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 […]
Read More....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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
Read More....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 […]
Read More....By Daniel T. Willingham
What is developmentally appropriate practice? For many teachers, I think the definition is that school activities should be matched to childrens abilities – they should be neither too difficult nor too easy, given the childs current state of development.* The idea is that children’s thinking goes through stages, and each stage is […]
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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? […]
Read More....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, […]
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