The Getting of Wisdom

There is an entire literature devoted to the importance of students developing understanding and taking a deep approach to their learning yet in Accounting and Finance, textbooks and teaching are all too often focussed on providing technical knowledge. Hence, it is hardly surprising that students view learning through the lens of fact accumulation. They read fact-focused materials and attend a lecture that often emphasises facts. In the short time of the average lecture, we know we are providing students with key knowledge to be supplemented by their additional reading, thinking, exploring, questioning etc done outside the classroom, but do our students know this? Moreover, do they know how to do it?

Although the teaching and learning literature discusses understanding, in assessment tasks, we often require an additional step: we expect students to demonstrate wisdom. So we teach knowledge, expect understanding and assess wisdom.

These words are not synonyms.

Knowledge is knowing what is and is not.

Understanding is knowing why it is or is not.

Wisdom is knowing how to use understanding to selectively apply knowledge.

We give our students knowledge so they will achieve understanding and demonstrate wisdom. There is a fundamental problem here. We expect our students to leap tall buildings at a single bound as they progress from knowledge to understanding and then finally to the holy grail of wisdom, often within the narrow confines of a teaching semester. Those who fail to make the leap are penalised by low marks or perhaps even failure. But it is their failure or ours?