Summary, Why Students Don’t LikeSchool by Daniel WillinghamPage 1 of 44.
A summary of
Why Don’t Students
Like
School?
A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How The Mind Works And What It Means For The Classroom
By Daniel Willingham
Summarized by Bud Nye, R.N., M.S.
Contents
- Why do we find it difficult to make school enjoyable for students?...... 3
- How useful or useless should we consider fact learning?...... 7
- What makes something stick in memory and what will likely slip away?...... 12
- Why do we find abstract ideas so difficult to understand, and so difficult to apply when expressed in new ways? 19
- Does the cognitive benefit of drill make it worth the potential cost to motivation?...... 23
- What can we do to get students to think like scientists, historians and mathematicians?...... 27
- How should a teacher adjust their teaching to different types of learners?...... 31
- How can we optimize school for students who don’t have the raw intelligence that other students have? 34
- What about the teacher’s thinking?...... 39
- Summary table...... 43
My comments in brackets [ ].
This paper summarizes important points from Why Don’t StudentsLikeSchool? A cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom, by Daniel Willingham, 2009, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.It reduces a 180 page book to 43 pages so, obviously, it leaves out many examples and much detail. You will find a summary table on page 43.
[I think that it would make good sense to share information in at least chapters 1, 2, 5 and 8 with students. They really need to know these things to help with motivational issues. Research shows that students having this kind of knowledge perform significantly better than those without it. Use PowerPoint? Conceptual Change Model inquiries?Some combination of these? A student suggests that students read it, write a response, and then discuss it in class. (Perhapsone section at a time?)Repeat/review during the year.]
Question 1: Why do we find it difficult to make school enjoyable for students?
Answer: Contrary to popular belief, human brains do not naturally and easily think. On the contrary, because the brain does not think very well, it works hard to save us from having to think.
Critical principle 1: People exhibit naturally curious behavior but do not naturally think well. We usually avoid thinking unless the right cognitive conditions exist.
For this reason, in order to maximize the likelihood that they will get the pleasurable rush that comes from successful thought,teachers need to carefully consider how they encourage their students to think. (Thinking here refers to solving problems, reasoning, reading complex material, or doing any mental work that requires some effort.) Henry Ford described the situation well with his cynical observation, “Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few people engage in it.” Humans don’t think very often because nature created our brains not for thought, but for avoiding thought. Thinking occurs not only with great effort, but also slowly and unreliably.
The mind’s poor design for thinking
If we all do so badly with thinking, how does anyone get through the day? How do we find our way to work or spot a bargain at the grocery store? The answer? When we can get away with it, we don’t think. Instead, we rely on memory. Most of the problems we face, we have solved before, so we just do what we have done in the past. You may think that you have a terrible memory, and it proves true that your memory system does not work as reliably as your visual or movement system—sometimes you forget, sometimes you think you remember when you don’t—but your memory system works much more reliably than your thinking system, and it provides answers quickly and with little effort.
We usually think of memory as storing personal events (memories of my wedding) and facts (George Washington was the first president of the United States), but memory also store strategies and procedures to guide what we should do, such as where to turn when driving home, how to handle a conflict at work, what to do when the pot on the stove starts to boil over, how to divide a number by 10, and so on. So we don’t have to think through these things each time we encounter them. “Most of the time what we do is what we do most of the time.” Using memory doesn’t take much of our attention so we have the freedom to daydream even as we stop for red lights, pass cars, watch for pedestrians, and so on. A task that initially takes a great deal of thought, with practice becomes a task that requires little or no thought.
What implications does this have for education? If people think badly and try to avoid it, what does this say about student’s attitudes toward school? Fortunately, the story doesn’t end with people stubbornly refusing to think. Despite the fact that we don’t think well, we actually like to think. We naturally feel curious, and we look for opportunities to engage in certain types of thought. But because we find thinking so hard, we have to have the right conditions for this curiosity to thrive or we easily quit thinking.
Though naturally curious, our curiosity remains fragile
Solving problems brings pleasure. When we say “problem solving” here, we mean any cognitive work that succeeds. This might involve understanding a difficult passage of prose, planning a garden, learning to play a riff on the guitar, passing a football, or sizing up an investment opportunity. We get a sense of satisfaction, of fulfillment, in successful thinking. When you solve a problem, your brain may reward itself with a small dose of dopamine, a naturally occurring chemical important to the brain’s pleasure system. Even though we don’t completely understand it yet, it seems undeniable that people take pleasure in solving problems.
Notably, we get the pleasure in solving the problem. We do not find it pleasurable to work on a problem with no sense that we make progress on it. Then too, we don’t get great pleasure in simply knowing the answer. Even if someone doesn’t tell you the answer to a problem, once you have received too many hints you lose the sense that you have solved it yourself. This works much like a joke, funnier if you get it than if someone has to explain it to you. Mental work appeals to us because it offers the opportunity for that pleasant feeling when it succeeds.
The content of a problem—whether about sex or human motivation—may prove sufficient to prompt your interest, but it won’t maintain it. If content does not keep our attention, when does curiosity have staying power? The answer probably lies in the difficulty of the problem. We get little or no pleasure if we find the problem too easy or too difficult. We like to think—or more properly, we like to think if we judge that the mental work will pay off with the pleasurable feeling we get when we solve a problem. So no inconsistency exists in claiming that people avoid thought and in claiming that people have natural curiosity. Curiosity prompts us to explore new ideas and problems. But when we do this exploration, we quickly evaluate how much mental work it will take to solve the problem. If it’s too much or too little work, we stop working on the problem if we can.
This analysis of the kinds of mental work that people seek out or avoid provides one answer to why more students don’t like school. Students find it rewarding to work on problems atthe right level of difficulty, but they find it unpleasant to work on problems either too easy or too difficult. Students can’t opt out of these problems the way adults often can. If the student routinely gets work a little too difficult or too easy, little wonder exists for why they don’t like school. Few people would care to work on the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle for several hours each day.
How thinking works
Understanding a bit about how thinking happens will help you understand what makes thinking hard. That will in turn help you understand how to make thinking easier for your students, and therefore help them enjoy school more.
The diagram above shows a very simple model of the mind. On the left you see the environment, full of things to see and hear, problems to solve, and so on. It holds the stuff you interact with and think about. The arrow from the environment to working memory shows that working memory works as the part of your brain where you experience awareness of the things happening around you: the sight of a shaft of light falling onto a dusty table, the sound of a dog barking in the distance, and so forth. You can consider working memory synonymous with consciousness. Of course, you can also experience awareness of things not currently in the environment; for example, you can recall the sound of your mother’s voice, even if not present (or indeed no longer living). Long-term memory exists as the vast storehouse in which you maintain your factual knowledge of the world: that ladybugs have spots, that you find chocolate your favorite flavor of ice cream, that your three-year-old surprised you yesterday by mentioning kumquats, and so on. Factual knowledge can occur abstractly, for example, it would include the idea that triangles form closed figures with three sides, and your knowledge of what a dog generally looks like. It lies quietly until needed, at which time it enters working memory and so becomes conscious. For example, if someone asked you, “What color is a polar bear” you would say, “white” almost immediately. You had that information stored in long-term memory thirty seconds ago, but did not experience awareness of it until someone posed the question that made it relevant to ongoing conscious thought, at which time it entered working memory.
Thinkingoccurs when you combine information (from the environment and long-term memory) in new ways. That combining happens in working memory. Think about some problem that you don’t immediately know the answer to, perhaps how to multiply 18 by 7. Notice what it feels like to have working memory absorbed by the problem. Also notice that your having knowing how to combine and rearrange ideas in working memory proves essential to successful thinking. If you have had experience with this particular type of problem, then you likely have information in long-term memory about how to solve it, even if you don’t have the information in a foolproof way.
So, our long-term memory contains not only factual information, such as the color of polar bears and the value of 8 x 7, but it also contains what we may call procedural knowledge, you knowledge of your knowledge of the mental procedures necessary to execute tasks. If thinking something involves combining information in working memory, then procedural knowledge provides a list of what to combine and when—it works like a recipe to accomplish a particular kind of thought “cake”. You may have stored procedures for the steps needed to calculate the area of a triangle, or to duplicate a computer file using Windows, or to drive from your home to our office.
It seems pretty obvious that having the appropriate procedure stored in long-term memory helps a great deal when we think. This accounts for why we may find it easy to solve one math problem but not another. But how about factual knowledge? Does that help you think as well? It does in several different ways discussed soon. For now, note that solving the 18x7 math problem required retrieving factual information, such as the fact that 8x7 = 56. Thinking entails combining information in working memory. Often the information provided in the environment does not prove sufficient to solve a problem, and you need to supplement it with information from long-term memory.
We have a final necessity for thinking: the information we work with cannot take up too much space. Working memory has limited space, so thinking becomes increasingly difficult as working memory gets crowded.
Summary. Successful thinking relies on four factors: information from the environment, facts in long-term memory, procedures in long-term memory, and the amount of space in working memory. If one of these factors occurs inadequately, thinking will likely fail. We do not find people’s minds especially well-suited to thinking; thinking occurs slowly, it requires significant effort, and it happens unreliably. For these reasons, deliberate thinking does not guide people’s thinking in most situations. Rather, we rely on our memories, following courses of action that we have taken before. Nevertheless, we find successful thinking pleasurable. We like solving problems, understanding new ideas, and so forth. Thus we will seek out opportunities to think, but we use selectivity when doing so; we choose problems that pose some challenge but that seem likely we will have the ability to solve, because these problems lead to feelings of pleasure and satisfaction. To solve problems, the thinker needs adequate information from the environment, room in working memory, and the required facts and procedures in long-term memory.
Classroom implications
From a cognitive perspective, an important factor involves whether or not a student consistently experiences the pleasurable rush of solving a problem. What can teachers do to help ensure that each student gets that pleasure?
- Make sure that students have problems to solve. By “problems”, we mean cognitive work that poses moderate challenge, including activities such as understanding a poem or thinking of novel uses for recyclable materials. Avoid long strings of teacher explanationswith little opportunity for students to solve problems! With your lessons, keep an eye on the cognitive work the students will actually do. How often does this work occur in the lesson? Does it get intermixed with cognitive breaks at least every 15 to 20 minutes? Might negative outcomes occur such as failing to understand what you want them to do, not having the ability to do it, or just guessing? [From The Physics Teacher, Oct., 2009, in cognitive science we define problem solving as a process that minimizes the difference between the current state and a desired goal; ability to apply prior knowledge in new, somewhat unfamiliar situations. We contrast this with exercises, which give practice with a skill in familiar situations.]
- Respect students’ cognitive limits.Do they have the necessary background knowledge in memory to consider this question or problem? If students lack the appropriate background knowledge, they will quickly consider the question you pose “boring”. If they lack the background knowledge to engage with a problem, save it for another time when they have that knowledge. [I did with osmosis when I turned from that to the small particle model after realizing that they had no knowledge of it.] Remember working memory limits! People can keep only so much information in mind at once. Multistep instructions, lists of unconnected facts, chains of logic more than two or three steps long, and applying a just-learned concept to new material (unless quite simple) overloads working memory. [Remember that many of your students have trouble reading,writing, and performing the simplest math operations. This, alone, can easily overload working memory!] What serves as the solution to working memory overload problem? Slow the pace and use memory aids such as writing on the board, thus saving the student from keeping too much information in working memory. [But this may frustrate the students who do have the knowledgeto boredom, so differentiate instruction to the greatest extent possible.]
- Clarify problems to solve.How can you make the problem interesting? A common strategy involves trying to make the material “relevant”—butthis will only rarely help. Remember: our curiosity gets provoked when we perceive a problem that we believe we can solve. Ask yourself: What question will engage students and help them want to know the answer?
Sometimes we feel so anxious for our students to know the answers that we do not devote sufficient time to developing the questions. But the questions pique people’s interest. Someone’s telling you an answer doesn’t do anything for you. When you plan a lesson, start with the information you want students to know at its end, then consider what might work best as the key questions that will have the right level of difficulty to engage your students while you respect their cognitive limits. - Think about when to puzzle students. The goal of puzzling students involves making them curious. But consider whether you might use these strategies not only at the beginning of a lesson, but also after they have learned the basic concepts. If students don’t know the basic principles behind a demonstration it seems like a magic trick. [This magic makes it a “discrepant event”, clashing with their existing conceptions of how the world presumably works.] They get a momentary thrill, but their curiosity to learn may not last very long. Another strategy might involve doing the demonstration after students know the principle involved. Every fact or demonstration that would puzzle students before they have the relevant background knowledge has the potential to become an experience that will puzzle students momentarily later, and then lead to the pleasure of problem solving.
- Accept and act on variation in student preparation. You do not need to accept that “some students just are not very bright” and so we ought to track them into less demanding classes. Neither do you need naively to pretend that all students come to your class equally prepared to excel. Students have different preparations, as well as different levels of support at home and different biological strengths and weaknesses. They therefore differ in their abilities. With these and related truths, you will find it self-defeating to give all of your students the same work. The less capable students will find it too difficult and will struggle against their brain’s bias to mentally walk away from schoolwork. Meanwhile, the more capable students will not find it sufficiently challenging to maintain their interest [differentiate instruction].To the extent that you can, you will benefit your students and yourself to assign work to individuals or groups of students appropriate to their current level of competence.Naturally, you need to do this in a sensitive way, minimizing the extent to which some students will judge themselves as behind others and create helpless beliefs by attributing this to permanent, unchangeable personal characteristics. [See Learned Helplessness and Power Therapy. Create CCM inquiries related to such thinking and start early with some of these?] But the fact remains that someare behind others, and giving them work beyond them will probably not help them catch up; doing this will more likely make them fall still further behind. [So, how can you practically do the needed individualization? You need different levels of labs, worksheets and tests. [Remember Singapore Math in Alaska.Dr. Schenck suggests knowledge- or skill-matched groups—but you would need to do this in a sensitive way that does not produce “dumb” and “smart” groups! Using language that emphasizes student’s having background knowledge and skills should help with this.]
- Change the pace.We all lose the attention of our students, at times, and this happens more often when they feel confused. They mentally check out. Happily, we can fairly easily get them back. How?Change grabs attention. When you change topics, start a new activity, or in some other way show that you have shifted gears, virtually every student’s attention will come back to you and you will have a new chance to engage them. So plan shifts and monitor your class’s attention to see if you need to change things more often or less frequently [in general, every 15 to 20 minutes].
- Keep a diary or lesson notes.The core idea in this chapter involves the fact that solving a problem gives people pleasure—but—theindividual has to consider the problem easy enough to solve yet difficult enough to take some mental effort. [This holds true for teachers and their teaching as well as for students.] A teacher does not easily find this sweet spot of difficulty. Your experience in the classroom serves as your best guide: whatever works, do again; whatever doesn’t, discard. But don’t expect that you will really remember how well a lesson plan worked a year later. Whether a lesson goes brilliantly well or down in flames, we tend to think at the time that we will never forget what happened; but the ravages of memory can surprise us, so write it down. Even if just a quick scratch on a sticky note, make a habit of recording your success in gauging the level of difficulty in the problem you pose for your students. [Add a “Reflections” section to all labs/inquiries that you do, and then do that reflection immediately afterward.]
Question 2:How useful or useless should we consider fact learning?