Learning philosophies: A glimpse into students' approaches to learning

A learning philosophy, as discussed in this paper, is a collection of beliefs about how one learns and approaches learning activities and tasks. Learning is often studied from the instructor's point of view, but learning from the student's perspective is not examined much. A baseline understanding of how students learning philosophies might be disclosed and interpreted are described by the nineteen student responses to an open-ended survey in an undergraduate elective course titled “Engineering in Global Context.” The findings suggest implications for course and curriculum design in order to promote higher levels of thinking and to develop appropriate epistemological beliefs. Partially through the lenses of Bloom's Taxonomy and Schommer's Epistemological Dimensions, this paper offers a glimpse into students' conceptions about learning.