Why Don't Students Like School: Chapter 5

No snarky comments toady.  Just trying to get caught up :)

Is Drilling Worth It?

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

“Does the cognitive benefit make it worth the potential cost to motivation?” Answer: The bottleneck in our cognitive system is the extent to which we can juggle several ideas in our mind simultaneously."

“The cognitive principle that guides this chapter is:
It is virtually impossible to become proficient at a mental task without extended practice.”

“Odd as it may seem, that sort of practice is essential to schooling. It yields three important benefits: it reinforces the basic skills that are required for the learning of more advanced skills, it protects against forgetting, and it improves transfer.”

Practice Enables Further Learning
“This lack of space in working memory is a fundamental bottleneck of human cognition.”

“Thus, the first way to cheat the limited size of your working memory is through factual knowledge. There is a second way: you can make the processes that manipulate information in working memory more efficient.”

“Mental processes can become automatized. Automatic processes require little or no working-memory capacity. They also tend to be quite rapid in that you seem to know just what to do without even making a conscious decision to do it.”

“Most of the time automatic processes help rather than hinder. They help because they make room in working memory. Processes that formerly occupied working memory now take up very little space, so there is space for other processes.”

“ Finding a fact in long-term memory and putting it into working memory places almost no demands on working memory. It is no wonder that students who have memorized math facts do better in all sorts of math tasks than students whose knowledge of math facts is absent or uncertain. And it’s been shown that practicing math facts helps low-achieving students do better on more advanced mathematics.”

Practice Makes Memory Long Lasting
“One thing these studies don’t make clear is whether you get longer-lasting memory because you practice more or because your practice is stretched out over time."

“If you pack lots of studying into a short period, you’ll do okay on an immediate test, but you will forget the material quickly. If, on the other hand, you study in several sessions with delays between them, you may not do quite as well on the immediate test but, unlike the crammer, you’ll remember the material longer after the test ”

“We’ve been talking about the importance of practice, and we’ve just said that practice works better if it’s spaced out.”

Practice Improves Transfer
“As I’ve said, transfer is more likely when the surface structure of the new problem is similar to the surface structure of problems seen before. ”

“Working lots of problems of a particular type makes it more likely that you will recognize the underlying structure of the problem, even if you haven’t seen this particular version of the problem before.”

“Contextual information can be used not only for understanding individual words with several possible meanings, but also for understanding the relationships of different things in what you read.”

“In sum, practice helps transfer because practice makes deep structure more obvious.”

Implications for the Classroom
“Such practice yields three benefits: (1) it can help the mental process become automatic and thereby enable further learning; (2) it makes memory long lasting; and (3) it increases the likelihood that learning will transfer to new situations.”

What Should Be Practiced?
“In general, the processes that need to become automatic are probably the building blocks of skills that will provide the most benefit if they are automatized. Building blocks are the things one does again and again in a subject area, and they are the prerequisites for more advanced work.”

Space Out the Practice
“But if material from a week or a month or three months ago is sometimes included, students must think more carefully about how to tackle the problem, and about what knowledge and skills they have that might apply.”

Fold Practice into More Advanced Skills
“You may target a basic skill as one that needs to be practiced to the point of mastery, but that doesn’t mean that students can’t also practice it in the context of more advanced skills.”