What instructional strategies will help students learn to think?
What do we know about student learning? Helping students learn would appear to be a straightforward goal, but there are many ways of perceiving postsecondary teaching and learning. From the perspective of faculty, learning is a matter of disciplinary knowledge and methods of inquiry, but the expectations of students differ across disciplines. Most physics professors expect students to enter their programs with a high degree of logical ability, while English professors expect students to learn to argue logically in their courses (Donald, 1988). Law professors expect students to learn to think like a lawyer, to acquire the skills and methods of analysis and procedure (Donald, 2002). Since scholars learn and think within disciplines, an important source for what is to be learned is what our disciplines tell us, particularly the methods of inquiry used and the learning tasks prescribed by these methods. Learning theories have a more general effect, influencing what happens in the classroom
