Inducing Students To Think about Their Learning: Four Approaches.

Instructors seeking to practice learner-centered principles of teaching have several tools at their disposal. This paper summarizes four approaches to help students become more aware of their own psychological functioning and how it shapes their learning. Journal writing induces students to reflect and connect course concepts to past or present experiences. The Bloom Taxonomy of Educational Objectives encourages writing journal entries to reflect examples of knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. The covert curriculum, those routine skill-related activities, behaviors, and attitudes transacted inside and outside of classrooms, links the present to the future by recognizing that study skills are career skills. The Kolb Learning Style Inventory represents students' preferred mode of learning. In Kolb's Experimental Learning Model (Kolb, 1984), learning proceeds in four cycles, from concrete experience to reflective observation to abstract conceptualization to active experimentation. Included are guidelines for journal writing, articles by Paul Hettich, "Journal Writing: Old Fare or Nouvelle Cuisine?" and "Study Skills Are for Career and College," and categories in the cognitive domain of the Bloom Taxonomy. (References are included.) (LL)