Are the answers in the back of the book?

I can't imagine how frustrated Thomas Edison must have been the other nine hundred ninety-nine times he did NOT invent the light bulb.  The easy thing to do would have been to say, "Screw it, it's going to have to be candles.  Besides, in a few years they'll all be declaring my incandescent bulb a weapon of mass ecological destruction."  I realize trying to move students from from the mindset that learning is not about completing tasks but discovery and mastery is not going to happen over night, but it certainly brings the Myth of Sisyphus to mind. 

Recently my classes embarked on a PBL activity in which they had to create or move a professional sports team and "sell" that idea to a group of league officials (the class).  Obviously there were certain tasks that needed to be completed, but the heart and soul of the assignment was to take the gathered data, analyze it, and determine if your chosen city was a viable candidate for a franchise.  Students were to then take that data and persuade the class that the data made their city an ideal candidate for a team.

What I ended up seeing (after repeatedly encouraging people to go further) was a simple report on data that was gathered that included little to no analysis in most cases.  A week of instruction has been wasted for the most part.  Upon reflection there was a lot that I should have done differently.  However, the modern public school pupil is steeped in a culture that moves you ahead and rewards you based upon task completion.

At the beginning of every school year they've been told that if they complete sixty-five percent of their tasks they will move on.  With the exception of a government institution, no employer would ever accept that you've completed just a tad more than half of your job and still pay you!  Of course this culture is going to lead to copying work, cheating, and worst of all completion without thinking.

If we want to create competent analytical learners this cycle must be broken.  Nothing short of a radical transformation from a twentieth century "assembly line" method of education to a more mastery oriented mode of education will stop this.  There are signs of life out there.  STEM has proven to be very adept at achieving this goal, but so far implementation of STEM and other types of discovery education have not caught on institutionally.  Until this is done we will be forced to deal with students and an institution that looks for the answers from the back of the book.