Spoon Feeding Leads to Regurgitation: a better diet can result in more digestible learning outcomes

It is common to hear teachers claim that their students expect to be spoon fed and are only capable of regurgitating information they have been fed. Their curricula reflect this belief and the outcome is a self-fulfilling prophecy—the students dutifully regurgitate to the best of their ability to fulfill assessment requirements. We present a case study of a course based upon this belief, but provide evidence to show that the assumption was not true at all. When an alternative curriculum stressing independent learning and student-centred approaches was developed, the students were not only capable of more meaningful learning approaches, they actually preferred them—even if they did at times work harder. We discuss the aspects of course design which contributed to encouraging students to use a deep approach to learning.