In effect, students already had a set of principles about learning and teaching they use to interpret and explain classroom dilemmas. Their model construes learning as something that happens via exposure, imitation, practice and exploration. The kind of teaching that goes along with this view of learning involves showing, telling, modeling, reinforcing, and providing hands on experience for the student (Levin and Ammon, 1996, 1992; Ammon and Hutcheson, 1989). Everyday models of teaching and learning are distinctly non-cognitive in nature and focus on behavior that is directly observable. Cognitive models of learning, on the other hand, focus on covert mental processes that are inaccessible to direct experience. Not only is this type of theory unfamiliar to students, but the experiences on which it is founded are inaccessible to direct experience. It is interesting to note that none of my students tried to answer the question by reflecting on what they do to try to understand text. I expected at least a few students to explain their own strategies for trying to understand text, and use these as a basis for their proposals. Perhaps this illustrates that the cognitive perspective is not intuitive.

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