Students often ask their homework questions on Socratic. How can we create a culture of learning on Socratic rather than one of just getting quick answers?
2 Answers
People who provide answers (myself including) must always be cognizant of the possibility of the question being asked to avoid hard work on a home assignment. But suspecting this type of question should not preclude answering it. What's important in these cases is to provide the logic behind the answer, so even just reading the answer or re-writing it from the screen into a notebook would be beneficial for a student. The answer provided should not be just the final answer, but based on detail derivation process.
There is no substitution for solving a problem by a student himself. So, if appropriate, the answer might be provided just in a form of a hint instead of a complete solution. If our purpose is to lift up the level of knowledge, this hint might be even more beneficial than a complete answer, however logical. In some cases this hint might be the beginning of a conversation between a student and a person who provided this hint, but I am not sure if Socratic accommodates this type of personal contact. If not, general conversation in a form of comments and comments on comments will do as well.
Since most of the questions are in Old English units of measurement, I often say that I will do the method with metric units, and they may convert themselves.
In this way they can see the method used, but they don't get a ready-to-copy answer.
