The Core Knowledge Blog

We’ve all heard anecdotes about accomplished people who struggled in school: Albert Einstein failed his first college entrance exam.  William Faulkner won a Nobel Prize for Literature without ever having accumulated enough credits to finish high school.  And Charles Schultz, the creator of the Peanuts comics had his illustrations rejected by his high school yearbook.  Doing well in school is not an absolute prerequisite for later success.  Still, teachers naturally want all students to get as much as they can from school.  How can we optimize school for students who don’t have the raw intelligence of other students?

Americans tend to view intelligence as a fixed attribute, like eye color. If you win the genetic lottery, you’re smart; but if you lose, you’re not. In China, Japan, and other Eastern countries, intelligence is more often viewed as malleable. If students fail a test or don’t understand a concept, it’s not that they’re stupid-they just haven’t worked hard enough yet. There is some truth in both.   Children do differ in intelligence, but intelligence can be changed through sustained hard work.   This belief in the malleable intelligence for students has many implications for classroom teachers and should play a role in how you administer praise and talk to students about their successes and failures.

 There is overwhelming evidence that there is a general intelligence.  It’s usually called g, short for general intelligence.  What exactly is g? It’s not known. People suggest it might be related to the speed or the capacity of working memory, or even that it’s a reflection of how quickly the neurons in our brains can fire. Knowing what underlies g is less important than knowing that g is real.  Having a lot of g predicts that we will do well in school and well in the workplace.

Still, if intelligence were all a matter of one’s genetic inheritance, then there wouldn’t be much point in trying to make kids smarter. Instead, we’d try to get students to do the best they could given the genetically determined intelligence they have. We’d also think seriously about trying to steer the not-so-smart kids toward intellectually undemanding tracks in schools, figuring that they are destined for low-level jobs anyway. But that’s not the way things are. Intelligence is malleable. It can be improved.

Slow learners are not dumb.  They probably differ little from other students in terms of their potential.   This should not be taken to mean that these students can easily catch up. Slow students have the same potential as bright students, but they probably differ in what they know, in their motivation, in their persistence in the face of academic setbacks, and in their self-image as students. I fully believe that these students can catch up, but it must be acknowledged that they are far behind, and that catching up will take enormous effort. How can we help? To help slow learners catch up, we must first be sure they believe that they can improve, and next we must try to persuade them that it will be worth it.

I have several suggestions in my book, including 1) praise effort, not ability; 2) tell students that hard work pays off; and 3) treat failure as a natural part of learning.  Points 2 and 3 are nicely made in this You Tube video titled Famous Failures:

Try to create a classroom atmosphere in which failure, while not desirable, is neither embarrassing nor wholly negative. Failure means you’re about to learn something. You’re going to find out that there’s something you didn’t understand or didn’t know how to do. Most important, model this attitude for your students. When you fail-and who doesn’t?-let them see you take a positive, learning attitude.

 Tomorrow:  Great teachers are story tellers.

Daniel T. Willingham is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author of Why Students Don’t Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What it Means for the Classroom (Jossey-Bass, 2009) from which this post was adapted. 

“Drill and kill” are dirty words in education.  The teacher drills the students, which is said to kill their innate motivation to learn.  The word drill conjures up military imagery not associated with the more neutral term practice, which means the same thing.  On the other side of this debate are educational traditionalists who argue that students must practice in order to learn some facts and skills they need at their fingertips-for example, math facts. 

For teachers, the important question is whether the cognitive benefit of automaticity make it worth the potential cost to motivation.  The answer is that it is sometimes worth it, and even necessary. The question is how to get the benefits of practice while minimizing the costs.

Why do I say that practice is necessary? One benefit of practice is to gain a minimum level of competence. A child practices tying her shoelaces with a parent or teacher’s help until she can reliably tie them without supervision.  Less obvious are the reasons to practice skills when it appears you have mastered something and it’s not obvious that practice is making you any better. Odd as it may seem, that sort of practice is essential to schooling. It yields three important benefits: it reinforces the basic skills that are required for the learning of more advanced skills, it protects against forgetting, and it improves transfer-the ability to apply what we know in different circumstances. 

Working memory is the where thinking occurs   A critical feature of working memory is that it has limited space.  There are, however, ways to cheat this limitation. The first way is through factual knowledge, as I discussed yesterday. A second way is to make the processes that manipulate information in working memory more efficient.  In fact, you can make them so efficient that they are virtually cost free. Think about learning to tie your shoes. Initially it requires your full attention and thus absorbs all of working memory, but with practice you can tie your shoes without thinking about it. 

Likewise, beginning readers slowly and painstakingly sound out each letter and then combine the sounds into words, so there is no room left in working memory to think about meaning.  When students are first introduced to arithmetic, they often solve problems by using counting strategies until they gain command of basic math facts.  Learning to write or keyboard letters is laborious and consumes all of working memory, leaving you unable to think of the content of what you’re trying to write until it becomes automatic. 

What’s true of reading, writing and math is true of most or all school subjects, and of the skills we want our students to have. They are hierarchical. There are basic processes (like retrieving math facts or using deductive logic in science) that initially are demanding of working memory but with practice become automatic. Those processes must become automatic in order for students to advance their thinking to the next level.

If practice makes mental processes automatic, we can then ask, which processes need to become automatic? Retrieving number facts from memory seems to be a good candidate, as does retrieving letter sounds from memory. A science teacher may decide that his students need to have at their fingertips basic facts about elements. In general, the processes that need to become automatic are probably the building blocks of skills that will provide the most benefit if they are automatized. Building blocks are the things one does again and again in a subject area, and they are the prerequisites for more advanced work.

Tomorrow:  How Can We Get Students to Think Like Experts?

Daniel T. Willingham is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author of Why Students Don’t Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What it Means for the Classroom (Jossey-Bass, 2009) from which this post was adapted. 

I have been writing about cognitive science and education for about six years now, and teachers have thrown a lot of questions at me. Many I did not feel comfortable answering-I felt that cognitive science didn’t have much to contribute. But for othersI felt that scientists did have some relevant knowledge that might apply to the classroom. When I heard such a question, I tucked it away.

After several years of saving questions, I collected nine that I thought were really central to teaching. The result was a book, Why Don’t Students Like School? This week I will post one entry each day that describes one question posed in the book and a highly abridged version of my answer.

The title-Why Don’t Students Like School? is not the question that I have been asked most often, but it is, to me, the most important. After I gave a talk at a conference, a ninth grade teacher asked me this question, obviously disappointed and frustrated. As she noted, almost everyone says that they like to learn new things; so why don’t students like school more?

It usually surprises people – and depresses teachers — when I tell them the brain is not designed for thinking. It’s designed to keep you from having to think. In fact, the brain is actually not very good at thinking.

Your brain serves many purposes, and thinking is not the one it serves best. Your brain supports the ability to see and to move, for example, and these functions operate much more efficiently and reliably than your ability to think. It’s no accident that most of your brain’s real estate is devoted to these activities. Compared to your ability to see and move, thinking is slow, effortful, and uncertain.

 About now you’re probably asking yourself, “Well, if we’re so bad at thinking, how do we function at all? How do we find our way to work or spot a bargain at the grocery store? How does a teacher make the hundreds of decisions necessary to get through her day?” The answer is that when we can get away with it, we don’t think.  We rely on memory, which is much more reliable than thinking.  Most of the problems we face are ones we’ve solved before, so we just do what we’ve done in the past.  We think of “memory” as storing personal events and facts, but it also stores strategies to guide what we should do: where to turn when driving home, how to handle a minor dispute when monitoring recess, what to do when a pot on the stove starts to boil over.  For the vast majority of decisions we make, we don’t stop to consider what we might do, reason about it, anticipate possible consequences, and so on. We just do what we always do. 

Saying we’re not very good at thinking sounds grim for educators.  But don’t despair. 

Despite the fact that we’re not that good at it, we actually like to think. We are naturally curious, and we look for opportunities to engage in certain types of thought. But because thinking is so hard, the conditions have to be right for this curiosity to thrive, and we quit thinking rather readily.  Solving problems – which I define as cognitive work that succeeds – makes us feel good.   

 From a cognitive perspective, an important consideration for educators is whether or not a student consistently experiences the pleasurable rush of solving a problem. What can teachers do to ensure that each student gets that pleasure?  I describe several practical applications in my book, but for now, I’ll focus on just one:  view schoolwork as a series of answers.  Sometimes I think that we, as teachers, are so eager to get to the answers that we do not devote sufficient time to developing the question. But it’s the question that piques people’s interest. Being told an answer doesn’t do anything for you.  When you plan a lesson, start with the information you want students to know by its end.  As a next step, consider what the key question for that lesson might be and how you can frame that question so it will have the right level of difficulty to engage your students.  

Lastly some practical advice:  Finding the sweet spot of difficulty is not easy. Your experience in the classroom is your best guide-if it works, do it again; if it doesn’t, discard it. But don’t expect that you will really remember how well a lesson worked a year later. Whether a lesson goes brilliantly well or down in flames, it feels at the time that we’ll never forget what happened, but the ravages of memory can surprise us, so write it down.  It’s worth making a habit of recording your success in gauging the level of difficulty in the problems you pose for your students.

Tomorrow: Why understanding is remembering in disguise.

 Daniel T. Willingham is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author of Why Students Don’t Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What it Means for the Classroom (Jossey-Bass, 2009) from which this post was adapted.