These students would seem to be what William Perry and related researchers
label "received knowers." I came across this in pp. 42+ of Ken Bain's
"What the Best College Teachers Do." In that section, he describes
students' intellectual development (this is the lowest one). A very quick
Google search yielded this on these ideas:
http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/perry.positions.html . At least at a
casual level, it does seem to describe a lot of what we see.

   - Bill


Jennifer said (in part):

> I teach in a very different field (I use TBL in a data analysis
> course) but have had the same issue. The first time I used TBL,
> students really seemed to hate that there was not a 'right' answer,
> even though I tried to be very clear with them about why there could
> be multiple 'right' answers. 


-- 
Bill Goffe
Department of Economics
SUNY Oswego, 416 Mahar Hall
Oswego, NY 13126
315-312-3444(v), 315-312-5444(f)
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http://cook.rfe.org