Why don't students like school?

What Hacker News says

1. moribundaOct 2024
   From: https://medium.com/eedi/how-i-wish-id-taught-maths-8ec9b0578...

   [...]the day I started reading educational research was the day my life changed.

   It all began with Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School, which led me onto his ridiculously good series of Ask the Cognitive Scientist articles for the American Federation of Teachers and the associated research papers he quoted. I devoured them all with eyes wide open and jaw firmly on the floor. Next came Cognitive Load Theory, which I was introduced to via the incredible blog of Greg Ashman and our subsequent conversation on my podcast. I was familiar with the work of Dylan Wiliam through the development of my Diagnostic Questions website, but I read and re-read everything I could get my hands on from the great man. I didn’t think life could get any better — and then I came across the work of Robert and Elizabeth Bjork. Good God.

   One thing led to another, and before I knew it I had read well over 200 hundreds books and research papers. I would wake up in the middle of the night, my head buzzing with ideas[...]

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2. red_admiralAug 2024
   Great article! From my own teaching experience,

   > I'm not a hundred percent certain of the exact mechanisms of how, yet. In my experience, I learn the most when I struggle; if a student can shortcut through all the hard parts on, for example, and assignment, they're not going to learn very much. On the flip side, when most students struggle, they just give up. Somehow I need to make assignments which thread the needle between being too hard to solve and too easy to learn anything.

   The academic theory is that for each learner, there are three concentric circles - the way I was taught them, they were called the comfort zone, the growth zone, and the danger zone. (https://commonslibrary.org/the-learning-zone-model/ calls them comfort, learning and alarm zones) Learning happens best when you push people beyond their comfort zone, but not into the danger zone (where the amount retained rapidly converges to zero). Of course, this is easier said than done, especially with a class of students with varying abilities, though I like your approach to the problem. It's even harder when you're teaching a 200-student introductory class and there's no way to really set individual assignments.

   > [Lecturing] is designed for the lecturer's convenience ...

   I personally really liked most of my lectures I sat in as a student - yes there was one guy who just read out from the textbook he'd published, so I skipped those lectures and just read the book. But overall, I liked most of my lectures; I might be the exception to the rule. I think the important thing is to make a lecture interesting with some of the same storytelling ideas that writers and TV/film scriptwriters use, and to throw in jokes and asides every now and then. Be a human being with personality. Worked examples, live-coding, experiments etc. are also useful, depending on the topic. (For more examples and scientific background, see Willingham's book "Why don't students like school?") Of course, that's a lot more work for the lecturer than designing for their own convenience. I've lectured like this myself before and students loved it. I've also heard from students at various places that, now the pandemic has died down mostly, "We're not paying fees just to watch some videos. We can do that on youtube. We want real lectures back."

   The most important part, which one of my professors told me in the first week and was some of the best advice I ever got at university, was that you don't actually learn anything in lectures. That's not the point. You learn things by doing the exercises, and by studying in your own time. Lectures are just there to prepare you for the learning, because without the prep you wouldn't know what to do in the exercises.

   > If you're on the fence about teaching, you should definitely give it a try, if only because interacting with students is such a rewarding experience.

   Definitely!

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3. SiValJul 2021
   Do yourself a big favor and read the book "Why Don't Students Like School?" by Prof. Daniel T. Willingham. He's a prof of psych at the University of Virginia specializing in the application of cog sci and neuro sci to K-12 education.

   I don't know who chose the title, but it doesn't describe the book, which is really a collection of articles about the results of experiments comparing various learning & teaching techniques. Only one chapter is about why children, who like learning some things, don't like school.

   Willingham publishes in academic journals and in journals for educators, so you can find other writings online. He tries to persuade teachers that so much of what the elite grad schools of education teach is intellectual fashion out of touch with actual cog sci findings, but all he cares about are the science experiments.

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4. joaoricoMar 2018
   This is off-topic, but perhaps interesting to some, and might add some weight to the opinions expressed in the article.

   The author of this article is Daniel T. Willingham. He is a psychologist at the University of Virginia and author of some very good books on learning, schools and education.

   He is a good, careful and informed thinker on the subject of learning and children.

   I recommend his book "Why Don't Students Like School?" [0] for an insightful look at one of the pieces of the puzzle that is Education.

   [0] "Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom" https://www.amazon.com/Why-Dont-Students-Like-School/dp/0470...

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5. mfrankelOct 2014
   Take a look at Daniel Willingham's material and his book "Why Don't Students Like School"

   Here's a review of the book: http://ed-policy.blogspot.com/2009/04/one-of-handfull-one-of...

   Here's Dr Willingham's web site with a lot of articles worth reading: http://www.danielwillingham.com/articles.html

   Here's his credentials: Earned his B.A. from Duke University in 1983 and his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Harvard University in 1990. He is currently Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 1992.

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6. rickhanloniiMay 2013
   Willingham would be proud, as this is a recurring theme and a whole chapter in his book "Why Don't Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom." He also made this case on this on his blog when responding to Andrew Hacker's ridiculous suggestion to change math so that you don't actually learn math:

   "The problem is that if you try to meet this challenge by teaching the specific skills that people need, you had better be confident that you're going to cover all those skills. Because if you teach students the significance of the Consumer Price Index they are not going to know how to teach themselves the significance of projected inflation rates on their investment in CDs. Their practical knowledge will be specific to what you teach them, and won't transfer.

   The best bet for knowledge that can apply to new situations is an abstract understanding--seeing that apparently different problems have a similar underlying structure. And the best bet for students to gain this abstract understanding is to teach it explicitly. (For a discussion of this point as it applies to math education in particular, see Anderson, Reder, & Simon, 1996).

   But the explicit teaching of abstractions is not enough. You also need practice in putting the abstractions into concrete situations."

   Neither of us, though, can make the point as well as he does. In the book he explains what transfer is, as well as surface knowledge, deep knowledge, etc, and how an understanding of these concepts ca inform a philosophy of education and shape education practices.

   Everyone, read his book! If the title worries you that it's too focused on educators, then ignore the title. The content is applicable to anyone interested in learning at all, especially if you want to improve the way you learn. Obviously, I strongly recommend that book, but alternatively, he covers a lot of what's in the book in his articles[2].

   </willingham_fan_boy>

   [1] http://www.danielwillingham.com/1/post/2012/07/yes-algebra-i...

   [2] http://www.danielwillingham.com/articles.html

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