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Why Dont Students Like School A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

Kids are naturally curious, but when it comes to school it seems like their minds are turned off. Why is it that they can remember the smallest details from their favorite television program, yet miss the most obvious questions on their history test?

Cognitive scientist Dan Willingham has focused his acclaimed research on the biological and cognitive basis of learning and has a deep understanding of the daily challenges faced by classroom teachers. This book will help teachers improve their practice by explaining how they and their students think and learnrevealing the importance of story, emotion, memory, context, and routine in building knowledge and creating lasting learning experiences.

User Ratings and Reviews

1 Star Unbelievable
I read the front matter to this book and found my jaw dropping. I cannot help but think the author is either a fiction writer, that this is a hoax, or that it is the by-product of a religious cult of one kind or another.

I have followed educational research for decades and I’m a software engineer with over twenty five years experience and find just about every assertion this author makes about the brain, computers, and children to be wholesale nonsense.

the author claims, “The brain doesn’t like to think”. Really. It doesn’t like to think?

And that would help explain why students don’t like school!

The author claims thinking has three properties: Thinking is slow, thinking is effortful, and thinking is uncertain. In fact the author claims the human body has a “thinking system” connected to a visual system, connected to… well, you get the idea.

And the basis for these claims is what? The author mixes up so many bodily and cognitive functions that the body and thinking become unrecognizable to anyone who actually , well, thinks.

Memorization of information and the subsequent retrieval of that information is not the same as thinking. And problem solving is different from creating new ideas. But the author doesn’t want to get bogged down in trivial details. It’s all about memory.

And students disgusted by the quality of information dispensed at schools is not the same as students having a hard time thinking. But so what, information is information and having a hard time with bad information just proves how hard it is to think.

Unless this book is a brilliant farce, it is junk science.

5 Stars A Neceesary and Helfpful Shattering of Some Education Myths.
If you are a teacher, like myself, you have doubtless been inundated by advice about teaching to multiple intelligences, active (rather than passive) learning, teaching students to think rather than memorize facts, etc. If so, then you can’t afford to pass up this book, which will provide a very helpful guide as to why some of these well-intentioned ideas are wrong, and what it means for you as a teacher.

Dan Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School? is a book applying findings of cognitive psychology to the world of education. Sound a lot like Eric Jensen and his wildly popular book Teaching With the Brain in Mind? Well, unlike Jensen – who educators hear a lot about – Willingham is a PhD in cognitive psychology (while Jensen, who has a bachelors in English, is “working towards” a PhD from an online university, while making his real living as a motivational speaker). Long and short: Willingham is the real deal and I move to suggest that this book infinitely deserves more popularity amongst educators than anything Jensen has written.

Willingham’s basic theme is that, despite everything you’ve heard, nothing works to increase student ability like factual learning and practice. In fact, one of his first ideas is to point out that what seperates the excellent student (or adult) from those performing less well is their ability to recall facts. The more facts you know about your subject, the more you can understand your subject because of significantly less energy spent on fact recall or retention. With facts learned to automaticity, more time can be spent on higher-order concept learning, and once that becomes automatic….etc.

While that may sound mundane, think of how many times you as a teacher have heard the idea of “rote memorization” and “regurgitation of fact” denegrated. Of course, Willingham is not advocating the strawman position that teachers do nothing but drill, drill, drill and enforce memorization of text passages. (No one actually holds that position!) What he reminds us, though, is that the critical thinking we hear so much about teaching our kids simply CANNOT happen without giving kids the requisite background info that must be employed to think critically. (One cannot critically reflect on whether the revolutionary war was justified without some big factual understanding of Colonial American and Empirial Britian, for example.)

Another big idea in educaiton that Willingham works to dispel is the idea that we all have different learning styles – auditory, visual, kinesthetic, etc. Cognitive science, in fact, has shown the opposite: with minor variation, we all learn very similarly. While I may have a better memory for visual phemonena than you (who may be better at remembering sounds), we remember IDEAS not through the media in which they were delivered, but by…thinking about them. When memorizing words and definitions, we are not being asked to memorize sounds or visuals, but ideas, and the fact that I am an auditory or visual learner does nothing to predict what presentation method will help me memorize the best. (The amount I studied, of course, will.)

I don’t want to give the impression that Willingham’s book is about bashing education icons and maxims. It is not It is a book for teachers designed to bring up ideas we may not have thought about, and to suggest how to apply these ideas to our classrooms. Each chapter is focused around a question (“Is Drilling Worth It?” “Why is it So Hard for Students to Understand Abstract Ideas?”) and gives a detailed, but engaging, answer. At the end of each chapter, the author makes several concrete suggestions for how the answer can shape how we teach as well as reccomendations for further readings.

All in all, this is one of the single best education books I have read, and cannot wait to share it with fellow educators. As mentioned, I sincerely hope that this book becomes as widely devoured as those by Eric Jensen and Howard Gardner. Willingham offers a valuable and very constructive counterpoint, especially to Jensen’s “brain based ways of learning.”

5 Stars How people really learn (not what most people think)
Dan nails it down in plain language. You have to pay your dues over a long enough time for real expertise to develop. In a society transfixed with romantic ideas of instant insight, instant gratification and perpetual amusement, Willingham delivers the building blocks of understanding to the job site and shows how to put them together. Parents and teachers who read, understand, and apply the lessons here will provide their children and students with a head start, the benefits of which will last for years!

5 Stars Know a teacher? Give them this book.
This will be fascinating to anyone who regularly tries to impart knowledge to others, including trainers of all types. And to parents of students. If you know a school teacher, get this book, read it and give it to that teacher. This is the teacher gift for the end of the school year, beginning in 2009. It’s an easy, fun read. Then putting its nine lessons into practice will take a lot of work. Get started!

5 Stars If you are in any way attached to K-12 education, read this book
This is one of the most practical and powerful books for K-12 education that I have read in years. As a middle school principal and part-time graduate professor of education, I have had the opportunity to read tons of K-12 literature and work with hundreds of K-12 educators. This book struck a chord with me, and I have already ordered copies for my staff for next year.

This book is the perfect companion to Marzano’s What Works. Marzano documents specific, research-based instructional strategies that can help teachers improve the quality of learning in their classrooms; Willingham’s book makes clear the cognitive processes that make some classroom approaches more successful than others. Every couple pages of Willingham’s book, I would stop and say to myself “Wow, that just makes sense!” This book clears through the jargon and theoretical clutter that has taken hold in so many of the corners of the K-12 education space, providing simple, logical, scientific explanations for the learning process. If you work in K-12 education, if you have a child in a K-12 school, or if you’re just interested in understanding how learning works (or should work), read this book.

Parry Graham

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Brain Based Learning The New Paradigm of Teaching

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Mindful Leadership A Brain Based Framework

This updated edition of Connecting Leadership to the Brain provides school leaders with a visionary framework for aligning leadership practices with the nature of human intelligence.

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Mind Mapping How to LiberateYour Natural Genius

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Introducing Children To Mind Mapping in 12 Easy Steps ISBN 0953538745

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Mapping the Mind Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture

What is the nature of human thought? A long dominant view holds that the mind is a general problem-solving device that approaches all questions in much the same way. Chomsky’s theory of language, which revolutionized linguistics, challenged this claim, contending that children are primed to acquire some skills, such as language, in a manner largely independent of their ability to solve other sorts of apparently similar mental problems. In recent years, researchers in anthropology, psychology, linguistics and neuroscience have examined whether other mental skills are similarly independent. Many have concluded that much of human thought is “domain-specific.” Thus, the mind is better viewed as a collection of cognitive abilities specialized to handle specific tasks than as a general problem solver. Mapping the Mind introduces a general audience to a domain-specificity perspective, by compiling a collection of essays exploring how several of these cognitive abilities are organized. This volume is appropriate as a reader for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in cultural psychology, psychological anthropology, developmental and cognitive psychology.

User Ratings and Reviews

5 Stars Excellent introduction to central topic in modern cog sci
While certainly putting forth a controversial view of cognition, this book includes contributions by many of the scientists in the forefront of the field, and provides a broad overview of thinking in this area. Great for students as well as experts in the field.

4 Stars Needs more scientific support but a helpful book
Is the human brain an entity that makes use of a general collection of reasoning processes that can be used to solve problems no matter what domain or context these problems appear? Or does the human brain make use of cognitive processes that work only in specific domains? The latter alternative is called `domain specificity’ and is held to be the correct one throughout this book. The articles in the book argue for the hypothesis of domain specificity mostly from a philosophical point of view, and not a scientific one. The articles though do grant a large degree of insight into the current thinking on domain specificity. Via measurements and laboratory experiments, current research in neuroscience is beginning to shed more light on whether the brain is an “all-purpose” problem solver or a collection of independent modules geared toward specific tasks. All of the articles in the book are interesting, but only a few will be reviewed here due to reasons of space.

The first article of the book, entitled “Toward a topography of mind: An introduction to domain specificity,” introduces the problem of domain specificity and how it arose historically. It is very tricky to define what a domain actually is, but the authors of this article take it up in some detail. They emphasize the Chomsky theory of natural language grammar as being one of the first most important examples of a domain-specific perspective. If the mind is modular, as Chomsky and the authors in this book assert, then damage to one module should not affect the cognitive abilities of another module. There are indications from experimental neuroscience that this is the case for abilities such as language, music, and mathematics for example. The authors mention some of this evidence in this article. Interestingly though, they believe that theories are domain specific. They argue for example, that a theory of biology cannot be applied to physics. However this is only partly true. For example, molecular biology can be interpreted completely in terms of physics. There are many other examples of theories designed for specific domains that work in others. In addition, the authors assert that theory construction is not necessary for “getting around the world.” This may be true in a certain weak sense, but finding a cure for cancer or “getting around” or traveling to other worlds requires highly sophisticated theories. The authors do however distinguish between `scientific’ theories and commonsense or `folk’ theories, the latter of which are needed in everyday life. They discuss some examples in the article that emphasize their assertion that “theoretical” beliefs are important in organizing input data. The authors also address the question of what a domain really is, noting at the same time that an explicit definition does not exist. They therefore rely on examples of domains, and characterize it as a body of knowledge that serves to identify and interpret phenomena sharing certain properties.

In the second article of the book, entitled “The modularity of thought and the epidemiology of representations,” the author attempts to defend the view that thought processes themselves are also modular, and to explain his ideas on second topic in the title. The author believes that the modularity of thought is in no way incompatible with the diversity of human cultures, and much of the article is devoted to explaining why he thinks this is true. To this end, the author wants to distinguish between the `actual’ domain of a conceptual module and the `proper’ domain. The actual domain is the totality of information in the environment that satisfies the input conditions of the module. The `proper’ domain is the information that it is the module’s biological function to process. The module will process information in its actual domain, regardless of whether or not this information is contained in its proper domain. This distinction the author believes will allow him to explain the wide variation in human cultures, for the actual domains have become larger than the proper domains. This allows the organization of vast amounts of information, and allows the distinguishing of what he calls `cultural domains’ of modules. For the author, an explanation of culture involves explaining why some representations become more widely distributed than others. This explanation he calls the `epidemiology of representations’, wherein information in human communities is thought of as competing for private and public space and time. Interestingly, the transmission of cultural information in his view induces in the actual domain of any module a proliferation of `parasitic’ information that acts like the proper domain of this module. He quotes music as being an example of this, but he is careful to point out that he has not supported his case in this regard by rigorous scientific evidence.

In order to fit in to the evolutionary paradigm of modern science, the authors of the fourth article in the book, entitled “Origins of domain specificity: The evolution of functional organization”, attempt to show how modules can be viewed as evolved adaptations. The authors emphasize very strongly the need for natural selection in explaining the existence of complex functional design, and that the evolved design of organisms is the result of events in the past and happened without anticipation of the present. Successful cognitive mechanisms of the present are the result of what has happened in the past. Domain-general mechanisms, the authors argue at length, cannot be reconciled with evolutionary biology. Generality is achieved at the price of effectiveness, and domain-specific mechanisms that are able to utilize the stable features of recurring situations will outperform general mechanisms that don’t utilize these features. There are no domain-general criteria for success/failure that correlate with fitness. In addition, domain-general criteria are limited to what can be derived from perceptual information, and are subject to combinatorial explosion.

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Memory Recall the Brain and Learning Improve Student Learning Outcomes By Engaging Learners in Visual and Nonlinguistic Strategies Activities and Organizers

Memory, Recall, the Brain & Learning provides over 40 proven, practical, and easy to implement activities and 35 organizers to encourage your students to become engaged in the learning process while in your classroom.
Brain research has evidenced unprecedented levels of attention in education and learning endeavors. We have come to understand that “learning” is not merely an exercise in storing information for artificially engineered tests. Our interest and intent have evolved to encompass the notions of recall, long-term memory, and applications ~ not to mention life-long learning habits.
Our goal in teaching and learning must be to create environments and conditions in which learners are more likely to make greater attempts at processing sufficiently for understanding and application, resulting in increased long-term memory. This book seeks to explore in detail a vital aspect of learning and the brain that supports the acquisition of sustained understanding.
This book merges brain science research and educational best practice. Two profound works underpin the foundation for the strategies provided ~ Dr. Barbara Given’s work on the natural learning systems of the brain and Marzano, Pickering, and Pollock review of the nine most effective educational strategies leading to student achievement.
Dr. Greenleaf is a public school educator of 20 years. He has served as a school administrator at all levels as well as a professional development specialist at Brown University. He currently conducts workshops and consulting services full time. www.greenleaflearning.com
With 25 years of experience in design, software, and education, Doris Wells-Papanek designs tailored tools and coaches learners to achieve their goals, organize their time, tasks, and thoughts. She also consults with designers, corporations, and universities to integrate the end-user’s mindset into the product development process.

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ParaMind Lite Version 3 1

ParaMind Lite will create brainstorms on your original text just like the ParaMind Standard version will. You simply type or paste in your sentence, select and follow the Merge Wizard, and get back up to 50 pages of your sentence changed in fascinating ways.

ParaMind Lite 3.1 has the same Word Category database as the ParaMind Standard and Professional versions. This is an added value that is new in ParaMind Lite 3.1. ParaMind Lite 3.1 includes a large online manual, a Merge Wizard which takes out the learning curve, the Word Category Dictionary Editor, and a unique separate editing program called PM Select that lets you quickly copy and paste any text-format document in one movement of copy and paste. It will let you select blocks of text not next to each other. ParaMind Lite 3.1 also comes with a special dictionary printer so you can have a hard copy of these unique Word Categories.

The difference between ParaMind standard and ParaMind Lite is the Standard and Professional ParaMind versions use different techniques which produce larger merges in a shorter amount of time. The Professional Version also makes this process totally automated. The Standard version will produce a fifty-page or greater output of your sentence in as little as twenty seconds.

In ParaMind Lite 3.1, the user looks through the Word Category database for the words they want to brainstorm on. In the ParaMind Standard and Professional versions, the programs can do it for you automatically or you can also do it yourself.

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The Jossey Bass Reader on the Brain and Learning

This comprehensive reader presents an accessible overview of recent

Becoming a Wiz at Brain Based Teaching How to Make Every Year Your Best Year BECOMING A WIZ AT BRAIN BAS 2E

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