Author: erinlcrane

That’s good to hear ? I should have said that I’m a librarian, so I probably just end up with the students that are annoyed by the more open assignments. I never hear the good side! Typically the students that are asking for help from the library are the ones who are already at a point of frustration because they couldn’t figure things out on their own. It sounds like, in your experience as a professor, more often than not they are happy with the experience!

I like the idea of setting students loose through an enjoyable learning experience/journey… I’m just skeptical that many of them want such an experience. I speak partly from anecdotal evidence of student annoyance when they are allowed to choose their own topic, as a minor example of this. The goal of the teacher is to improve student motivation by allowing them to choose a topic that interests them. But then the students are overwhelmed the options or not really interested in doing the assignment in the first place, so having to choose a topic is just more work. I think Nelson would blame this on the way K-12 education is structured. Students are conditioned a certain way so why should we be surprised if they resist a new type of education. I suppose his argument would be that if the educational experience were highly self-motivated from the very start, they would be conditioned appropriately and handle the options better. I find myself very skeptical … ?