ABSTRACT
Candyce’ Story: The bad—Yet another essay turned in that seems to ignore all of what my students have studied (or so I thought) over a whole term. We have discussed the concepts repeatedly; they have written papers and have been given detailed feedback. But again, a significant number of my students have minimally answered the question posed for their final paper and completely ignored my instructions to synthesize materials from the whole class as well as from their earlier psychology courses. They seemed to only pay attention to what is right in front of them—what they studied last week—and missed out on the bigger picture: how it all fits together. The good—I was looking forward to seeing my Freshman Inquiry students’ final ePortfolios, but I was actually surprised to see what my students had done. Many seemed to have learned what I had hoped they had learned, and many had learned more than I could have imagined by making connections beyond the scope of the course. One student summed it up nicely in his reflection about the program’s critical thinking goal:
