" that are hard to learn and worth learning are generally best studied by learning how they are applied to solving difficult problems. But you can;t follow a line of reasoning if you don't understand what is being reasoned through.
Posted by: sd at Nov 14, 2006 5:14:14 PM
``the "methods" that are hard to learn and worth learning are generally best studied by learning how they are applied to solving difficult problems. But you can;t follow a line of reasoning if you don't understand what is being reasoned through.''
I agree completely, and I bet Glaeser does too. So one has the very, very challenging task of teaching a lot of math as a means to solving interesting, real world problems.
In practice, though, the physicists delegate a lot of their methodology teaching to the math department.
Posted by: Bill Gardner at Nov 14, 2006 5:44:03 PM
Though facts are inevitably part of the thinking process, there's a matter of emphasis. One of my college professors started his chem classes by discussing phlogiston. He ended up spending a large chunk of the professor getting his students to come up with their own tests for the phlogiston theory. I wasn't in that class, so I'm afraid that I don't know how it ended up, but I thought it was an ingenious example of emphasizing methodology over material.
Now of course, this does not imply (or cannot imply) that you aren't teaching material, but to imply that I can't think scientifically without knowing scientific terms and theories before you start is simply not the case (as elementary school science fair projects demonstrate every year).
Surely there are ways to demonstrate methods of observation, reasoning (deducing), and testing without trodging step by step through the newest textbook.
Also, I must add that thinking like a _____ does not makes you a _____. For a kid to think logically does not make him Sherlock Holmes, but it does accomplish the primary goal: education.
Posted by: nick at Nov 14, 2006 5:58:28 PM
Seems obvious here. What has improved lately? What is likely to improve? Google and such. So education should change to de-emphasise things you can get with google easily, but it's sticky.
Posted by: bhauth at Nov 14, 2006 6:38:56 PM
people who learned based on facts -- back in the day -- generally seemed to end up alot smarter than the current crop, where facts are deemphasized. seems possible that, without a grasp of facts as a framework, you can't really teach method and, in fact, it may be better for an understanding of method to arise from learning facts rather than assuming you can teach method.
Posted by: dj superflat at Nov 14, 2006 8:09:13 PM
dj, I think your first argument gets flattened by the Flynn Effect and your second falls apart when you try to construct a real argument.
Posted by: bhauth at Nov 14, 2006 8:28:02 PM
//To think like Sherlock Holmes you have to know a lot of facts.//
I think the author agrees that even topic-based courses do teach
methods, but "via intensive exploration of a single, sometimes
narrow topic" for which I presume a lot of factual knowledge will be
required. A more general application of method, in a wide range of settings
that the author proposes however, could be based on what the students
already know and might not need new factual learning.
As nick said, it would be interesting to learn how methodology is
taught at lower levels as they are likely to be working with basic facts
and what could be common knowledge for undergrads. Any pointers?
Posted by: Venkat at Nov 14, 2006 10:37:34 PM
I suggest reading Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching (or a summary) to see why dowplaying facts will end in tears.
Posted by: KDeRosa at Nov 14, 2006 11:21:11 PM
I wonder how many of these comments are written by someone who read the article. I don't think Ed is proposing some abstract ``methods'' course for all students. He is saying that each student should be required to take a methods course in some discipline. The ``facts'' part of the course would depend on the discipline- different in economics than in history, for example, or psychology or physics. Surely not every discipline could do such a empirical methods course, but many could.
Posted by: pw at Nov 15, 2006 11:07:20 AM
Sorry for those funny quotation marks... too much LaTeX.
Posted by: pw at Nov 15, 2006 11:08:27 AM
I believe that to think on a methodological level you must learn the facts. It is not possible to think on a higher level without knowing the basics first. There for I believe it is more import to teach the basic facts and by doing that students can use those facts to think methodology.
Posted by: Aftin at Nov 15, 2006 4:36:42 PM
A strange, telling sentence near the end of that article:
"The scientific method should not be an afterthought at Harvard and it should not be confined to the physical sciences."
With that, he seems to imply that the biological sciences somehow make less use of the 'scientific method' than the physical sciences do.
Posted by: Wowbagger at Nov 16, 2006 12:58:35 AM
"With that, he seems to imply that the biological sciences somehow make less use of the 'scientific method' than the physical sciences do."
I dunno about that. In my reading he is lumping biology, ecology, etc. in with physics as "physical sciences," as distinguished from "social sciences."
Posted by: cxz at Nov 16, 2006 2:34:45 AM
All through grade school students are tought of the scientific method. Mainly it is taught in
science classes. However students learn to apply the method to many different situations. They
apply it to their everyday life without even knowing it. Outside of Science class and into
college, students are not reminded and are not exposed to the scientific method. I believe if
students are exposed to the idea and principles of the method, then they will be able to
handle situations better and have a better understanding of the world around them.
Posted by: tiffany at Nov 16, 2006 4:49:06 AM
My first thought was with many of these commentators; you can't teach methods without content. But then I remembered a summer program I worked in last summer whose goal was to get inner-city kids academically prepared to go to prep schools and Boston exam schools. We taught them lots of content -- math and Latin and so forth -- but what we were really teaching them was the *skills* they would need to succeed in their future schools. Some very clever person had generated a list of these skills, ordered so that the easiest ones were introduced first, and we were all expected to wind as many of them as possible into whatever we were teaching. And most of them were applicable, no matter what the subject.
So yeah, I think you can meaningfully have a curriculum that is methods-focused. I don't think you can meaningfully have a *class* that's methods-focused, but I do think you can label your core classes according to the skills they particularly focus on, and require students to complete a checklist of skills via whatever disciplines they find most congenial.
Actually I think that secondary education overemphasizes content at the expense of skills, and have long toyed with the idea, were I to get to design a curriculum, of having its requirements center more on skills than content. So I guess I'm with Glaeser here.
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