ABSTRACT
Too often, students are seen and see themselves only as consumers of rules and principles. The process of discovering for themselves these generalizations can make future application more likely. For instance, students learning the rules for quotation marks look for examples in written text, discover the pattern among similar examples, construct a rule, share it with a partner, help construct a class rule, return to textual examples to see whether the rule holds, and then apply it to their own writing. This example-to-idea-to-example-to-application learning process is classic and useful across content areas—for instance, in discovering mathematical formulas.
