Week 3 Post 1 (Why Don't Students Like School? at The Core Knowledge Blog)

This week, the Core Knowledge Blog is being moderated by Dan Willingham, a cognitive scientist who wrote the book, "Why Don't Students Like School"? Appropriately, he responds to this question from a cognitive science perspective. I personally believe that the answers don't just lie in the field of cognitive science, and that cultural explanations would go a long way in shedding light on this issue. Nevertheless, his analysis is pretty compelling.

Willingham explains that the brain is wired to actually avoid thinking when it can. "Compared to your ability to see and move, thinking is slow, effortful, and uncertain," he notes. He admits that this is a pretty depressing conclusion, especially when considered by an educator. So how do we make the thousands of decisions that we confront on a daily basis? The answer is that we don't think; we rely on memory, which is actually much more reliable than thinking.

The vast majority of students are not "thinking" when they compute 7 + 7. They are accessing their memory. Because they have seen this fact countless times, they have reached the point of automaticity. Automaticity is very important in education, because it allows more higher level problems to be less taxing than they would otherwise be. In other words, our memory allows us to exert less effort. A student who must count by eights each time they see 8 X 7 is doing something much more burdensome than the student who is simply recalling the answer from memory. A student who cannot compute this automatically will have a lot of difficulty when they reach polynomials and they have to multiply (8x^2)(4x + 7x^5 + 9x^7). The student who is not automatic will be confounded by all the calculations that this problem entails. The automatic student will be able to solve this in less than 20 seconds.

Willingham contends that this discovery (an old one) in congitive science is the case for practice, which has more sinister synonyms in "drill and kill" and "learning by rote." He's not saying that all learning should conform to this arrangement, but that certain basic things must be memorized. I could not have agreed more. I echoed his sentiments by saying that the difference between a successful 7th grade math student and an unsuccessful one is the difference between knowing how to do the four operations automatically and not knowing this. I have students who still multiply by counting in their heads, or doing long-hand addition on their paper (strategies promoted by Everyday Mathematics and other constructivist programs of this ilk). They can compute the volume of a cylinder correctly, but guess which student gets it right more often? The students who know their multiplication tables and who understand the algorithm for doing multiplication with 2 or more digits are far more successful.

There were 34 posts in this thread, and just about every educator agreed with my assessment of the matter (and of course, Willingham's), which made me pause and think. How is it that constructivist education took off this decade when most educators (at least my colleagues, friends, grad school peers, most who I meet online) despise the ideology? Because students are not expected to master certain basic facts, they become frustrated when they must tackle more difficult subject matter. Maybe this is why students don't like school.