Deep knowledge is always the goal, but everything we learn must connect to something we already know.
What is it about?
Why Don’t Students Like School? provides an overview of some key findings from cognitive science and their implications for teachers in classrooms. Chapters include ‘Why do students remember everything that’s on television and forget everything I say?’ and ‘Why is it so hard for students to understand abstract ideas?’ Willingham uses a ‘simple model of the mind’ to explain how working memory and long-term memory interact with the environment. This leads to nine key cognitive principles, including: Factual knowledge precedes skill. You cannot think about a topic properly without sufficient knowledge of it; skills deficits are usually really knowledge deficits
‘Memory is the residue of thought.’ This is probably Willingham’s most famous line. It means that we remember the things we think about, even if we were hoping to learn something
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