How 'Learning Engineering' Hopes to Speed Up Education - EdSurge News

This story was published in partnership with The Moonshot Catalog. In the late 1960s, Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Simon posed the following thought exercise: Imagine you are an alien from Mars visiting a college on Earth, and you spend a day observing how professors teach their students. Simon argued that you would describe the process as "outrageous." "If we visited an organization responsible for designing, building and maintaining large bridges, we would expect to find employed there a number of trained and experienced professional engineers, thoroughly educated in mechanics and the other laws of nature that determine whether a bridge will stand or fall," he wrote in a 1967 issue of Education Record. "We find no one with a professional knowledge in the laws of learning, or the techniques for applying them," he wrote. Teaching at colleges is often done without any formal training. Mimicry of others who are equally untrained, instinct, and what feels right tend to provide the guidance. As a result, teaching is, to use another building metaphor, not up to code. There are widespread beliefs about the best way to teach and learn that have been proven wrong by science, yet they persist. Reading back over a textbook or taking lecture notes with a highlighter at the ready is often done by students, for instance, but these practices have proven of limited merit, and in some cases even counterproductive in aiding recall.