Many applicants to the most selective university programs share high grades, high test scores, solid recommendations and generous doses of community service and volunteer activities. Yet, if they want to set themselves apart from the pool of exceptional students, a significant research experience in STEM or the social sciences helps.
In 2019, two researchers, one from Harvard School of Education, Jay Mehta, and the other from the School of
Education at UC San Diego, Sarah Fine, visited 30 high schools representing a wide demographic and geographic mix to observe deep learning in four distinct high school curricula: project-based, ‘no-excuses’, International Baccalaureate, and ‘conventional’.
There is a tendency for many students to take ‘relevant’, pre-professional courses as they commence their college studies. After all, most want the quickest path to economic success after graduating: that is, after all, in their self-interest, which, according to Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, is the backbone of our free enterprise system.
To many college applicants there must be something illicit about the block plan, especially as it is practiced by Colorado College.
The Block plan, which was incorporated into Colorado College’s curriculum in 1970, allows a student to take one course at a time. Each block is 3.5 weeks, beginning on a Monday and ending on a Wednesday four weeks later. Then there is a 4.5 day block-break, so students can decompress after the intensity of the immersion and go skiing near Pike’s Peak, rafting on the Colorado River, or visiting the four corners to study the Anasazi Indian remnants.
If you were to discover a method to almost double the learning from the same amount of time spent in class and on homework, chances are you’d want to use this method across all your studies. Research just published in the Science journal by Louis Deslauriers and Carl Wieman, a Nobel Prize winning physicist at the University of British Columbia (UBC), showed that a method called “deliberate practice” produced dramatic results.
