A New Look at the Twenty-First-Century Student's Mind

Almost any teacher will agree that technology is changing how students learn, but is it changing how student think? Not really, says Daniel Willingham, a teacher and cognitive neuroscientist who authored Why Don’t Students Like School?: A Cognitive Neuroscientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What it Means for the Classroom (Jossey-Bass, 2009) and who regularly publishes education-related articles, which you can find on his Web site.

“Technology has certainly changed how students access and integrate information,” he wrote in a piece published summer 2010 by the American Federation of Teachers. “But laboratory research indicates that today’s students don’t think in fundamentally different ways than students did a generation ago.”

That would come as a surprise to many adults—including a fair number of teachers—who would argue that technology alters young people’s brains in two ways: It makes them crave much more visual stimulation than traditional printed books can provide, and it turns them into multi-taskers with ultra-short attention spans.

To the contrary, Willingham sees a huge continuing role for books: “Many students are quite engaged by the Twilight series of novels despite the lack of technological flair,” he points out. And while surveys find that young people are multitasking more often than their elders did and are more comfortable at it, they still operate at their best when they are doing one thing at a time.

Willingham would agree, nevertheless, that schools could be better attuned to the ways that young people’s minds really work. He offers teachers a bounty of advice in his book, Why Don’t Students Like School?, in which he says that the ideal classroom lessons challenge students within set limits.

As he explains, only a small portion of the human brain is involved in deliberative thought. Motion, sight, and memory all constitute much larger shares of brain activity. This means that people—adults and children alike—rely much more on their physical senses and memory than on thinking processes. Thinking is hard work.

Nonetheless, we like to engage in it. Using our brain power to solve problems is a stimulating challenge, and we feel excitement when we succeed at it.

For a teacher, this means that students will find class work more interesting if it includes a fair amount of problem solving. Problems should be moderately difficult—challenging enough to draw students in but not so challenging that the students tune out.

Willingham gives examples, such as having students decipher the meaning of a poem or come up with new uses for recyclable materials, and he shows how to work such activities into instruction while also adding enough variety and accommodation of any given student’s needs to make sure that every student gets the most out of each day’s lessons—and better still, remembers much of it long after the school day is over.

Willingham strongly advises teachers to give special consideration to what the students already know or don’t know. Background knowledge sets many students apart from others. A student from an affluent background and highly educated parents will have acquired more knowledge even before entering school than another student from a poor background and less-educated parents.

The latter will have less background knowledge and will thus be at a disadvantage not only in reading, writing, and the gamut of class work, but also in the fundamental cognitive processes of analyzing, critiquing, and synthesizing information. A teacher who wants to help the latter will have to work with that student to help fill the gaps in his or her knowledge.

Beyond differences in upbringing, some students are just naturally better learners than others. Teachers should be mindful of students that show particular talent in certain areas or struggle more than most in others.

The notion that different groups of students learn differently is heard all the time, according to Willingham. In his experience, however, it is not entirely true. While some students do have special needs, almost all students benefit from consistently effective teaching.

Willingham advises teachers not to spend much time studying the various models of so-called “learning styles” and determining which students might fit which models. What teachers should do is strive to be the best teachers they can be. He puts forth nine “principles of the mind” that he touts as ideal for most teachers in most situations:

• People are naturally curious, but they are not naturally good thinkers. Think of to-be-learned material as answers, and take the time necessary to explain to students the questions.
• Factual knowledge precedes skill. Instill important facts, and encourage students to read as much as possible. It is impossible to think well on a topic without factual knowledge about it.
• Consider carefully what a lesson will make students think about; that is what they will remember.
• We understand new things in the context of what we already know. Guide students toward the information’s deeper meaning and structure. Use lifelike examples whenever possible as comparisons.
• Proficiency requires practice. Think carefully about which material students need at their fingertips, and practice it over time.
• Cognition is fundamentally different early and late in training. Strive for deep understanding in your students, not the creation of new knowledge.
• Children are more alike than different in terms of learning. Think of lesson content, not student differences, driving decisions about how to teach.
• Intelligence can be changed through sustained hard work. Always talk about successes and failures in terms of effort, not ability.
• Teaching, like any complex cognitive skill, must be practiced to be improved. Monitor your own teaching, and seek regular feedback from a peer, to find ways to improve it.

Drawing students’ interest and maintaining it are not easy for teachers today, Willlingham concedes, but cognitive science can make these tasks less difficult. A teacher who knows some basics about how students think and learn will have some useful guides with which to shape his or her day-to-day practice.