Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

novices do. For example, a historian can analyze documents outside her area of expertise and still come up with a reasonable analysis. The analysis will take longer and will not be as detailed or likely as accurate as it would be for material in her own area, but it will be more like an expert's analysis than a novice's. You can imagine what might

Real scientists are experts. They have worked at science for 40 hours (likely many more) each week for years. It turns out that those years of practice make a qualitative, not quantitative, difference in the way they think compared to how a well-informed amateur thinks. Thinking like a historian, a scientist, or a mathematician turns out to be a ve

It's not just that students know less than experts; it's also that what they know is organized differently in their memory. Expert scientists did not think like experts-in-training when they started out. They thought like novices. In truth, no one thinks like a scientist or a historian without a great deal of training. This conclusion doesn't mean

Answer: This protest against school curricula has a surface plausibility: How can we expect to train the next generation of scientists if we are not training them to do what scientists actually do? But a flawed assumption underlies the logic, namely that students are cognitively capable of doing what scientists or historians do. The cognitive princ

Make Sure There's Variety I've said that practice helps you see deep structure, but I should be a bit more precise. There's increasing evidence that practice with variation in surface structure helps you see deep structure. A recent experiment tested people who spend a lot of time thinking about the likely winners of professional basketball games:

Fold Practice into More Advanced Skills You may target a basic skill as one that needs to be practiced to the point of mastery, but that doesn't mean that students can't also practice it in the context of more advanced skills. For example, students may need to practice retrieving sounds in response to printed letters, but once students are ready fo

particular unit. In fact, there is good reason to space out practice. As noted earlier, memory is more enduring when practice is spaced out, and practicing the same skills again and again is apt to be boring. It is better to offer some change. An additional benefit of spacing may be that students will get more practice in thinking through how to ap

What Should Be Practiced? Not everything can be practiced extensively. There simply isn't time, but fortunately not everything needs to be practiced. The benefits that I've said will accrue from practice provide some direction as to what sorts of things should be practiced. If practice makes mental processes automatic, we can then ask, Which proces

The answer seems to be “keep studying it.” This type of review is called overlearning – continued study after you seem to know something. It's exactly the type of practice we've been discussing in that it feels like it's not doing any good.