As Brick, Herke, and Wong suggest, one of the central ideas of academic culture
is that knowledge develops through debate and argument.
We ask questions like, how reliable is this source?
Is there an alternative conclusion to the one they've reached?
What assumptions have they made?
Or simply, why?
Indeed, questioning becomes as Paul and Elder and
King suggests, a form of independent learning.
The very act of generating questions regardless of whether those questions
are answered, enables you as a student to more fully engage with the topics covered.
The aim of questioning is not to pose cause in an argument or
undermine a theory, but to more fully understand it.
Take the example we gave you before.
We should question new information.
This is one of the key ideas we hope you take away from this lecture.
However, the example response questions each reveals something more.
What do you qualify as new information?
In this lesson, we've been using the term new
to apply to information that's new to you, regardless of when it was discovered.
This then leads us to our next question.
Do we just need to question new information?
Of course not.
When we learn new things we need to integrate them into our current
understanding.
That means that all knowledge needs to be questioned again
to see how it fits with the new information.