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) [log in to unmask] http://cook.rfe.org