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

Both Shakespeare and Ford had a point. Humans are good at certain types of reasoning, particularly in comparison to other animals, but we exercise those abilities infrequently. A cognitive scientist would add another observation: Humans don't think very often because our brains are designed not for thought but for the avoidance of thought.

To summarize, I've said that thinking is slow, effortful, and uncertain. Nevertheless, people like to think – or more properly, we like to think if we judge that the mental work will pay off with the pleasurable feeling we get when we learn something new. So there is no inconsistency in claiming that people avoid thought and in claiming that people

What used to take all of the room in working memory now takes almost no room. As an adult you can tie your shoes while holding a conversation or even while working math problems in your head (in the unlikely event that the need

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

You can see why I said that practice enables further learning. You may have “mastered” reading in the sense that you know which sounds go with which letters, and you can reliably string together sounds into words. So why keep practicing if you know the letters? You practice not just to get faster. What's important is getting so good at recognizing

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

People are naturally curious, but we are not naturally good thinkers; unless the cognitive conditions are right, we will avoid thinking.

Although K–12 students don't complete questionnaires about their teachers, we know that more or less the same thing is true for them. The emotional bond between students and teacher – for better or worse – accounts for whether students learn. The brilliantly well-organized teacher whom fourth graders see as mean will not be very effective. But the

Why Don't Students Like School? began as a list of nine principles that are so fundamental to the mind's operation that they do not change as circumstances change. They are as true in the classroom as they are in the laboratory* and therefore can reliably be applied to classroom situations. Many of these principles likely won't surprise you: factua