Why Don't Students Like School: Chapter 3

“Why Do Students Remember Everything That’s on Television and Forget Everything I Say?”

Excerpt From: Daniel T. Willingham. “Why Don't Students Like School?.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/SexLw.l

“Your memory system lays its bets this way: if you think about something carefully, you’ll probably have to think about it again, so it should be stored. Thus your memory is not a product of what you want to remember or what you try to remember; it’s a product of what you think about.”

“Whatever students think about is what they will remember. The cognitive principle that guides this chapter is: Memory is the residue of thought.
To teach well, you should pay careful attention to what an assignment will actually make students think about (not what you hope they will think about), because that is what they will remember.”
Question for myself, based on the Underground railroad example, if my students struggle with the technology in my course, then they are "thinking" about their struggle with the technology and not the course content.

“things can’t get into long-term memory unless they have first been in working memory. So this is a somewhat complex way of explaining the familiar phenomenon: If you don’t pay attention to something, you can’t learn it!”

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“What’s more mysterious is why, when they are paying attention, they sometimes learn and sometimes don’t. What else is needed besides attention? A reasonable guess is that we remember things that bring about some emotional reaction. ”

“Things that create an emotional reaction will be better remembered, but emotion is not necessary for learning.”

“Repetition is another obvious candidate for what makes learning work.”

“One of the remarkable findings was that knowing about the future test didn’t improve subjects’ memories. ”

“In this case it matters because judging pleasantness makes you think about what the word means and about other words that are related to that meaning. ”

“Whatever you think about, that’s what you remember. Memory is the residue of thought.”

So if students are repeatedly told they are "digital natives", they assume this to be true because they repeatedly use smartphones thus reinforcing the notion they are digitally savvy. When they take my class, they are dismayed that they can't perform tasks using a desktop computer. The hypothesis I have come to since starting this class (EDUC792) is that the skills needed to use apps on mobile technologies  are not the same as the skills needed to use applications on desktop computers. This is a problem because in the workforce for the foreseeable future, say 5 to 10 years when they will be entering the workforce, students will not be using their mobile devices solely to perform their work activities.

I've also being confronted several times this semester by students asking, not politely, why they have to take my class, whether is be because they are a Mac user or whether they believe they won't use the knowledge and skills in the course in their particular major. They can't see past their immediate situation or contemplate what may be needed in the future. They are in higher education to learn, but their resistance to learn new knowledge and skills baffles me.

The answer to my thoughts... “If you do think about something, then it’s likely that you’ll want to think about it in the same way in the future.”

“Therefore, a teacher’s goal should almost always be to get students to think about meaning.”

“For material to be learned (that is, to end up in long-term memory), it must reside for some period in working memory—that is, a student must pay attention to it. Further, how the student thinks of the experience completely determines what will end up in long-term memory. The obvious implication for teachers is that they must design lessons that will ensure that students are thinking about the meaning of the material.”

What Good Teachers Have in Common

“Trying to make the material relevant to students’ interests doesn’t work. ”

“Students often refer to good teachers as those who “make the stuff interesting.” It’s not that the teacher relates the material to students’ interests—rather, the teacher has a way of interacting with students that they find engaging.”

“Teachers need to be both well organized and approachable.”

“Does the professor seem like a nice person, and is the class well organized? ”

“The emotional bond between students and teacher—for better or worse—accounts for whether students learn.”

The Power of Stories

“The human mind seems exquisitely tuned to understand and remember stories—so much so that psychologists sometimes refer to stories as “psychologically privileged,” meaning that they are treated differently in memory than other types of material. ”

the four Cs:
“causality, which means that events are causally related to one another.”
"conflict - a story has a main character pursuing a goal, but he or she is unable to reach that goal.”
"complications - subproblems that arise from the main goal.”
"character - a good story is built around strong, interesting characters, and the key to those qualities is action. A skillful storyteller shows rather than tells the audience what a character is like.”

“using a story structure brings several important advantages”
1) “First, stories are easy to comprehend, because the audience knows the structure, which helps to interpret the action.”
2) “Second, stories are interesting. ”
3) “Third, stories are easy to remember. Because comprehending stories requires lots of medium-difficulty inferences”

Putting Story Structure to Work

“The story structure applies to the way you organize the material that you encourage your students to think about, not to the methods you use to teach the material.”

“When it comes to teaching, I think of it this way: The material I want students to learn is actually the answer to a question. On its own, the answer is almost never interesting. But if you know the question, the answer may be quite interesting. That’s why making the question clear is so important. But I sometimes feel that we, as teachers, are so focused on getting to the answer, we spend insufficient time making sure that students understand the question and appreciate its significance."

But What If There Is No Meaning?

“Memorizing meaningless material is commonly called rote memorization.”

“There are times when a teacher may deem it important for a student to have such knowledge ready in long-term memory as a stepping-stone to understanding something deeper. ”

Implications for the Classroom
Review Each Lesson Plan in Terms of What the Student Is Likely to Think About
Think Carefully About Attention Grabbers
Use Discovery Learning with Care - “Discovery learning is probably most useful when the environment gives prompt feedback about whether the student is thinking about a problem in the right way. ”
Design Assignments So That Students Will Unavoidably Think About Meaning
Don’t Be Afraid to Use Mnemonics
Try Organizing a Lesson Plan Around the Conflict - “If I’m continually trying to build bridges between students’ daily lives and their school subjects, the students may get the message that school is always about them, whereas I think there is value, interest, and beauty in learning about things that don’t have much to do with me.” Is this the culture currently being created in K-12? Is this why I'm getting so much push back from students about my class?