Why Don't Students Like School?

Every aspect of education policy is being hotly debated right now. From national politics, the role of local boards, the effectiveness of school administrators, influence of teachers' unions, teaching performance, standardized testing, funding, etc. Every aspect is being widely debated, except perhaps the most important: that many students just don't like school. This can be observed even at the best performing public schools, where there's often a large achievement gap among the student body, even despite presumably similar exposure to administration, academic standards, funding, etc. Indeed, perhaps the single biggest difference between students who do well, graduate, and go to college, and those who don't, is the student's level of motivation. Those who attend competitive universities are almost all highly self-motivated individuals, whereas those who drop out of school are almost all lacking in school motivation. It's the elephant in the room, and arguably the single biggest challenge to any new education policies. That being said, it was with great anticipation I bought Dr. Willingham's book.

Unfortunately, this is not that book. It doesn't really resolve the issue of students not liking school, nor is it a herald of 21st century education policy. Indeed, the book mostly reads as a defense (albeit insightful) of standard education practices. If you've always wanted to know why memorizing facts, doing drills, emphasizing homework practice, and maintaining conformity are all important, then this is the book for you. /sarcasm :)

To be fair to Dr. Willingham, the book is well-researched and well-referenced. It's easy to read, and includes numerous examples that clearly describe the book's conclusions. There's also gems of insight scattered throughout. Sounds great, right? My main criticism however is that although the book carefully describes why standard education practices "should" work, or why they "would" work if only practiced correctly, it seems to ignore a simple truth: standard practices have not been working, even as much as educators may want otherwise.

I'll save you the [...] to buy this book here :) In a nutshell Willingham says this: Students don't like school because school is designed to make you think. But the brain is designed not to think unless conditions are correct. Basically like goldielocks your brain likes problems that aren't too easy or too tough, but are just right. (finding such a careful balance for 30-100 students is not really possible though) Willingham then spends most the book describing how to help "working memory", your consciousness. This by memorizing facts and doing drills until recall of such information becomes automatic. The reason here being, that once these things become automatic, you won't have to think about them anymore -- and thus you can use your "working memory", your consciousness, to focus entirely on new, more difficult problems you encounter. The book seems to implicitly suggest that this is the entire purpose of "learning", to develop your "working memory." This is not unlike your basketball coach telling you that to become a great shooter, you need to stand in front of a hoop and shoot until your hands bleed. It's a very "brute force" way of trying to improve your skills, and no doubt, when it works it works. But -- most of the time it doesn't work; all it does is discourage students from becoming good at the task.

In contrast, I would say the main reason students don't like school is because it's not fun. Children (yes children) start going to school from ages 3-7 ...yet, they are thrown into this demanding environment emphasizing drill, drill, drill. Do these 50 arithmetic problems, write these words down in grammatically correct sentences, memorize this textbook passage. They sit in small desks, are told they can't move for an hour, and are told they have to attentively listen while a stranger lectures, about stuff they may or may not be interested in, stuff they may or may not understand. But they have to listen anyway, and if they don't understand and if they aren't interested, is someone going to come help them personally? Probably not. Because the teacher is too busy lecturing, and too busy following a rigid lesson plan just so that her students can fill little bubbles on scantrons. Is this what learning really is? Is it any wonder, any wonder at all, why kids (yeah kids) would rather play on their ipod, iphones, ipads? Why they can't wait to leave school so they can go watch TV and play video games? And what's the educator response to this? Oh, let's be more demanding. Let's drill more, assign more homework, force kids to learn more raw facts so they can better pass a mindless test. Oh and yeah, let's expect them to behave like adults would. Because even if you're bored out of your mind, and every raw instinct in your natural body is telling you to be somewhere else, you're expected to act maturely. Expected to act like an adult, and just sit there and learn anyway "because it's for your own good". Because you're 3, or 5, or 10 -- and you're supposed to know better. Really. Is it any wonder at all, why by the time kids are 14, 15 years old, many of them can't wait to leave school?

In Dr. Willingham's defense, I don't think he's intentionally being deceptive. I think he's giving advice in good faith, trying to explain things as best he can, and advising regarding the policies that perhaps worked best for him. But, I would respectfully suggest that perhaps these old educators are showing a strong confirmation bias. They want to believe this stuff works, so they interpret their data to support what they believe. Often times in this book, Willingham cites a study that lends evidence to his position -- however, it doesn't really prove the position -- it only lends evidence. Nevertheless, it doesn't stop Willingham from concluding that his interpretation must be the correct one, since the evidence supports it. I'll give you a good example why this is a precarious position. Willingham describes this in a chapter detailing IQ and IQ measurement. For awhile scientists believed IQ was mostly genetic, because they had observed similar IQ scores in identical twins raised apart. But, then they discovered that the entire population's IQ keeps going up generation after generation, something which could only be explained as environmentally caused since there's no way everyone's genes are getting better. So how can it be that IQ is supposedly mostly genetic, but it keeps going up each generation for environmental reasons? Well nobody really knows. But the most likely answer is that genetics plays an actually small role, but a significant one. -- If you're a little more smart when you're a kid, your parents and teachers probably will encourage you to do activities suited to your "higher" intelligence. Whereas if you show no intellectual talent at all, probably nobody encourages you as such, and indeed might actively be looking for other areas where you show promise. Maybe you're a little more athletic, or a little funnier, or a little bit more expressive. So the adults in your life encourage you to play sports, or entertain, or be creative. This then basically becomes a snowball effect, where people think you are better at something, so they encourage you to become better at it, and you engage in those activities, which then makes you better at them than those who don't. But not because you were born that way -- but because people encouraged you to work at that particular talent while your peers didn't. In this way, a tiny little variation in genetic potential, can snowball into a huge difference over the course of a lifetime. Willingham describes this in the book, and how most cognitive scientists now think intelligence is mostly environmental and only somewhat genetic. The exact opposite of what they thought only 20 years ago. My point here being, that the mind is a very mysterious thing, don't be so eager to jump to conclusions (*cough* Dr. Willingham) :) Because in 20 years time, it could well be proven that every conclusion jumped to in this book was actually incorrect.

Ultimately -- I did learn a few things from Willingham's book, but to be honest, I would steer clear of it. It's mostly trying to validate 19th century practices for 21st century educators. What teachers really need, is 21st century innovation to engage students in the new world of ipods, online games, social networks, etc. And this book is just not it.

I get tired of hearing the phrase, "Brain research shows..." to prove whatever point teachers are trying to show at the time. Whether it is about the importance of play, the use of movies, standing on your head before a test, or studying on the toilet, educators pull these three words and throw them down on the table like the trump card they've been saving to illuminate a point. The problem is that most teachers, including me, have no idea about brain research or even where to begin. Because of this, I sought to find a book to offer a basic understanding for dum-dums like me.

The subtitle of this book is, "A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for your classroom." This is a better explanation for the information, as I still don't know why students don't like school (perhaps it has something to do with me!). I suppose I could sum up the book as follows:

1. People are naturally curious.
2. Teachers create "problems" far too easy or too difficult.
3. Students do not have background information necessary to engage a problem, thus making it easy to quit.
4. Teachers present information in a disconnected way, thus students cannot remember background information to address critical thinking problems.
5. Students sit and force themselves to hold back both sleep and drool, while dreaming about that cute girl sitting in the front.
6. Students are no longer curious.

As I read, I made liberal notes throughout, and it will be a book to revisit. If you are a teacher, I think that you'll find this to be an important work for your professional growth. At face value, here are the three main points that I have thought most about since completing this:

1. As I already listed, people are naturally curious. I like this idea, and I must remember it as I teach. Am I creating problems that challenge students to think and wrestle with in class, problems that are still within their reach for success? Reducing the amount of other work to focus on more of this kind of work is something that I want to do. This includes offering more opportunities for students to play with language and words. Sometimes, I forget about this as I try to meet content standards.

2. Memorization is important, as it provides the building blocks for critical thinking. The author is not suggesting long lists of information to remember. However, in order for our brains to conquer a problem, basic materials are needed. This could be definitions, word parts, poetry, multiplication tables, etc. Modern teaching often belittles memorizing as outdated pedagogy, but when students do not know the times tables or what the definition of an allusion is, the critical thinking engagement is crippled.

3. The effectiveness of "multiple intelligences" is over-emphasized in education. According to Wellingham, educators put too much stock in this, as there does not seem to be different intelligences, rather strengths and talents. We do students a disservice when we tell them that they are smart in some area, even if they are not the same. His suggestion is that we focus on varying the lessons (sometimes visual, using music, acting, etc.) rather than on each student. This is the area that teachers will squirm and protest the most. Multiple intelligences are the sacred cows of education. If you don't believe me, as a teacher you know about them. Their eyes will light up as they tell you about how they had students act out what a commas does or sing about a Picasso painting.

Why Don't Students Like School? is the perfect primer for educators to get a peek into the complex and deep world of brain research. I still won't use "brain research shows..." in my next conversation, but I found this book a good first step in understanding how it relates to education.

I am a teacher. A colleague recommended this book and started a book club for us to discuss it. Our district admins have long been 'believers' of 'brain science' but much of what they purport can't be supported by data or it has since been shown to be one person's bright idea that isn't accurate. Yet they still push it on us to drive our lesson planning (most of these people have little or no experience as classroom teachers). They seem to have some Hollywood-ized version of what a classroom should be. My hope is that they would reconsider their approach if they had a better understanding of 'real' brain science.

First, I have to say the title is misleading. At no point does the author ever explain why students don't like school. He leaves it up to the reader to extrapolate that from the information given. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter why they don't like school since that doesn't seem to be the goal of the book anyway. The goal seems to be to give teachers an understanding of how we learn, some insight into our motivations behind learning and the limitations to learning something new in hopes that, when designing lessons and activities, we can address these issues.

This book explains how our brains learn and why in language that's easy to understand even for those without a science background. The author only includes information that can be supported by LOTS of data (as a scientist, this is important to me). He gives many examples to illustrate his points. It saves a lot of time to have an expert in the field separate the good from the rest. He also makes recommendations for further reading on topics that he divides into 'technical' and 'less technical' with a few notes on what the paper/article is about.

Those of us who spend day after day in the classroom actually do know something about our profession. (We do seem to have the one profession where everyone seems to feel that since they spent time in school, they must understand all aspects of our jobs and be able to weigh in on how we should be doing them.) We know that some of the things others want us to do in the classroom are unrealistic. Students are unable to 'think like.....' (insert profession here). People in professions have spent years in school learning background knowledge (which students don't have) and years of experience working with and integrating that knowledge. To expect students to just be able to leap-frog over all of that hard work if only the classroom teachers could design FUN lessons that 'trick' them into learning is just unrealistic.

That's not to say that we don't have lessons where students play games, watch movies or engage in other activities that help them to remember background knowledge and integrate it by extrapolating what we've been doing in class to other problems. But it's not an instantaneous process - it takes a lot of practice and yes, some rote memory. The best days for us are when (usually weeks into a topic/unit) students are able to apply what we've been working on/with to new problems, remember how this might apply to previous topics or ask questions that show they're using the information they learned in class to apply it to new ideas. Asking students to learn a new topic through 'project-based learning' is leaving them to flail around without the proper tools and does not mimic work life for professionals in any field. I know I'm going to anger some people here and get responses that they successfully run project-based learning programs. I say good for them but I maintain that this is not appropriate for all students.

I recommend this book to anyone (educator or not) who would like to better understand how human beings learn.

The best way to create marketable texts in the field of education is to rally against things that offend no one, but nevertheless complain about something - typically curriculum. I read this text while at Graduate School at Harvard and while Willingham has written a few quality articles that have been published in journals, this book is a huge embarrassment to his academic credentials that he can never recover from even if he renounces this piece of trash. This is what happens when people misapply the lens of their field on one small facet of an outside concern and ignore everything else. The reason students don't like school is because it is a prison. Everything else is trivial in relation to that fact. This is quite possibly the worst excuse for a scientific book I have ever seen from someone not peddling a religious agenda. The fact that so many people have embraced this only reveals the degree of willed ignorance the masses hold about the lives of children and how desperately they want to believe that schools aren't the miserable places they truly are for kids. Manufacturing trivial components about school might make adults feel better about sending children to these places, but anyone with even a sliver of a soul knows this is amateurishly constructed deception. If Willingham were alive in the 19th Century, he would have concluded that slaves didn't like slavery because of the repetitive nature of the work and that they would be much happier if labor were more varied. Undoubtedly, all of the same people who applaud his work now would have applauded it then too. I don't know which offends me more - this atrocious excuse for a text or the people who celebrate it.

Daniel T. Willingham is Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. Much of his research deals with how students learn, and for a long time I have wanted to read his book Why Don't Students Like School? (WDSLS?) Most of my exposure to Willingham's work has been through Valerie Strauss's education column in the Washington Post and his own website. I have especially enjoyed reading his findings regarding learning styles--if they do exist, we have no reason to believe paying attention to them will help a student learn better, but my enjoyment may result from confirmation bias.

Needless to say, I looked forward to getting into WDSLS? and was pleased to find a copy in my local library. My pleasure faded, however, after reading deeply into the book. The book's biggest flaw is that it doesn't answer the question the title poses. A better title for the book would have been How Might Teachers Make School More Palatable for Students? Willingham never directly addresses why students don't like school, but because of the information he does provide, one can fathom that he believes students don't like school because for most students, the material the teacher presents is either inadequate, too difficult, or too easy. To remedy this situation, Willingham has written a book for teachers about what they can do to get students to be more successful in their classrooms, as if success alone will make kids like school.

How do we get students to become better (critical) thinkers? We make sure they have problems to solve, give them more knowledge, and respect the limits of their abilities. How do we make students better readers? We give them more knowledge. How do we improve students' memory? We give them more knowledge. How do we give students more knowledge? We tell them meaningful stories. What if what we want students to know isn't meaningful? Then we introduce mnemonics. How can we get students to deepen their understanding of a subject? We can offer many examples and ask students to compare them, we can offer assignments that demand deep understanding, and we can make our desires for deep understanding realistic. How do we help students get really good at something and help them think like experts? Practice, practice, practice. (Although, they're not ready to think like experts--they're not ready to create knowledge, so don't ask them to). And we must make them believe that hard work leads to a high intelligence, that a high intelligence is not something you are born with, that like anything else intelligence can be improved.

Had Willingham just focused on writing a book about how teachers can work within the current educational system to help students deepen their academic knowledge and increase their academic skills, then this would be an adequate book. It offers some good suggestions: knowledge is important, knowledge and skill development only come about through practice, stories are important, teaching students that I Q can be improved is important, and learning styles may not be an important thing to fret about. However, all of this information was available to teachers before this book was published, so there isn't anything new here and the book's value should be questioned.

Nonetheless, Willingham's title suggests Willingham is not just writing a guide merely to help teachers make school a little more tolerable for students. He is supposed to tell us why students dislike school--and, we would hope, how to create a school students like. Willingham suggests that if all students were successful in school, then more students would like school. Unfortunately, I've seen a good number of unhappy students who were quite successful, so I don't find Willingham's thesis compelling. (Willingham also fails to offer any evidence that he might be on the right track.)

In Chapter Six of his book, Willingham tells us that one difference between experts and novices is that experts look at the deep structure of a problem, while novices look at the surface structure of a problem. Also, experts create new knowledge. I've already stated that Willingham's book does not offer any new knowledge, but what's worse is that Willingham merely explores the surface structure of school. He does not look at the deep structure of the system itself. Willingham's book is the work of a novice. He does not investigate the possibility that students don't like school because the entire system is flawed. (This is much more likely than Willingham's idea that if teachers just tweak their approaches then all students would be floating around schools blissfully.) The structure of the entire system is something an expert would and should look at. An expert should look at the fact that students are told what to do and when to do it and not given much control over what they study and when they study it. They should look at how the punishments and rewards that we call grades degrade the natural curiosity that all students enter school with. They should look at a lot more than Willingham looks at.

As I've stated, Willingham's book makes a decent resource for teachers and parents who want to learn or who need reminding about how best to help their students and/or children. It is also a good resource for better understanding how a student's mind works. For these reasons it might be worth a look. However, if you think WDSLS? will help you create a school students like, you're looking in the wrong place. Other writers like John Holt, Carol Black, and even Alfie Kohn do a much better job in this area.

"Lack of space in working memory is a fundamental bottleneck of human cognition." "If a genie comes out of a lamp and offers you one way to improve your mind, ask for more working memory capacity." "To a surprising degree, scoring well on a working-memory test predicts scoring well on a reasoning test, and a poor working-memory score predicts a poor reasoning score."

"The first way to cheat the limited size of your working memory is through factual knowledge." "Thinking well requires knowing facts" because "background knowledge allows chunking, which makes more room in working memory, which makes it easier to relate ideas, and therefore to comprehend," as well as to retain information and reason about it. But "chunking works only when you have applicable factual knowledge in long-term memory."

Hence we must disagree with the saying that "imagination is more important than knowledge" or calls to "teach students skills such as analysis or synthesis in the absence of factual knowledge."

Better maxims are: "The Devil is not wise because he’s the Devil. The Devil is wise because he’s old." Or: "The best geologist is the one who has seen the most rocks."

"Memory is the cognitive process of first resort." "Much of the time when we see someone apparently engaged in logical thinking, he or she is actually engaged in memory retrieval."

But: "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." "Memory is the residue of thought." "How can we get students to remember something? The answer from cognitive science is straightforward: get them to think about what it means."

"A striking example of an assignment that didn’t work for this reason came from my nephew’s sixth-grade teacher. He was to draw a plot diagram of a book he had recently finished. The point of the plot diagram was to get him to think about the story elements and how they related to one another. The teacher’s goal, I believe, was to encourage her students to think of novels as having structure, but the teacher thought that it would be useful to integrate art into this project, so she asked her students to draw pictures to represent the plot elements. That meant that my nephew thought very little about the relation between different plot elements and a great deal about how to draw a good castle. My daughter had completed a similar assignment some years earlier, but her teacher had asked students to use words or phrases rather than pictures. I think that assignment more effectively fulfilled the intended goal because my daughter thought more about how ideas in the book were related."

This example also illustrates another way in which "the expert mind has another edge over the minds of the rest of us": "It’s not just that there is a lot of information in an expert’s long-term memory; it’s also that the information in that memory is organized differently from the information in a novice’s long-term memory. Experts don’t think in terms of surface features, as novices do; they think in terms of functions, or deep structure."

So we must not learn things as loose facts, but in terms of their functional role and relations to other things. "That’s why experts are able to ignore unimportant details and home in on useful information; thinking functionally makes it obvious what’s important. That’s also why they show good transfer to new problems. New problems differ in surface structure, but experts recognize the deep, abstract structure."

One way to get across such deeper, functional understanding of an idea is to embed it in a kind of "story." "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." "Structure your lessons the way stories are structured, using the four Cs: causality, conflict, complications, and character."

"Stories are easy to remember. There are at least two contributing factors here. Because comprehending stories requires lots of medium-difficulty inferences, you must think about the story’s meaning throughout. ... Thinking about meaning is excellent for memory because it is usually meaning that you want to remember. Your memory for stories is also aided by their causal structure. If you remember one part of the plot, it’s a good guess that the next thing that happened was caused by what you remember."

"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." "Spending a lot of time clarifying the conflict follows a formula for storytelling from, of all places, Hollywood." "Being very clear about the conflict ... yields a natural progression for topics. In a movie, trying to resolve a conflict leads to new complications. That’s often true of school material too."

In fact, expert reasoning and problem solving often have just such a story structure: "one thing they do is talk to themselves"; they "generate hypotheses, and so test their own understanding and think through the implications of possible solutions in progress. Talking to yourself demands working memory, however, so novices are much less likely to do it. If they do talk to themselves, what they say is predictably more shallow than what experts say. They restate the problem, or they try to map the problem to a familiar formula. When novices talk to themselves they narrate what they are doing, and what they say does not have the beneficial self-testing properties that expert talk has." In short, they are regurgitating loose facts rather than crafting a story.

In a pleasant tone, with lots of friendly examples and anecdotes, Daniel T. Willingham gets to the root of a teaching dilemma: how to convey information in a way that is meaningful to the student.

According to Willingham, thinking is "slow, effortful and uncertain." Apparently that explains why we often avoid doing it. And kids avoid doing it even more.

If we're not thinking, then what are we doing?

We're relying on memory to guide us through even the simplest tasks. It's what we mean when we say we're on "autopilot". Willingham uses the example of making spaghetti to illustrate his point: we don't peruse recipes and calculate nutrition stats, we just make spaghetti. The way we always do. Which might be boiling noodles and opening a jar of Ragu. To ponder, ruminate, calculate and cogitate on everything, all the time, would simply be too exhausting.

The good news is that we're naturally curious. The bad news is that curiosity has a short lifespan. Make a solution too difficult and we become frustrated. Make it too easy and we become bored.

What's a teacher to do?

Willingham offers suggestions like "begin with the end in mind" when planning lessons (what do you want your students to know?), pick your "puzzles" carefully (showy demos make classroom magic, but will the student remember or care about underlying principles?), change it up (short attention spans love it) and take notes (not the students, you, on what worked and what didn't).

Another premise is that "students come to understand new ideas by relating them to old ideas. If their knowledge is shallow, the process stops there." (p.94). In a lecture Willingham recently gave, he suggested that lots of shallow knowledge isn't necessarily bad. One needs to know a little about a lot of things to read the Wall Street Journal or NY Times, for example. (Lord knows, I wouldn't have passed the SAT without "Trivial Pursuit" and the card game "Masterpiece"!!)

Perhaps my favorite Willingham nugget is the one that offers the most hope: "Intelligence can be changed through sustained hard work."(p. 211). In other words, effort does make a difference.

How, teachers might ask, can I get my students to work? Willingham suggests that teachers make thoughtful decisions about what students need and then offer them opportunities for practice. Often.

Willingham has written a very clear account of his perspective from cognitive
science, as well as some of his views and suggestions. Given that the overall reasons why students do not like school are somewhat intractable, the question becomes, for us as teachers and parents, what can we understand about this, and how can our work improve student understanding and progress through school? He supplies a very well-organized book for the intended audience: Focused and systematic, and yet, at the same time, appealing to us via anecdotes and literary devices (such as typical types of puzzles that many people can relate to) to avoid making his discussion too dry and authoritative. I have encountered much of what he discussed in previous reading, but the book has clear and helpful suggestions, extremely well-organized, and is a quick read, so I did not find the review to be boring or unhelpful. I feel this is a worthwhile book for the intended audience, despite skirting the edge of a pedestrian presentation. He is also careful to support his views with references to scientific work, including articles and books of possible interest.

After making my way through two teacher ed programs, I've heard a lot of the following:

"Your job as the teacher is to be a facilitator of learning. Be 'the guide on the side' instead of 'the sage of the stage!'"

"Don't write in red pen; it hurts students' feelings."

"If a student isn't responding to your writing instruction, it's probably because he's a kinesthetic learner. Have him make up a dance for every comma, and he'll be just fine!"

"Treat students like the experts they already are!"

"If students are bored by the content matter you teach, you're not doing enough to engage them. Try making it more relevant to their lives!"

"Lectures are bad! Students aren't empty vessels!"

"Your students aren't your students. They are your co-teachers!"

"Who cares if kids aren't reading 'the classics!?' They engage in all sorts of literacies that are just as valuable, like MySpace!"

Now, there might be some truth to some of these (not the red pen one; come on!!). But for any teacher who has ever been skeptical of statements like these, you will love this book.

The author is a cognitive scientist writing to teachers of all subjects. His goal is to help teachers understand how the brain works so they can teach more effectively. What his research suggests might seem obvious to people who haven't been indoctrinated by the statements above. Learning is hard, it takes effort, it's not always fun, it requires background knowledge and it takes tons of practice. Oh, and we all basically learn the same way - sorry to the kid who likes to dance to the commas.

At the same time, the author, who is also a professor, is hardly some dry, crinkly, old, monotone man at a podium. He's funny, he's engaging, he shares lots of anecdotes, he's incredibly clear when articulating difficult concepts. Basically, he strikes me as the ideal teacher. I want to be more like him! This is an excellent book; I learned so much and laughed a lot along the way.

This book is a easy to read explanation of some of the main obstacles that students face when trying to learn new material and what teachers can do to help them overcome them. Willingham is cognitive psychologist that has been working in the education field for a long time and he is very familiar with a lot of what passes for research in this field and the many fads that have come and gone in education that promised to improve student performance. His book is not one of those types. As a matter of fact much of his book my seem a little dry and common sense but what it is psychological principles that have been proven to work not in education but in life in general. Things such as practice and repetition being the best way to learn something that you would never hear in some of the other "research based" educational books.
I have to say that I was also a little surprised in that I was expecting this book to be a refutation of a lot of the stuff that I had learned in my other educational classes. But what I actually found was that it was actually suggesting some of the same things but in a much clearer and less convoluted way. That seems to be the problem with a lot of educational literature the authors seem very self conscious about what they are saying and feel the need to use a bunch of confusing jargon and site all these studies to prove that what they are saying is relevant. That is not the case at all with this book and the result is something that is actually readable that doesn't require to buy some new educational product or start calling something that you have been doing for a long time by a different name. I highly recommend this book.