Deeper learning is based on the premise that the nature of work, civic, and everyday life is changing and therefore increasingly requires that formal education provides young people with mastery of skills like analytic reasoning, complex problem solving, and teamwork.
Deeper learning is associated with a growing movement in U.S. education that places special emphasis on the ability to apply knowledge to real-world circumstances and to solve novel problems.
[4] According to labor economists Frank Levy of MIT and Richard Murnane of Harvard's Graduate School of Education, since 1970, with the economic changes brought about by technology and globalization, employers' demands for workers with routine, repetitive skills—whether manual or cognitive—have dropped steeply, while demand for those with deeper learning competencies like complex thinking and communications skills has soared.
In a 2012 survey conducted by the American Management Association (AMA), executives found a need for highly skilled employees to keep up with the fast pace of change in business and to compete on a global level.
While stressing robust content mastery, instructors ask students to "move beyond basic comprehension and algorithmic procedures and engage in skills that lie at the top of traditional learning taxonomies—analysis, synthesis, and creation," according to Harvard education scholars Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine.
Strategies that promote metacognition, reflection, student feedback, creativity, inquiry and more support the type of teaching that most enriches mindful, deeper learning.
In addition, his studies detail how surface teaching strategies such as lectures, worksheets, overly frequent testing and others do little for achievement or deeper learning.
[17] While evidence supporting the direct impact of education organized around deeper learning outcomes in driving academic achievement is not robust to date, it continues to build.
The consortium team, made up of volunteer, long experienced professional developers, classroom teachers, administrators and school change specialists, all with experience in public school reform, adapted and redesigned the most effective PBL models and designed a new school-wide approach of PBL that included explicit instruction and assessment of the 4CS as advocated by the Partnership, technology, reflection and a 5th C, cultural responsiveness.
Research conducted by UCLA's CRESST show marked increases in the amount of higher-order skills to be assessed as measured by the Depth of Knowledge scale.
The performance assessments under development by participating states includes tasks that require students to analyze, critique, evaluate, and apply knowledge.
[24] In September 2014, a report was released by the American Institutes for Research on a three-year, quasi-experimental comparison of traditional and Deeper Learning schools.