Are Screens “Digital Heroin?”

By Dan Willingham

A piece appeared in the New York Post on August 27 with the headline “It’s digital heroin: How screens turn kids into psychotic junkies.”

Even allowing for the fact that authors don’t write headlines, this article is hyperbolic and poorly argued. I said as much on Twitter and my Facebook page, and several people […]

• Articles
• Attention
• Behavior
• Comprehension
• Organizing and Processing
• Retention

For the Love of Reading: Engaging Students in a Lifelong Pursuit

By Daniel T. Willingham 2015

How should American teens spend their leisure time? I recently asked* American adults this question, after explaining that the typical teen enjoys approximately five hours of leisure time each weekday.1 The activity with the highest response, irrespective of race, education, and other demographic factors, was reading. Adults thought teens ought to […]

• Articles
• Parents
• Reading
• Teaching

Computational Competence Doesn’t Guarantee Conceptual Understanding in Math

By Dan Willingham

Commenters on the teaching of mathematics sometimes express impatience with the idea that attention ought to be paid to conceptual understanding in math education. I get it: it sounds fuzzy and potentially wrong-headed, as though we’re ready to overlook inaccurate calculation so long as the student seems to understand the concepts—and student understanding […]

• Articles
• Learning
• Math
• Teaching

Evaluating Readability Measures

By Dan Willingham

This piece first appeared on RealClearEducation.com on March 26.

How do you know that whether a book is at the right level of difficulty for a particular child? Or when thinking about learning standards for a state or district, how do we make a judgment about the text difficulty that, say, a sixth-grader ought […]

• Articles
• Reading

What People Know About the Cost of Multitasking

By Dan Willingham

Researchers emphasize there are very few circumstances in which you can do two things at once without cost (relative to doing each on its own). Yet some drivers sneak a look at their phone while on the road, and some students have the television playing while they complete an assignment.

Why? One possibility is […]

• Articles
• Attention
• Behavior
• Learning

Reading and Brain Change

By Daniel Willingham, Ph.D.

 Is there a critical period of brain plasticity for literacy? We know that brain development progresses with age. If a child does not learn to read at the right age, has the brain lost its plasticity such that learning to read will be more difficult?  

For at least one aspect of brain plasticity, we […]

• Articles
• Early Childhood
• Reading

What Is Developmentally Appropriate Practice?

By Daniel T. Willingham

What is “developmentally appropriate practice”? For many teachers, I think the definition is that school activities should be matched to children’s abilities – —they should be neither too difficult nor too easy, given the child’s current state of development.* The idea is that children’’s thinking goes through stages, and each stage is […]

• Articles
• Leadership

Have Technology And Multitasking Rewired How Students Learn?

By Daniel Willingham

Question: It seems like students today have a love affair with technology. They are much more up-to-date on the latest gadgets, and they seem to have a sixth sense about how to use them. Is it true that growing up with cutting-edge technology has left them thinking differently than students of past generations? […]

• Articles
• Learning

Can Teachers Increase Students’ Self Control?

By Daniel T. Willingham

How does the mind work—and especially how does it learn? Teachers’ instructional decisions are based on a mix of theories learned in teacher education, trial and error, craft knowledge, and gut instinct. Such knowledge often serves us well, but is there anything sturdier to rely on?

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field of […]

• Behavior

What Will Improve A Student’s Memory?

By Daniel T. Willingham

Daniel Willingham is professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Virginia and the author of the best-selling book Why Don’t Students Like School?, which has been translated into 10 languages.

Question: I often have students tell me that they studied for a test, meaning that they reviewed their notes and the textbook, […]

• Articles
• Memory