The Faculty of Medicine at the University of Sydney has now moved to a problem based Graduate Medical Program that is supported by Intranet technology to encourage students in becoming independent and self-reflective learners. As well as putting more thought into the questions that we ask students, we need to encourage and enable them to ask their own questions. The habit of asking questions diminishes through formal education because of the system s determination to tell children what to think and believe. Schools teach you to obey authority rather than to question things. By the time students hit secondary school they have been indoctrinated into believing that memorising information at a superficial level is the same as learning.
Every study shows that the vast proportion of questions during a class come from the teacher.
If learning is about answering questions and solving problems rather than knowing the answers in rote conditioned responses, we need to develop more effective learning strategies to empower our students to explore and to help them make sense of the results of their explorations. The goal is to create inquiring students who come to class with their own questions and who know how to search for their own answers. At the same time, we need to enable them to look beyond the information they have, beyond their theories, and beyond their beliefs. There is a vast amount of information on the Internet that has been designed to persuade. The learning scaffolding we provide has to enable children to deal with information in the real world.