Why StudentS don’t Like SchooL – Highlights, Chapters IV-VI

Willingham, Chapter IV
PRINCIPLE: We understand new things in the context of things we already know, and most of what we know is concrete
 Comprehending abstract ideas & applying them to new situations is difficult to do well
 Analogies are important for learning so long as they are good analogies 
 Understanding new ideas is mostly a matter of getting the right old ideas into WM and rearranging them – making
comparisons we hadn’t before, or thinking about a feature we had previously ignored
 Rote knowledge -> memorizing with absolutely NO understanding (very rarely employed today)
 Shallow knowledge -> developing a limited understanding of the material (crucial stepping stone)
 Deep knowledge -> piecing knowledge together in ways that are richly interconnected (target area – sees the big picture,
the full context, etc.)
 Your background knowledge is the most important factor to comprehension of text and it will also shape how you interpret
what comes next
 Problem is that seeing deep structure of problems requires knowledge of the whole, not just the parts – surface structure
of problems is, on the other hand, easy to identify and thus draws novices focus
Implication for the Classroom Notes/Discussion
To help student comprehension, provide examples and
ask students to compare them
Make deep knowledge the spoken and unspoken
emphasis
Make your expectations for deep knowledge realistic
Willingham, Chapter V
PRINCIPLE: It is virtually impossible to become proficient at a mental task without extended practice
 Practice reduces the amount of “room” mental work requires
 Low-level processes must become automatic for more high-level concerns
 Mastery and skill development are key educational reasons we must require deliberate practice in our students
 Practicing when you’ve already appeared to have mastered something is crucial – it (1) reinforces basic skills, (2) protects
against forgetting, and (3) improves transfer
 Working memory is more or less fixed – so two ways to get around the limited size of WM are…
o Developing a rich, broad factual knowledge base
o Making the processes that manipulate information in WM more efficient
 Think of fundamental basics required to use in your discipline and work to make them automatic
 Spaced practice helps protect against forgetting better than studying hard
o Cramming helps for an immediate test but if not reused again will be forgotten; but several study sessions with
delays in between produces better recall over the long-term (not as good on the immediate test)
 Practice = doing something you have already mastered (practice has key cognitive benefits but can be boring)
Implication for the Classroom Notes/Discussion
Key factual knowledge and disciplinary processes
should be practiced deliberately by students
Space out the practice
Fold practice into more advanced skills
Willingham, Chapter VI
PRINCIPLE: Cognition early in training is fundamentally different from cognition late in training
 Students know less than experts & what is known is organized differently
 Experts can be bombarded by information and filter what is important & what should be ignored – additionally, they notice
subtleties that others miss
 Compared to novices, experts are better able to single out important details, produce sensible solutions, & transfer their
knowledge to similar domains
 Key = Extensive background knowledge held by experts frees up WM
 Experts see deep structure of issues while novices tend to think in terms of surface features
 Key procedures employed by experts in a discipline are routinized (freeing up WM again)
 Your students are not experts; they are novices
Implication for the Classroom Notes/Discussion
Students are ready to comprehend but not to create
knowledge
Activities appropriate for experts may at times be
appropriate for students, but not because they will do
much for students cognitively
Don’t expect novices to learn by doing what experts do