How meta-skills can guide your degree choices and learning journey
Apr 13, 2024
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When you are in the process of making a decision, an unconscious process that is occurring is an evaluation of your options using a predetermined set of principles. This usually goes unnoticed because no one stops you and forces you to actually explain how you made that decision. It may have just felt like you went with your gut instinct. The problem with not analysing your thinking is that you end up basing your decisions off only what you currently know. And what do you know right now? The preconceived views that you hold before proper research are simply those that have picked up by random chance over time. You cannot trust the quality of a decision made like this. When it comes to degree or university selection, some relevant considerations that are likely already having an influence include reputation, perceived early earning potential, and familiarity with content matter.
I want to add an additional consideration or principle into your decision-making process for what you end up studying, whether it is for your degree choice, or learning journey throughout life in general. Â
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Meta-skills as a concept
To begin, let’s think about skills. A skill can be simple defined as an ability to do something. Skills can be seen as smallest building blocks which can be used in different combinations to create a profession or subject. Some skills are relevant to many applications, others are very niche. They can also range in difficulty.
To break down the anatomy of something as intangible as a ‘skill’, we can think of three parts that together make up the whole. There is the relevant cognition or understanding about the skill, experience in the form of neural links that have been built, and for some skills, a sufficient physicality such as voice or fitness. For example, the skill of kicking a soccer ball has aspects of cognition, such as understanding how making contact at different parts of the ball or with different parts of your foot with affect its flight. There is also a neural component where the organisation of the neurons that transmits signals to produce the kicking motion become more coordinated over time, reducing the mental fatigue in performing the skill. Lastly, there is the muscular strength and endurance component that also develops with practice to reduce the physical cost. All of these are important areas to track your progress in skill development, which we will revisit later.
When I had just graduated from high school, I thought I was ahead of the curve because I was motivated to continue learning, and was excited to get started with the next chapter of my life. However, I encountered a problem that made it hard for me to take action and resulted in me being less productive that I would have liked. It was only later, that I found out that many learners suffered from the same problem I had, and you, reading this right now may have also experienced this too.
It is the paralysis of choice.
There are so many skills out there! And for many of them, there can be some sort of argument made for why they should be prioritised over the others. One can end up spending so much time and energy obsessing over making the right choice that they end up not doing anything at all. To overcome this obstacle, I want to provide a suggestion for which skills to pursue. And they are the ones that fall under the classification of ‘meta-skills.’ If any of the Atlas team are reading this right now, you can be sure that they will be groaning because Wayne and I have lectured them too many times on meta- words already, like metacognition and meta-explanation. But I will ignore the haters and soldier on.
‘Meta-‘ is an Ancient Greek root that translates to ‘beyond’ or ‘transcending.’ When we talk about metacognition in science education, we are talking about the logic and problem-solving skills that underlie a concept, rather than the theory itself. The chemistry example I like to use is that while the theory would be knowing that VSEPR is an abbreviation for ‘valence shell electron pair repulsion,’ the metacognition is the understanding that to determine the geometry of a molecule, we need to identify the number of regions of electron density and consider how they will repel each other. Metacognition tells us how to actually use the theory we have memorised to solve a problem.
A meta-skill similarly is the foundation to many skills. It is often a skill itself, but one that accelerates the process of skills acquisition. And so we can finally get to my objective. I think that getting meaningful development of meta-skills should form a key part of how you evaluate the pathways you can take after high school, be it degree choice or the study you do in your own time.
The central meta-skill
Though the formal literature provides many examples of meta-skills, I want to focus on the most important one. Later, I will provide a brief reason why I think this is the most important.
The educators and philosophers of Ancient Rome and Greece emphasised the importance of literacy. We can begin our framework be exploring it as a central meta-skill. Literacy extends beyond the foundations established in primary school, and encompasses a few subskills.
Reading: the ability to absorb information from text
Critical thinking: the ability to evaluate quality of information
Learning: the ability to create frameworks of information to understand and predict phenomena in the world
Teaching: the ability to impart information to others
Writing: the ability to impart information in the form of text
Public speaking: the ability to impart information verbally
A person who is skilled in literacy possess all the tools to endless learn new skills. Not only that, they can ensure that they have learnt skills properly, while a person who is handheld by someone else through the entire learning process has no idea whether they actually developed any skills. These fundamental skills are already hugely valuable in the workforce. So few people can read a formal text such as a research paper or report, or convey the information within it to other people. There are swaths of highly paid people whose jobs is literally to just to this (consultants). For those reading who are unsure about the value of a certain degree, my claim is that the generalist degrees, also known as liberal arts degrees, such as a Bachelor of Arts or a Bachelor of Science, are a great opportunity to focus on general literacy. This doesn’t mean you won’t specialise into anything, the majors you select with give you some specific areas of expertise, but the course in general gives you the tools to continue with self-study to become a specialist in anything.
There is a modification that I want to make to this framework, to account for how the world has changed from the classical period to now. We have undergone an unprecedented advancement in technology in our modern world. Computers are now highly complex and ubiquitous in our lives. So now, we need to expand our framework to include digital literacy as another key meta-skill.
Digital literacy: the ability to interact with technology
Computer skills: ability to use application such as word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation software
Programming: ability to write code, build applications
The reasoning is unchanged. Much like how a literature person can acquire information and share it with others, a digitally literate person can use the modern tools available to amplify their output to many times that of a regular person. It is not about specialising into a specific niche like just being really good at Microsoft PowerPoint. It is developing the competency to transfer know-how between many applications. A digitally literate person does not need to be an expert in everything such as coding, website and app development, or video editing software. But they have the confidence and fundamentals to learn any of those skills when the need arises. Even if you don’t do a computer science or software engineering course at university, there are ample opportunities to develop these skills. You will learn statistics software in any course that involves conducting first-hand research and referencing tools and graphic design in any course that involves report or paper writing.
At the risk of really complicating things, I would claim that there is another type of literacy that we can discuss, which is domain specific. For example, in the world of athletics/sports, skills that I would classify as ‘literacy’ which others may have not traditionally thought of calling, would be things like proprioception (understanding the relationship between parts of the body), which like the other examples we discussed, greatly accelerate the process of skill development in athletes.
And so, the complete framework for the central meta-skill may looks something like this:
Meta-skill: Literacy Which subdivides into
Traditional literacy
Digital literacy
Domain specific literacy
Resource limitation as a consideration for skill development
The argument for literacy being the most important meta-skill is that it opens up our potential to acquire many more skills. Skill development is a multifaceted process, and most people are learning many skills at the same time. So I want to add another consideration for what other skills to be working on at the same time, which is a consideration for the resource limitations of what you can accomplish at this point in time. Though it is great to believe that people can accomplish a great variety of things, to inject some nuance to this positivity, I think there are some things that are substantially harder to achieve without external assistance. These are things that are highly resource intensive.
For example, it is possible for someone to become a director and produce a movie. But if that is the first skill someone wants to work on in life, even after a huge amount of study and practice, they would have the gargantuan task of seeking external assistance in the form of financing and crew. It doesn’t mean that this task or skill is not worth pursuing, but it is likely one that is much easier at a later stage in life when prior skills and resources have been acquired. In addition, having prior skills in time management, leadership and business would clearly be advantageous, if not a requirement. Â
Now let’s evaluate the proposed central meta-skill of literacy under the same lens. Reading, writing, coding all have ridiculously low barriers of entry in terms of capital. This was not always the case! A long time ago, literacy was not universal among the common people (that’s us). You could not easily study from books if you did not have quiet spaces indoors, and lighting at night. And with regards to writing, the last decade or two has really been the first time anyone could write something, share it with the world via the internet, and receive feedback and build an audience. So if you want to weigh up your options, you have skills like developing your literacy that are easy to start now, and will likely have a similar barrier to entry and any point in your life. Then there are resource intensive skills like some artistic/creative pursuits, that become much easier with more experience. Â
