Why Don't Students Like School?. Daniel T. Willingham

the most important articles by Alan Baddeley, commonly considered the central figure in the development of working memory theory over the last 50 years.

      2 Berridge, K. C., & Kringelbach, M. L. (2015). Pleasure systems in the brain. Neuron, 86(3), 646–664. Reviews evidence that various types of pleasure we feel—from using addictive drugs, listening to music, experiencing romantic love, or eating delicious food—all have a common anatomic basis in the brain.

      3 Kidd, C., & Hayden, B. Y. (2015). The psychology and neuroscience of curiosity. Neuron, 88(3), 449–460. An overview of contemporary theories of curiosity, focusing on the idea that curiosity evolved to ensure that animals, including humans, learn about their environment. We are maximally curious when we think the environment offers the greatest opportunity to learn.

      4 Long, N. M., Kuhl, B. A., & Chun, M. M. (2018). Memory and attention. Stevens' Handbook of Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, 1–37. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. You probably didn't need to be convinced that paying attention is a prerequisite for learning. This chapter offers much more detail and, as you'd expect, some caveats and complications.

      5 Willingham, D. T., & Riener, C. (2019). Cognition: The Thinking Animal, 4. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. This is a college-level textbook on cognitive psychology that can serve as an introduction to the field. It assumes no background, but it is a textbook, so although it is thorough, it might be a bit more detailed than you want.

Discussion Questions

      1 We like to think only when we believe we'll be successful. If you want to engage in thinking more often, how then might you change your environment so that you more often encounter the right sort of mental challenge? Or what might you say to yourself to get you to try more often?

      2 When are your students on autopilot? It's easy to say there's value in trying to go off autopilot and think more often, but what are the obstacles to doing so? Can you think of ways of picking problems that they currently solve on autopilot that actually seem promising to think about?

      3 Just how much reward does a student need for the work of thinking? There's no firm answer to this question, and we'd certainly guess that it would vary by age and would vary within a classroom, probably based on students' concept of themselves as students and some inherent aspect of each student's persistence. Nevertheless it's worth considering: on average, how often would you like students to feel the pleasure of success? Equally important, how do you know when they do? If they solve a problem, are you sure they feel success? If not, is there anything you can do to prompt that feeling?

      4 Think of some assignments that your students consistently enjoy, and view them through the cognitive-work-that-succeeds lens. Does that work share any common characteristics?

      5 I suggested that students don't fully understand or appreciate the question that the to-be-learned content is meant to answer. How often do you think that applies to your context? How easy or difficulty might it be to get students to both understand the question at stake and to engage with it?

      6 I was a little casual in the implications section when I said that it's straightforward to deal with working memory overload. I said you should slow down and break things into smaller chunks, which is true, as far as it goes. What's trickier to deal with are the differences among students in what makes them feel overloaded. What can be done about that?

Notes

      1 1. Roitfeld, C. (2016). Icons: In bed with Kim and Kanye. Harper's Bazaar (28 July). https://www.harpersbazaar.com/fashion/photography/a16784/kanye-west-kim-kardashian-interview/ (accessed 24 July 2020).

      2 2. Duncker, K. (1945). On problem-solving. Psychological Monographs 5: 113.

      3 3. Townsend, D. J., and Bever, T. G. (2001). Sentence Comprehension: The Integration of Habits and Rules, 2. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

      4 4. Simon, H. A. Sciences of the Artificial, 3e, 94. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

      5 5. Aristotle. (2009). The Nicomachean Ethics (trans. D. Ross; ed. L. Brown), 137. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.