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 T. Willingham
Who is it for?
Teachers for sure. But also parents who want to understand what is going on in their child’s mind while they are at school (or while learning stuff at home), and how to help them learn more easily.
Biggest Takeaways for Parents: 1. Kids like to learn things that are not too difficult to understand.
Kids don’t like school, because it is hard. Kids, like the rest of us, are naturally curious, but often thinking and learning new things is too hard. We like to just know things already, without a lot of effort.
This is tied to how the mind is set up. The mind is divided into two distinct parts: the working memory and the long-term memory. When we encounter new information, we think about it in our working memory. When we learn it, the new information gets stored in our long-term memory. As Willingham put it, “memory is the residue of thought.” We thought about something, and then in got stored in our long-term memory. In other words, we learned it. We are curious about things that we don’t know yet, but that feel similar to what we have learned before. If a topic is not similar to what we already know, we have to think about it too much, and we don’t like that so much, and we don’t want to do it, because it feels to difficult. It is harder to store information in our long-term memory that is not similar to the information that is there already. Kids are the same way.
Biggest Takeaways for Parents: 2. Already knowing something on a topic helps kids learn more.
To do well in school, kids need background knowledge of the topics they are learning. This background knowledge is everything already in the long-term memory on a given topic. Kids use the knowledge in their long-term memory to make associations with what they are studying in school. The more associations your kid can make with knowledge he already has, the easier it will be to comprehend the topic they are studying. Poor readers scoring higher on comprehension assignments is a nice example given in Why Don’t Students Like School?. If they have a background in the topic of a reading assignment, poor readers do better on reading comprehension than good readers. This is because writers don’t spell out all the details of the topic they are writing about, and they assume you know some things. And if you’re the lucky kid who already has background knowledge, then you already understand many of the things the author assumes you know. As Willingham said, “understanding is remembering in disguise,” and when you understand the reading, you do well on the assignment.
This background knowledge can be gained through reading, so you should do everything you can to get your kids to read as much as possible. And it can be gained through learning in other ways, such as on YouTube, through audiobooks, or through educational shows or movies. Kids can have fun learning background information in a variety of topics, and the more they know on a broad range of topics, the more frequently these topics will come up in school.
Biggest Takeaways for Parents: 3. Kids need to practice the basic facts a lot. Like a lot, a lot.
Kids also need facts to do well in school. Math facts and reading basics especially. When doing math for example, if a child has to spend too much effort thinking about each math fact, such as 9 times 4, they won’t have enough thinking power left to solve the given problem. Therefore, kids need to practice math facts until they are fluent, and this means a lot of practice.
Similarly reading is like math facts practice, in that the kids become fluent only after extended practice. Just one more reason to get your kids to read a lot.
Biggest Takeaways for Parents: 4. All kids learn visually AND kinesthetically AND aurally AND through reading and writing.
“Children are more alike than different in terms of how they thing and learn.” The concept that some kids are visual learners, some are kinesthetic, some auditory and some written, is incorrect. All kids learn better when they are presented information in more than one way, visually and aurally, kinesthetic and written. And subjects should be taught using way that is most natural to that subject: math should be learned visually and written, music should be learned mostly auditorily.
Biggest Takeaways for Parents: 5. Kids start out with a given intelligence. But through effort, kids gain additional intelligence.
Kids do start out with differing amounts of intelligence. But intelligence can be gained through continued effort. Give kids praise for their efforts and not for their abilities. Praising abilities makes kids feel vulnerable and they don’t want to try new things for fear that they won’t live up to the praise they got before. Let kids know that you have confidence in their ability to learn.
Action items:
Do everything you can to get your kids to read for two reasons: 1. so they gain background knowledge in a variety of topics, 2. so they get faster and more fluent at reading, so they can more easily accomplish reason 1.
Have your kids practice their math facts a lot.
