Discussion - Nov 3

• Is it really necessary for professors to teach students about how to become more effective learners? I agree that it is important to integrate "strategic learning" into your teaching approach, but actually showing your students how to become better learners seems like something better taught outside of the class.
• Strategic learning is a skill that requires both a motivated teacher and a motivated student, how often do these two components come together in a given semester. It seems that helping foster self regualted and strategic learners is a major time and energy commitment, how feasible is this approach to teaching?
• The authors of the text describe methods that teachers can use to help students become self-regulated learners. Does this really need to be addressed in an upper division class?
• What are others thoughts on utilizing teaching strategies to promote self-regulatied learners/deep processing for higher level courses vs. intro courses?
• How much effort should go into teaching students how to learn (90% course content 10% how to learn) what do you think is an appropriate ratio?
• What "domain-specific" learning strategies should we be teaching to intro psychology students?
• Anyway, to help students with their studying strategies, how about the use of study guides? Instead of doing one right before the test, prepare them for the end of each section. However, are they better to help the students organize their information with topics they need to know, or have them a question format? -- but then how many students would take the time to answer the questions unless they were already self-directed?
• Are strategic learners influenced by their professors. In other words, do good professors make their students want to be strategic learners, while not so good professor create the opposite effect. Is a strategic learner really independent of their professor?
• McKeachie states that making sure a student understands is as simple as paraphrasing or applying the knowledge. In my opinion, to truely understand is not to simplify, but to be able to elaborate on the idea. Do you believe smaller or larger assignments reflect understanding better?
• Beyond giving homework assignments to help students develop their knowledge, and forming test questions that allow for deeper cognitive processing, how much of a moral responsibility does an instructor really have for "teaching a student how to learn." Are there any cases in which teachers can assume that their students already know how to learn, or should a good instructor always include "learning instruction" as part of the overall class?
• Have you ever seen the self-awareness survey strategy ("How much time do you study for? How do you take notes?" etc.) used to help identify ways in which students might study more effectively? It sounds like a good idea, but again, the problem of students being responsible for their own study strategies comes up here.