Two of the most fundamental insights of economics are, first, that “value” is a verb – objects have value because, and therefore precisely to the extent to which, someone values them; and second, people choose things they value. This is relevant to teaching because “to learn” is also a verb, a choice that learners must autonomously make.
“Teaching” therefore means creating an environment in which students choose to learn. Of course, another well known principle of economics is that you can manipulate value -- and thereby choice -- through incentives. There many different incentives that teachers can use to induce this choice. Most obviously, the threat of a bad grade for those who fail to learn enough. But many educators would agree that this results in getting things quite backwards: it makes the grade the carrier of value, and “learning” is reduced to a means to achieve the grade. The goal of education (learning) has become a tool, and the tool (the grade) has become the valued goal sought. This inversion is important: when the wrong object is valued, the wrong choices are made. By placing no value on the material itself, a scheme that motivates students with grades encourages them to learn the minimum amount required to get the grade they want, and provides no reason at all not to forget everything immediately thereafter. A low-value experience for everyone involved.
How can teachers induce students to value learning itself? For decades, a wide range of studies has supported an answer involving active learning. Education scholars consistently show that by engaging students in the production of their own knowledge, teachers also stimulate greater native or endogenous motivation to learn. The result is higher retention rates, a better holistic grasp of concepts, and higher-level understanding of the course content. There may be many reasons why this occurs, but for behavioral economists, it is reminiscent of the endowment effect: if people choose the things they value, it is also true that they often disproportionately value the things they own. Simply by giving students ownership over learning, teachers can make it more valuable.
The simplest path for this transfer of ownership lies in asking, and asking for, questions. This varies the pace of discussion, attenuating attention limits, and also allows continuous monitoring of understanding. But it also gives students ownership of the material. The possessive apostrophe in a student’s question (or reply) may have psychological significance. More concretely, teaching through questions gives students some autonomy over what they learn and how they learn it. This is the key element I'd like to stress. Two (very different) courses I regularly teach illustrate how autonomy and ownership interrelate to generate value: Economics & Psychology of Management (EPM) and an undergraduate methods course that is basically Intermediate Excel.
EPM is a first-year master’s course organized thematically on the nature and scope of rationality in social interactions. Each session is based around an economic experiment done in class, followed by a guided exploration of the results, with individual or group writing tasks designed to cement the material. The experimental activity means that the subject of the discussion is students’ own behavior; they must explain themselves, a rather radical degree of transfer of ownership. The form of the experiment determines the broad lines of the discussion: what is the “rational” behavior predicted by self-interested Homo economicus? What is the “socially optimal” behavior? What mechanisms might explain deviation from either of these? What real-life contexts resemble the experimental paradigm? While all of these are important, there is substantial leeway in the depth to which any branch can run, and to the extent possible, I let class interest determine the development. No class can ever be exhaustive, and it is an exercise of my autonomy as a professor to judge what is sufficient. Above all, any class will be more useful as a step in an ongoing process of intellectual development, the more the knowledge acquired is driven by learners’ endogenous interests.
This is possible in EPM because the competencies of the syllabus are broad. (And there is no common final exam.) The situation is different in the course on Excel. In this case, the set of skills that students need to master consists in the use of a relatively well-defined list of formulas. How to preserve the autonomy of exploration here? The answer is to give them scope to use the tools flexibly. The format is 30-45 minutes of demonstration of the session’s new material, followed by two hours of problems they need to solve by using them. I circulate, answering questions, and in the meanwhile encourage students to look online for solutions to their problems, and for those who understand to help those who are having trouble. These techniques give students power over, and responsibility for, their learning. Peer coaching helps the explainers appropriate and solidify their understanding, at the same time providing role models as well as another explanation to those they are helping. Looking up online solutions is a skill useful at any level of programming expertise, and also once again gives learners ownership of the material.
The grading of the course, similarly, is not based on finding answers to problems, but on constructing techniques that generate the answers. Exams contain problems to solve, but to grade the responses, the parameter values of the problem are changed: the method proposed must also solve the new problem parameters to earn marks. This focus on the derivation process rather than the solution itself generates a feeling of freedom and discovery, and many students are surprised at how the course is not just useful, but also even relatively enjoyable. “Competence” is precisely the name for the enjoyable feeling they experience when their solutions work. The lesson from these two examples is that the extent of autonomy, and the form that it is given, must be tailored to the goals and requirements of the course. But in all cases, the principle is ownership and freedom: the more students discover knowledge through active exploration, the more valuable it will be to them, and the more likely they are to choose to learn it.
This idea is literally thousands of years old, but is more controversial than it may sound. There are at least two aspects of the process of exploration that conflict with other important educational goals. The first is time: an active classroom will necessarily have fewer ideas presented than one packed with transmissive information. Thus, less is sometimes more constitutes an important component of my active learning philosophy. I believe learners who have engaged with a reasonable volume of material, and leave the course knowing there is more to learn, have received more value than those who leave feeling packed (or perhaps a better word for after finals is “crammed”) with material they will soon forget. The second conflict arguably runs even deeper: it can be termed “freedom.” Letting them choose what to learn, or at least how to learn it, implies both a priori unpredictability, and also some heterogeneity in the final outcome. The second potentially controversial component of active learning follows: fair does not mean equal.
I would argue that both of these positions are controversial only when viewed through a lens that places no inherent value on education itself. Education, according to this view, is "good" or "important" or "valuable" because it has other positive consequences. Higher productivity/earnings later in life is the most common ultimate goal used across the political spectrum to justify the necessary evil of learning. Even basic research or literature or philosophy are justified in this way, with the claim that they are the path to discover potentially useful facts, which may deliver some other unexpected benefits in the future. If this is the case, then less can never be more, as the greatest additional usefulness of (true) knowledge successfully obtained is zero. And fair must always be equal: students in any class or program are "purchasing" a set of future benefits with their effort; if they pay the same price, they should get the same benefit.
However, these future goals are all instrumental benefits of learning. They boil down to a broader version of the "work for grades" model. And like that model, they get the incentives backwards. Education counts in the "cost" side of the equation, which by economic reasoning will be minimized for any expected "benefit". A view of education as inherently valuable, by contrast, implies that the value attached to it is purely determined by the learner, as an application of Stigler's famous adoption of the expression de gustibus non est disputandum. A teacher's role, in this view, is to help learners discover what kind of knowledge they value, and with it the value of education.