by Benjamin Yost, Rhetoric
Grappling with divergent understandings of a text is a highlight of the class, but for many students is also fraught with uncertainty and confusion…When they occur, I slow down the discussion, and remind students that different interpretations are not signs of hopeless undecidability, but reveal that arguments work only on the basis of particular assumptions.
by Gautam Borooah, Mathematics
Since mathematics in books is (almost) always correct and students’ work is often wrong, they think that they cannot produce “real” mathematics. They are so afraid of coming up with a wrong idea that they do not articulate any ideas at all: they are too afraid to try.
by Terry O’Brien, Integrative Biology
In my experience, no matter how much students practice…skills, few are able to develop a clear conceptual matrix for those skills without significant guidance from the instructor. A direct approach to this problem means that the instructor first provides students with the scaffolding of concepts for each skill.