"When our courses demand that first-year students move beyond memory—as they should—we need to provide structured activities to support them in uncharted territory....
First-year students come to us with their own notions of what constitutes learning. Because, for the most part, they are in the early stages of intellectual development, many students define learning as accumulating facts and memorizing right answers, and they’ve honed their study skills to do just that... Although accumulating facts is something we want students to do, it is certainly not the only thing we hope they accomplish in our courses. We want students to use the ideas of our disciplines to solve problems, to analyze situations, to make judgments, and more.
This article provides some strategies to use to support and facilitate deeper thinking among your first-year students.
