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Jeffrey J. Selingo, regular contributor to Grade Point and professor of practice at Arizona State University says, "What employers look for when hiring graduates."
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| Xavier University student Triton Brown studies in a common area on campus before going to one of his part-time jobs in New Orleans. Photo: Gerald Herbert/AP |
As college students nationwide work in part-time
jobs or internships this summer, it’s unlikely many will think about how
they’re using their undergraduate courses on the job or how they might
apply what they’re learning at work when they get back to campus.
For
students, college is a series of disconnected experiences — the
classroom, the dorm, the athletic field, the internship. Yet what
employers tell me gets college students hired is the ability to
translate what they learned in one place (the classroom, for instance)
to another that is far different from where they originally learned a
concept (a project on an internship).
Educators
call this “transfer learning” — the ability to generalize core
principles and apply them in many different places, which becomes more
important as the skills needed to keep up in any job and occupation
continue to shift in the future.
The concept
sounds simple enough. But today’s students, facing the constant pressure
to prepare for standardized tests, rarely have the chance to learn
through problem solving or to be involved in projects that reinforce
skills that can be used in multiple settings. Our ability to drive
almost any car on the market without reading its manual is an example of
knowledge transfer, as is our ability to solve math equations involving
any number once we learn the formula...
Arizona State University, where I’m a professor of practice, is testing a curriculum
across a dozen majors in which students learn nearly half of the
subject matter through group projects instead of a specified schedule of
classes. Engineering students might build a robot and learn the key
principles of mechanics and electronics from faculty members during the
project. The hope is that students will be more engaged if theories from
the classroom are immediately applied in the outside world instead of
years after students graduate.
Source: Washington Post
