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by tokenadult
5958 days ago
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So is there evidence that English majors are better at that kind of metacognition than, say, engineering majors? (I certainly don't credit MOST business majors with a high level of metacognition, but maybe all we have going on now is yesterday's former marginal English majors becoming today's marginal business majors. Maybe neither major program adds value to the students enrolled in it.) I strongly suspect that engineering majors have more experience reading harder material more closely than most humanities majors, but I'm basing that mostly on my close acquaintance with my contemporaries. There may well be published research on this subject--what does that research say? |
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Having fought my way through a number of Greek and German philosophers, I can tell you that there is no shortage of dense and difficult material to read in the humanities. (There is plenty of English lit that isn't a cakewalk either). In my current line of work I often find myself reading technical papers involved in computer science and engineering. I can tell you that while there is sometimes math that I have trouble with and have to learn, the level of of writing is certainly not more difficult than Nietzsche, Wittgenstein or Joyce.
What I intended to convey was that in general the particular major probably doesn't make as much difference as we would think. I think it is misguided to believe that you can learn any career in four years at college, I would argue that it is more important that you learn how to learn, so that you can keep learning for the next 60 years of your life/career. A good student will use his or her time at college to develop meta-cognition.
As a matter of fact, a quick Google turns up a plethora of information about reading comprehension and meta-cognition (in both the sciences and liberal arts). There seems to be much less information about specific majors and meta-cognition.