Reply to comment

In their paper, The Many Faces of Inductive Teaching and Learning, Michael Prince and Richard Felder describe the benefits and various forms of inductive teaching. This paper offered valuable information for teachers who are interested in implementing these teaching strategies, giving general overviews of each, comparing the pros and cons of each, discussing the student and teacher demands required for each method, and supplying the locations of additional resources. This would certainly be a good resource for those who are interested in examining new and perhaps more effective methods for teaching.

My interest, however, did not lie in the general information provided by the paper. Rather, I would be more interested to see research on the factors underlying the success and failures of these different methods. For example, why are students more resistant to inductive teaching? Why do we, as students, prefer to turn to the teacher for ‘truth’ and a solid foundation for the future acquisition of more ‘facts’? (Is it purely due to cultural expectations we have developed? Is this preference affected by innate predispositions for how we acquire knowledge? As pointed out in Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science, it seems we prefer to unquestionably accept information as fact when delivered by a source we deem trustworthy. Why would we rather assume our teachers are infallible sources of truth than explore the topics ourselves?)

Further, why is inductive teaching more ‘effective’? What is it about these different methods that improve “student retention” and “skill development?” I have always been taught that engaged learning is more effective, but never really taught why. I have a vague understanding that being engaged in the material of a subject will increase one’s interest in the subject, and therefore enhances one’s ability to commit relevant concepts to a working memory, but I do not really understand why this is the case beyond my own experience. From my experience I can tell that having a greater involvement and investment in learning feeds a desire to better understand the material, and I will therefore work harder to do so, but it seems this paper is suggesting more is at play than an increased desire/interest to learn. The authors of this paper argue that these methods are more effective at accomplishing specific tasks (e.g. teaching concepts of a high cognitive level, beyond pure memorization), which to me suggests that these methods do a better job of targeting the actual mechanisms of learning. If this is the case, I believe that further inspection of the subject of learning could benefit from examining these neural mechanisms involved in learning, and how each of these mechanisms are in turn affected by the different methods of teaching/learning.