Thoughts on Work Report supervision

During the Winter 2023, I looked back upon my experience supervising student co-op work reports for over two years.  Between Spring 2019 and Fall 2021, I commented on 483 student proposals and 544 reports.

Through co-op and other forms of experiential learning, economics students have a remarkable opportunity to bridge two worlds, university study and employment.  For some students it was a rewarding task to use what intuition they had about economic problems (trade-offs, market power, strategic and collaborative interaction) to frame a problem in their employment situation, and then try to understand how their fellow employees navigate those situations.

My commitment in trying to improve the work report process was to lean against simple chronicling of activities, parroting of workplace narratives, and overzealous application of concepts to the neglect of observation on employment situation and the ideas used in those settings. 

I realize now how important it is to create learning opportunities where students can integrate the learning of an economics education with real-world experiences.  For educators, co-op offers a unique window on how students will take their education out into the world.  To make university education meaningful we must find occasions for students to practice framing problems, judging appropriateness of different tools, and asking what they could learn through observation (to work in the zone of proximal development).