CHAPTER 7
How Do Students Become Self-Directed Learners?
The “A” Student
I was exhausted from reading and grading twenty-five papers over the past weekend, but I was glad to be able to hand them back so quickly. It was the first big assignment in my freshman seminar on immigration, and it required students to state an argument and support it with evidence from course readings and supplemental documents. After class, one of the students, Melanie, approached me and insisted that she needed to talk with me immediately about her grade (not about her paper, mind you!). Hers was a typical first paper in this course—it lacked a clearly articulated argument, and there was only weak evidence to support what I inferred was her argument. As we walked across ...
