Caplan: People fail to apply knowledge across subjects without explicit prompting
Bryan Caplan · a16z Podcast | The Case Against Education, From Signaling to Rainbow's End · Jan 2, 2019 · at 7:15
Bryan Caplan, economics professor at George Mason University, explains educational psychology experiments regarding skill transfer across academic disciplines.
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“People are very bad at applying what they've learned. Especially without external prompting, so there's a lot of experimental evidence where you'll teach, for example, either math and science or science and math, and you'll sort of randomly assign which order you get, and then just see whether people apply something that is relevant to the other subject, and a usual result is people are terrible at applying this. Unless you give very heavy-handed instructions, like use the material that you learned in the previous section to solve the problems in this section, there's very little sign that people actually do apply it.”
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