A Runner's Ramblings

Title: Why Don’t Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions about How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

Author: Daniel T. Willingham

Completed: June 2025 (Full list of books)

Overview: This book was not what I expect… but I’m not entirely sure what I thought it would be. It took a little while to get into it. Early on he stated that people don’t like to learn which I strongly disagree with. Later he clarified his position that people are innately curious and that the step from curiosity to learning is often challenging which feels closer to my understanding. I do agree that using our current understanding of how the mind works to help improve classroom learning is important and he does a decent job bridging between the research and classrooms.

There are several recommendations at the end for ways to improve your teaching. The one that feels like the best fit for me is one that was also recommended by Carla Smith with Renton Teacher Academy, keeping a Teaching Diary. I’ve been using Obsidian for the past couple of years and found it to be a great place to take notes on everything. This seems like a good tool for a Teaching Diary and I’m already starting to think about how to set it up to be most effective

Highlights:

• This analysis of the sorts of mental work that people seek out or avoid also provides one answer to why more students don’t like school. Working on problems that are of the right level of difficulty is rewarding, but working on problems that are too easy or too difficult is unpleasant. Students can’t opt out of these problems the way adults often can. If the student routinely gets work that is a bit too difficult, it’s little wonder that he doesn’t care much for school.
• Overloads of working memory are caused by such things as multistep instructions, lists of unconnected facts, chains of logic more than two or three steps long, and the application of a just-learned concept to new material (unless the concept is quite simple). The solution to working memory overloads is straightforward: slow the pace, and use memory aids such as writing on the blackboard that save students from keeping too much information in working memory.
• How can you make the problem interesting? A common strategy is to try to make the material “relevant” to students.This strategy sometimes works well, but it’s hard to use for some material. Another difficulty is that a teacher’s class may include two football fans, a doll collector, a NASCAR enthusiast, a horseback riding competitor—you get the idea. Mentioning a popular singer in the course of a history lesson may give the class a giggle, but it won’t do much more than that. I have emphasized that our curiosity is provoked when we perceive a problem that we believe we can solve.What is the question that will engage students and make them want to know the answer?
• A number of studies have shown that people understand what they read much better if they already have some background knowledge about the subject. Part of the reason is chunking. A clever study on this point was conducted with junior high school students. Half were good readers and half were poor readers, according to standard reading tests.The researchers asked the students to read a story that described half an inning of a baseball game. As they read, the students were periodically stopped and asked to show that they understood what was happening in the story by using a model of a baseball field and players.The interesting thing about this study was that some of the students knew a lot about baseball and some knew just a little. (The researchers made sure that everyone could comprehend individual actions, for example, what happened when a player got a double.) The dramatic finding, shown in Figure 5, was that the students’ knowledge of baseball determined how much they understood of the story.Whether they were “good readers” or “bad readers” didn’t matter nearly as much as what they knew.
• Which knowledge should students be taught? This question often becomes politically charged rather quickly.When we start to specify what must be taught and what can be omitted, it appears that we are grading information on its importance.The inclusion or omission of historical events and figures, playwrights, scientific achievements, and so on, leads to charges of cultural bias. A cognitive scientist sees these issues differently. The question, What should students be taught? is equivalent not to What knowledge is important? but rather to What knowledge yields the greatest cognitive benefit? This question has two answers.
• For reading, students must know whatever information writers assume they know and hence leave out.The necessary knowledge will vary depending on what students read, but most observers would agree that a reasonable minimum target would be to read a daily newspaper and to read books written for the intelligent layman on serious topics such as science and politics. Using that criterion, we may still be distressed that much of what writers assume their readers know seems to be touchstones of the culture of dead white males. From the cognitive scientist’s point of view, the only choice in that case is to try to persuade writers and editors at the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and so on to assume different knowledge on the part of their readers.
• if you think about something carefully, you’ll probably have to think about it again, so it should be stored.Thus your memory is not a product of what you want to remember or what you try to remember; it’s a product of what you think about.A teacher once told me that for a fourth-grade unit on the Underground Railroad he had his students bake biscuits, because this was a staple food for runaway slaves. He asked what I thought about the assignment. I pointed out that his students probably thought for forty seconds about the relationship of biscuits to the Underground Railroad, and for forty minutes about measuring flour, mixing shortening, and so on.Whatever students think about is what they will remember.The cognitive principle that guides this chapter is: Memory is the residue of thought.   To teach well, you should pay careful attention to what an assignment will actually make students think about (not what you hope they will think about), because that is what they will remember.
• Whatever you think about, that’s what you remember. Memory is the residue of thought.
• Sometimes what things look like is important—for example, the beautiful facade of the Parthenon, or the shape of Benin—but much more often we want students to think about meaning. Ninety-five percent of what students learn in school concerns meaning, not what things look like or what they sound like. Therefore, a teacher’s goal should almost always be to get students to think about meaning.
• Teachers must design lessons that will ensure that students are thinking about the meaning of the material. A striking example of an assignment that didn’t work for this reason came from my nephew’s sixth-grade teacher. He was to draw a plot diagram of a book he had recently finished.The point of the plot diagram was to get him to think about the story elements and how they related to one another.The teacher’s goal, I believe, was to encourage her students to think of novels as having structure, but the teacher thought that it would be useful to integrate art into this project, so she asked her students to draw pictures to represent the plot elements.That meant that my nephew thought very little about the relation between different plot elements and a great deal about how to draw a good castle. My daughter had completed a similar assignment some years earlier, but her teacher had asked students to use words or phrases rather than pictures. I think that assignment more effectively fulfilled the intended goal because my daughter thought more about how ideas in the book were related.
• a common technique that I would not recommend for getting students to think about meaning: trying to make the subject matter relevant to the students’ interests.
• Trying to make the material relevant to students’ interests doesn’t work. As I noted in Chapter One, content is seldom the decisive factor in whether or not our interest is maintained. For example, I love cognitive psychology, so you might think, “Well, to get Willingham to pay attention to this math problem, we’ll wrap it up in a cognitive psychology example.” But Willingham is quite capable of being bored by cognitive psychology, as has been proved repeatedly at professional conferences I’ve attended. Another problem with trying to use content to engage students is that it’s sometimes very difficult to do and the whole enterprise comes off as artificial.
• Researchers have examined these sorts of surveys to figure out which professors get good ratings and why. One of the interesting findings is that most of the items are redundant. A two-item survey would be almost as useful as a thirty-item survey, because all of the questions really boil down to two: Does the professor seem like a nice person, and is the class well organized?
• A couple of things are worth noticing. A good deal of time—often ten or fifteen minutes of a seventy-five-minute class—is spent setting up the goal, or to put it another way, persuading students that it’s important to know how to determine the probability of a chance event.The material covered during this setup is only peripherally related to the lesson.Talking about coin flips and advertising campaigns doesn’t have much to do with Z-scores. It’s all about elucidating the central conflict of the story.
• material I want students to learn is actually the answer to a question. On its own, the answer is almost never interesting. But if you know the question, the answer may be quite interesting.That’s why making the question clear is so important. But I sometimes feel that we, as teachers, are so focused on getting to the answer, we spend insufficient time making sure that students understand the question and appreciate its significance.
• Review Each Lesson Plan in Terms of What the Student Is Likely to Think About This sentence may represent the most general and useful idea that cognitive psychology can offer teachers.The most important thing about schooling is what students will remember after the school day is over, and there is a direct relationship between what they think during the day and their later memory.
• Start with the material you want your students to learn, and think backward to the intellectual question it poses. For example, in a science class you might want sixth graders to know the models of the atom that were competing at the turn of the twentieth century. These are the answers. What is the question? In this story, the goal is to understand the nature of matter. The obstacle is that the results of different experiments appear to conflict with one another. Each new model that is proposed (Rutherford, cloud, Bohr) seems to resolve the conflict but then generates a new complication—that is, experiments to test the model seem to conflict with other experiments.
• Abstraction is the goal of schooling. The teacher wants students to be able to apply classroom learning in new contexts, including those outside of school. The challenge is that the mind does not care for abstractions. The mind prefers the concrete.
• “We’re never gonna use this stuff.” So if what we teach students is simply going to vanish, what in the heck are we teachers doing?   Well, the truth is that I remember a little geometry. Certainly I know much less now than I did right after I finished the class—but I do know more than I did before I took it. Researchers have examined student memory more formally and have drawn the same conclusion: we forget much (but not all) of what we have learned, and the forgetting is rapid.
• a student who gets a C in his first algebra course but goes on to take several more math courses will remember his algebra, whereas a student who gets an A in his algebra course but doesn’t take more math will forget it.That’s because taking more math courses guarantees that you will continue to think about and practice basic algebra. If you practice algebra enough, you will effectively never forget it.
• There is no reason that all of the practice with a particular concept needs to occur within a short span of time or even within a particular unit. In fact, there is good reason to space out practice. As noted earlier, memory is more enduring when practice is spaced out, and practicing the same skills again and again is bound to be boring.
• Automaticity takes lots of practice. The smart way to go is to distribute practice not only across time but also across activities.Think of as many creative ways as you can to practice the really crucial skills, but remember that students can still get practice in the basics while they are working on more advanced skills.
• science curricula have students memorize facts and conduct lab experiments in which predictable phenomena are observed, but students do not practice actual scientific thinking, the exploration and problem solving that are science.What can be done to get students to think like scientists, historians, and mathematicians?
• This generalization—that experts have abstract knowledge of problem types but novices do not—seems to be true of teachers too.When confronted with a classroom management problem, novice teachers typically jump right into trying to solve the problem, but experts first seek to define the problem, gathering more information if necessary. Thus expert teachers have knowledge of different types of classroom management problems. Not surprisingly, expert teachers more often solve these problems in ways that address root causes and not just the behavioral incident. For example, an expert is more likely than a novice to make a permanent change in seating assignments.
• experts save room in working memory through acquiring extensive, functional background knowledge, and by making mental procedures automatic.What do they do with that extra space in working memory? Well, one thing they do is talk to themselves. What sort of conversation does an expert have with herself? Often she talks about a problem she is working on, and does so at that abstract level I just described.The physics expert says things like “This is probably going to be a conservation of energy problem, and we’re going to convert potential energy into kinetic energy.”
• experts do not just narrate what they are doing.They also generate hypotheses, and so test their own understanding and think through the implications of possible solutions in progress. Talking to yourself demands working memory, however, so novices are much less likely to do it. If they do talk to themselves, what they say is predictably more shallow than what experts say. They restate the problem, or they try to map the problem to a familiar formula.When novices talk to themselves they narrate what they are doing, and what they say does not have the beneficial self-testing properties that expert talk has.
• trying to get your students to think like them is not a realistic goal.Your reaction may well be, “Well, sure. I never really expected that my students are going to win the Nobel Prize! I just want them to understand some science.” That’s a worthy goal, and it is very different from the goal of students thinking like scientists. Drawing a distinction between knowledge understanding and knowledge creation may help. Experts create. For example, scientists create and test theories of natural phenomena, historians create narrative interpretations of historical events, and mathematicians create proofs and descriptions of complex patterns. Experts not only understand their field, they also add new knowledge to it.
• A more modest and realistic goal for students is knowledge comprehension. A student may not be able to develop his own scientific theory, but he can develop a deep understanding of existing theory. A student may not be able to write a new narrative of historical fact, but she can follow and understand a narrative that someone else has written.
• The same is true of science fairs. I’ve judged a lot of science fairs, and the projects are mostly—not to put too fine a point on it—terrible. The questions that students try to answer are usually lousy, because they aren’t really fundamental to the field; and students don’t appear to have learned much about the scientific method, because their experiments are poorly designed and they haven’t analyzed their data sensibly. But some of the students are really proud of what they have done, and their interest in science or engineering has gotten a big boost. So although the creative aspect of the project is usually a flop, science fairs seem to be good bets for motivation.
• enormous amount of research exploring this idea has been conducted in the last fifty years, and finding the difference between Sam and Donna that would fit this pattern has been the holy grail of educational research, but no one has found consistent evidence supporting a theory describing such a difference.The cognitive principle guiding this chapter is:   Children are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn.
• interact with each student differently, just as they interact with friends differently; but teachers should be aware that, as far as scientists have been able to determine, there are not categorically different types of learners.
• suppose Anne is an auditory learner and Victor is a visual learner. Suppose further that I give Anne and Victor two lists of new vocabulary words to learn.To learn the first list, they listen to a tape of the words and definitions several times; to learn the second list, they view a slide show of pictures depicting the words. The theory predicts that Anne should learn more words on the first list than on the second whereas Victor should learn more words on the second list than on the first. Dozens of studies have been conducted along these general lines, including studies using materials more like those used in classrooms, and overall the theory is not supported. Matching the “preferred” modality of a student doesn’t give that student any edge in learning. How can that be? Why doesn’t Anne learn better when the presentation is auditory, given that she’s an auditory learner? Because auditory information is not what’s being tested! Auditory information would be the particular sound of the voice on the tape.What’s being tested is the meaning of the words. Anne’s edge in auditory memory doesn’t help her in situations where meaning is important. Similarly, Victor might be better at recognizing the visual details of the pictures used to depict the words on the slides, but again, that ability is not being tested.
• It’s just as evident that factual knowledge is important to teaching. In the last ten years or so, many observers have emphasized that teachers ought to have rich subject-matter knowledge, and there do seem to be some data that students of these teachers learn more, especially in middle and high school and especially in math. Somewhat less well known but just as important are other data showing that pedagogical content knowledge is also important.That is, for teachers, just knowing algebra really well isn’t enough.You need to have knowledge particular to teaching algebra. Pedagogical content knowledge might include such things as knowledge of a typical student’s conceptual understanding of slope, or the types of concepts that must be practiced and those that need not be.When you think about it, if pedagogical content knowledge were not important, then anyone who understood algebra could teach it well, and we know that’s not true.
• After perhaps fifty hours of practice, I was driving with skill that seemed adequate to me, so I stopped trying to improve (Figure 2). That’s what most people do for driving, golf, typing, and indeed most of the skills they learn.   The same seems to be true for teachers too. A great deal of data show that teachers improve during their first five years in the field, as measured by student learning. After five years, however, the curve gets flat, and a teacher with twenty years of experience is (on average) no better or worse than a teacher with ten. It appears that most teachers work on their teaching until it is above some threshold and they are satisfied with their proficiency.
• if you want to be a better teacher, you cannot be satisfied simply to gain experience as the years pass. You must also practice, and practice means (1) consciously trying to improve, (2) seeking feedback on your teaching, and (3) undertaking activities for the sake of improvement, even if they don’t directly contribute to your job.
• Keep a Teaching Diary Make notes that include what you intended to do and how you thought it went. Did the lesson basically work? If not, what are your thoughts as to why it didn’t? Every so often take a little time to read past entries. Look for patterns in what sorts of lessons went well and which didn’t, for situations that frustrated you, for moments of teaching that really keep you going, and so on.
• Thus, to ensure that your students follow you, you must keep them interested; to ensure their interest, you must anticipate their reactions; and to anticipate their reactions, you must know them. “Know your students” is a fair summary of the content of this book.This maxim sounds suspiciously like bubbe psychology. If you weren’t aware that you should know your students (and I’m sure you were), your grandmother could have told you it was a good idea.
• I see principles of cognitive science as useful boundaries to educational practice. Principles of physics do not prescribe for a civil engineer exactly how to build a bridge, but they let him predict how it is likely to perform if he build its. Similarly, cognitive scientific principles do not prescribe how to teach, but they can help you predict how much your students are likely to learn. If you follow these principles, you maximize the chances that your students will flourish.
• “If your method reaches only the attentive student, then you must either invent new methods or call yourself a failure.”