What do you learn in doing a PhD?

Really interesting post on the Chronicle of Higher Education forums lately about the skills of a PhD student. Poster polly_mer highlights some of the generic skills, according to learning research:

A PhD student has to be on the road to independence instead of a good instruction follower.  A good PhD student has ideas and can make plans.  A good PhD student knows the difference between "I need some help here to sort through ideas and bounce around possibilities before I make a decision on what to do next" and "Just tell me what to do and I'll do it".

At some point, being diligent and pliable are negatives because what's needed is taking control of one's own research or piece of a bigger project instead of simply doing what others have decided needs doing.  On Bloom's taxonomy of learning, a PhD student (and certainly a candidate) needs to be spending a lot of time on analysis, synthesis, and evaluation with very little time spent on pure application, comprehension, and knowledge.


I'm no expert in the learning research, but what that means can be seen in terms of Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning, moving from comprehension and application, up to analysis, synthesis and evaluation:

Image source: http://juliaec.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/blooms_taxonomy.jpg