Styles, Abilities and Multiple Intelligences

Research by cognitive scientists into the differences among students can shed light on this question, but before I get into that research, it is important to clarify whether I’m talking about differences in cognitive abilities or differences in cognitive styles. The definition of cognitive ability is straightforward: it means capacity for or success in certain types of thought. If I say that Sarah has a lot of ability in math, you know I mean she tends to learn new mathematical concepts quickly. In contrast to abilities, cognitive styles are biases or tendencies to think in a particular way, for example to think sequentially (of one thing at a time) or holistically (of all of the parts simultaneously). Abilities and styles differ in a few important ways. Abilities are how we deal with content (for example, math or language arts) and they reflect the level (that is, the quantity) of what we know and can do. Styles are how we prefer to think and learn.We consider having more ability as being better than having less ability, but we do not consider one style as better than any other style. One style might be more effective for a particular problem, but all styles are equally useful overall, by definition.

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Everyone can appreciate that students differ from one another.What can (or should) teachers do about that? One would hope we could use those differences to improve instruction.Two basic methods have been suggested. One approach is based on differences in cognitive style—that is, if one matches the method of instruction to the preferred cognitive style of the child, learning will be easier. Unfortunately, no one has described a set of styles for which there is good evidence. 

The second way that teachers might take advantage of differences among students is rooted in differences in abilities. If a student is lacking in one cognitive ability, the hope would be that she could use a cognitive strength to make up for, or at least bolster, the cognitive weakness. Unfortunately, there is good evidence that this sort of substitution is not possible.To be clear, it’s the substitution idea that is wrong; students definitely do differ in their cognitive abilities (although the description in Gardner’s multiple intelligences theory is widely regarded as less accurate than other descriptions).

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I admit I felt like a bit of a Grinch as I wrote this chapter, as though I had a scowl on my face as I typed “wrong, wrong, wrong” about the optimistic ideas others have offered regarding student differences. As I stated at the start of the chapter, I am not saying that teachers should not differentiate instruction. I hope and expect that they will. But when they do so, they should know that scientists cannot offer any help. It would be wonderful if scientists had identified categories of students along with varieties of instruction best suited to each category, but after a great deal of effort, they have not found such types, and I, like many others, suspect they don’t exist. I would advise teachers to treat students differently on the basis of the teacher’s experience with each student and to remain alert for what works.When differentiating among students, craft knowledge trumps science.

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Learning-style theories don’t help much when applied to students, but I think they are useful when applied to content.Take the visual-auditory-kinesthetic distinction. You might want students to experience material in one or another modality depending on what you want them to get out of the lesson; a diagram of Fort Knox should be seen, the national anthem of Turkmenistan should be heard, and the cheche turban (used by Saharan tribes to protect themselves against sun and wind) should be worn. The distinctions in Table 1 provide a number of interesting ways to think about lesson plans: Do you want students to think deductively during a lesson, or to free-associate creatively? Should they focus on similarities among concepts they encounter, or should they focus on the details that differentiate those concepts? Table 1 may help you to focus on what you hope your students will learn from a lesson and how to help them get there.

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Every teacher knows that change during a lesson invigorates students and refocuses their attention. If the teacher has been doing a lot of talking, something visual (a video or a map) offers a welcome change.Table 1 provides a number of ways to think about change during the course of a lesson. If the students’ work has demanded a lot of logical, deductive thinking, perhaps an exercise that calls for broad, associative thinking is in order. If their work has required many rapid responses, perhaps they should do another task that calls for thoughtful, measured responses. Rather than individualizing the required mental processes for each student, give all of your students practice in all of these processes, and view the transitions as an opportunity for each student to start fresh and refocus his or her mental energies.


If you have felt nagging guilt that you have not evaluated each of your students to assess their cognitive style, or if you think you know what their styles are and have not adjusted your teaching to them—don’t worry about it.There is no reason to think that doing so will help. And if you were thinking of buying a book or inviting someone in for a professional development session on one of these topics, I advise you to save your money. 

If “cognitive styles” and “multiple intelligences” are not helpful ways to characterize how children differ, what’s a better way? Why do some children seem to breeze through mathematics while others struggle? Why do some children love history, or geography? The importance of background knowledge has come up again and again in this book. In Chapter One I argued that background knowledge is an important determinant of what we find interesting; for example, problems or puzzles that seem difficult but not impossible pique our interest. In Chapter Two I explained that background knowledge is an important determinant of much of our success in school. Cognitive processes (such as analyzing, synthesizing, and critiquing) cannot operate alone.They need background knowledge to make them work. 

Still, background knowledge is not the only difference between students.There is something to the idea that some students are simply really clever.

READ MORE:

Why Is It Hard to Make Students Think Like Experts?

Why Is It So Hard for Students to Understand Abstract Ideas?

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

Factual knowledge must precede skill
Why Don't Students Like School?

Why Is It Hard to Make Students Think Like Experts?

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.

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This generalization—that experts have abstract knowledge of problem types but novices do not—seems to be true of teachers too.When confronted with a classroom management problem, novice teachers typically jump right into trying to solve the problem, but experts first seek to define the problem, gathering more information if necessary. Thus expert teachers have knowledge of different types of classroom management problems. Not surprisingly, expert teachers more often solve these problems in ways that address root causes and not just the behavioral incident.

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...that transfer is so difficult because novices tend to focus on surface features and are not very good at seeing the abstract, functional relationships among problems that are key to solving them. Well, that is what experts are great at. They have representations of problems and situations in their long-term memories, and those representations are abstract.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. That’s also why their judgments usually are sensible, even if they are not quite right.

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The second way to get around the limited size of working memory is to practice procedures so many times that they become automatic.That way the procedures don’t take space in working memory.Tie your shoes a few hundred times and you no longer need to think about it; your fingers just fly through the routine without any direction from thought processes that would crowd working memory. Experts have automatized many of the routine, frequently used procedures that early in their training required careful thought. Expert bridge players can count the points in a hand without thinking about it. Expert surgeons can tie sutures automatically. Expert teachers have routines with which they begin and end class, call for attention, deal with typical disruptions, and so on. It’s interesting to note that novice teachers often script their lessons, planning exactly what they will say. Expert teachers typically do not.They plan different ways that they will discuss or demonstrate a concept, but they don’t write out scripts, which suggests that the process of translating abstract ideas into words that their students can understand has become automatic.

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Over the last fifty years there have been a few instances in which a researcher has gained access to a good number (ten or more) of prominent scientists, who have agreed to be interviewed at length, take personality and intelligence tests, and so forth.The researcher has then looked for similarities in the backgrounds, interests, and abilities of these great men and women of science.The results of these studies are fairly consistent in one surprising finding.The great minds of science were not distinguished as being exceptionally brilliant, as measured by standard IQ tests; they were very smart, to be sure, but not the standouts that their stature in their fields might suggest.What was singular was their capacity for sustained work. Great scientists are almost always workaholics. Each of us knows his or her limit; at some point we need to stop working and watch a stupid television program, read People magazine, or something similar. Great scientists have incredible persistence, and their threshold for mental exhaustion is very high

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Experts are not simply better at thinking in their chosen field than novices are; experts actually think in ways that are qualitatively different.

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They have worked in their field for years, and the knowledge and experience they have accumulated enables them to think in ways that are not open to the rest of us. Thus, trying to get your students to think like them is not a realistic goal.Your reaction may well be, “Well, sure. I never really expected that my students are going to win the Nobel Prize! I just want them to understand some science.” That’s a worthy goal, and it is very different from the goal of students thinking like scientists.

Styles, Abilities and Multiple Intelligences

Why Is It Hard to Make Students Think Like Experts?

Why Is It So Hard for Students to Understand Abstract Ideas?

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

Factual knowledge must precede skill

Why Don't Students Like School?

Why Is It So Hard for Students to Understand Abstract Ideas?

We understand new things in the context of things we already know, and most of what we know is concrete.

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Thus it is difficult to comprehend abstract ideas, and difficult to apply them in new situations.The surest way to help students understand an abstraction is to expose them to many different versions of the abstraction—that is, to have them solve area calculation problems about tabletops, soccer fields, envelopes, doors, and so on.

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It’s often difficult for students to understand new ideas, especially ones that are really novel, meaning they aren’t related to other things they have already learned. What do cognitive scientists know about how students understand things? 

The answer is that they understand new ideas (things they don’t know) by relating them to old ideas (things they do know). That sounds fairly straightforward. It’s a little like the process you go through when you encounter an unfamiliar word. If you don’t know, for example, what ab ovo means, you look it up in a dictionary. There you see the definition “from the beginning.” You know those words, so now you have a good idea of what ab ovo means.* 

The fact that we understand new ideas by relating them to things we already know helps us understand some principles that are familiar to every teacher. One principle is the usefulness of analogies; they help us understand something new by relating it to something we already know about.

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Every new idea must build on ideas that the student already knows.To get a student to understand, a teacher (or a parent or book or television program) must ensure that the right ideas from the student’s long-term memory are pulled up and put into working memory. In addition, the right features of these memories must be attended to, that is, compared or combined or somehow manipulated. For me to help you understand the difference between ordinal and interval measurement, it’s not enough for me to say, “Think of a thermometer and think of a horse race.” Doing so will get those concepts into working memory, but I also have to make sure they are compared in the right way.

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We all know, however, that it’s not really this simple.When we give students one explanation and one set of examples, do they understand? Usually not.

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To dig deeper into what helps students understand, we need to address these two issues. First, even when students “understand,” there are really degrees of comprehension. One student’s understanding can be shallow while another’s is deep. Second, even if students understand in the classroom, this knowledge may not transfer well to the world outside the classroom.That is, when students see a new version of what is at heart an old problem, they may think they are stumped, even though they recently solved the same problem.They don’t know that they know the answer! In the next two sections I elaborate on each issue, that is, on shallow knowledge and on lack of transfer.

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Every teacher has had the following experience:You ask a student a question (in class or perhaps on a test), and the student responds using the exact words you used when you explained the idea or with the exact words from the textbook. Although his answer is certainly correct, you can’t help but wonder whether the student has simply memorized the definition by rote and doesn’t understand what he’s saying.

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Much more common than rote knowledge is what I call shallow knowledge, meaning that students have some understanding of the material but their understanding is limited.We’ve said that students come to understand new ideas by relating them to old ideas. If their knowledge is shallow, the process stops there.Their knowledge is tied to the analogy or explanation that has been provided.They can understand the concept only in the context that was provided. For example, you know that “Seize the day!” means “Enjoy the moment without worrying about the future,” and you remember that the teacher said that “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” (from Herrick’s To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time) is an example of this sentiment. But you don’t know much more. If the teacher provided a new poem, you would be hard put to say whether it was in the style of a Cavalier poet. 

We can contrast shallow knowledge with deep knowledge. A student with deep knowledge knows more about the subject, and the pieces of knowledge are more richly interconnected.The student understands not just the parts but also the whole. This understanding allows the student to apply the knowledge in many different contexts, to talk about it in different ways, to imagine how the system as a whole would change if one part of it changed, and so forth. A student with deep knowledge of Cavalier poetry would be able to recognize elements of Cavalier ideals in other literatures, such as ancient Chinese poetry, even though the two forms seem very different on the surface. In addition, the student would be able to consider what-if questions, such as “What might Cavalier poetry have been like if the political situation in England had changed?” They can think through this sort of question because the pieces of their knowledge are so densely interconnected. They are interrelated like the parts of a machine, and the what-if question suggests the replacement of one part with another. Students with deep knowledge can predict how the machine would operate if one part were to be changed. 

Obviously teachers want their students to have deep knowledge, and most teachers try to instill it.Why then would students end up with shallow knowledge? One obvious reason is that a student just might not be paying attention to the lesson.The mention of “rosebuds” makes a student think about the time she fell off her Razor Scooter into the neighbor’s rose bush, and the rest of the poem is lost on her.There are other, less obvious reasons that students might end up with shallow knowledge. 

Here’s one way to think about it. Suppose you plan to introduce the idea of government to a first-grade class.The main point you want students to understand is that people living or working together set up rules to make things easier for everyone. You will use two familiar examples—the classroom and students’ homes—and then introduce the idea that there are other rules that larger groups of people agree to live by. Your plan is to ask your students to list some of the rules of the classroom and consider why each rule exists.Then you’ll ask them to list some rules their families have at home and consider why those rules exist. Finally, you’ll ask them to name some rules that exist outside of their families and classroom, which you know will take a lot more prompting.You hope your students will see that the rules for each group of people—family, classroom, and larger community—serve similar functions.

A student with rote knowledge might later report,“Government is like a classroom because both have rules.”The student has no understanding of what properties the two groups have in common.The student with shallow knowledge understands that a government is like a classroom because both groups are a community of people who need to agree on a set of rules in order for things to run smoothly and to be safe.The student understands the parallel but can’t go beyond it. So for example, if asked,“How is government different from our school?” the student would be stumped. A student with deep knowledge would be able to answer that question, and might successfully extend the analogy to consider other groups of people who might need to form rules, for example, his group of friends playing pickup basketball.

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So our minds assume that new things we read (or hear) will be related to what we’ve just read (or heard).This fact makes understanding faster and smoother. Unfortunately, it also makes it harder to see the deep structure of problems.That’s because our cognitive system is always struggling to make sense of what we’re reading or hearing, to find relevant background knowledge that will help us interpret the words, phrases, and sentences. But the background knowledge that seems applicable almost always concerns the surface structure.



READ MORE:
Styles, Abilities and Multiple Intelligences

Why Is It Hard to Make Students Think Like Experts?

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

Factual knowledge must precede skill


Why Don't Students Like School?

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

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.

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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. 

The Importance of Memory  

Every teacher has had the following experience: you teach what you think is a terrific lesson, full of lively examples, deep content, engaging problems to solve, and a clear message, but the next day students remember nothing of it except a joke you told and an off-the-subject aside about your family—or worse, when you say, struggling to keep your voice calm, “The point of yesterday’s lesson was that one plus one equals two,” they look at you incredulously and say, “One plus one equals two?” Obviously, if the message of Chapter Two is “background knowledge matters,” then we must closely consider how we can make sure that students acquire this background knowledge. So why do students remember some things and forget other things? Let’s start by considering why you fail to remember something. Suppose I said to you, “Can you summarize the last professional development seminar you attended?” Let’s further suppose that you brightly answer, “Nope, I sure can’t.”Why don’t you remember? 

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If you don’t pay attention to something, you can’t learn it! You won’t remember much of the seminar if you were thinking about something else.

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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.

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What Good Teachers Have In Common

Trying to make the material relevant to students’ interests doesn’t work. As I noted in Chapter One, content is seldom the decisive factor in whether or not our interest is maintained. For example, I love cognitive psychology, so you might think, “Well, to get Willingham to pay attention to this math problem, we’ll wrap it up in a cognitive psychology example.” But Willingham is quite capable of being bored by cognitive psychology, as has been proved repeatedly at professional conferences I’ve attended. Another problem with trying to use content to engage students is that it’s sometimes very difficult to do and the whole enterprise comes off as artificial. How would a math instructor make algebra relevant to my sixteen-year-old daughter? With a “real-world” example using cell phone minutes? I just finished pointing out that any material has different aspects of meaning. If the instructor used a math problem with cell phone minutes, isn’t there some chance that my daughter would think about cell phones rather than about the problem? And that thoughts about cell phones would lead to thoughts about the text message she received earlier, which would remind her to change her picture on her Facebook profile, which would make her think about the zit she has on her nose . . . ? So if content won’t do it, how about style? 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. Let me give a few examples from my own experience with fellow college-level teachers who are consistently able to get students to think about meaning.

Teacher A is the comedian. She tells jokes frequently. She never misses an opportunity to use a silly example. Teacher B is the den mother. She is very caring, very directive, and almost patronizing, but so warm that she gets away with it. Students call her “Mom” behind her back. Teacher C is the storyteller. He illustrates almost everything with a story from his life. Class is slow paced and low key, and he is personally quiet and unassuming. Teacher D is the showman. If he could set off fireworks inside, he would do it. The material he teaches does not lend itself easily to demonstrations, but he puts a good deal of time and energy into thinking up interesting applications, many of them involving devices he’s made at home. 

Each of these teachers is one to whom students refer as making boring material interesting, and each is able to get students to think about meaning. Each style works well for the person using it, although obviously not everyone would feel comfortable taking on some of these styles. It’s a question of personality. 

Style is what the students notice, but it is only a part of what makes these teachers so effective. College professors typically get written student evaluations of their teaching at the end of every course. Most schools have a form for students to fill out that includes such items as “The professor was respectful of student opinions,” “The professor was an effective discussion leader,” and so on, and students indicate whether or not they agree with each statement. Researchers have examined these sorts of surveys to figure out which professors get good ratings and why. One of the interesting findings is that most of the items are redundant. A two-item survey would be almost as useful as a thirty-item survey, because all of the questions really boil down to two: Does the professor seem like a nice person, and is the class well organized?  Although they don’t realize they are doing so, students treat each of the thirty items as variants of one of these two questions.

Although K-12 students don’t complete questionnaires about their teachers, we know that more or less the same thing is true for them.The emotional bond between students and teacher—for better or worse—accounts for whether students learn.The brilliantly well-organized teacher whom fourth graders see as mean will not be very effective. But the funny teacher, or the gentle storytelling teacher, whose lessons are poorly organized won’t be much good either. Effective teachers have both qualities. 

They are able to connect personally with students, and they organize the material in a way that makes it interesting and easy to understand.



READ MORE:

Styles, Abilities and Multiple Intelligences

Why Is It Hard to Make Students Think Like Experts?

Why Is It So Hard for Students to Understand Abstract Ideas?

Factual knowledge must precede skill

Why Don't Students Like School?

Factual knowledge must precede skill

I defined thinking as combining information in new ways.The information can come from long-term memory—facts you’ve memorized—or from the environment.

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Thinking well requires knowing facts, and that’s true not simply because you need something to think about.The very processes that teachers care about most—critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem solving—are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory (not just found in the environment).

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Critical thinking processes are tied to background knowledge. The conclusion from this work in cognitive science is straightforward: we must ensure that students acquire background knowledge parallel with practicing critical thinking skills.

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The phenomenon of tying together separate pieces of information from the environment is called chunking. The advantage is obvious: you can keep more stuff in working memory if it can be chunked.

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So factual knowledge in long-term memory allows chunking, and chunking increases space in working memory.

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A number of studies have shown that people understand what they read much better if they already have some background knowledge about the subject. Part of the reason is chunking.

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Background knowledge allows chunking, which makes more room in working memory, which makes it easier to relate ideas, and therefore to comprehend. 

Background knowledge also clarifies details that would otherwise be ambiguous and confusing.

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It’s worth noting that some observers believe that this phenomenon—that knowledge makes you a good reader—is a factor in the fourth-grade slump. If you’re unfamiliar with that term, it refers to the fact that students from underprivileged homes often read at grade level through the third grade, but then suddenly in the fourth grade they fall behind, and with each successive year they fall even farther behind.The interpretation is that reading instruction through third grade focuses mostly on decoding—figuring out how to sound out words using the printed symbols—so that’s what reading tests emphasize. By the time the fourth grade rolls around, most students are good decoders, so reading tests start to emphasize comprehension. As described here, comprehension depends on background knowledge, and that’s where kids from privileged homes have an edge.They come to school with a bigger vocabulary and more knowledge about the world than underprivileged kids. And because knowing things makes it easier to learn new things (as described in the next section), the gap between privileged and underprivileged kids widens.

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Books expose children to more facts and to a broader vocabulary than virtually any other activity, and persuasive data indicate that people who read for pleasure enjoy cognitive benefits throughout their lifetime. I don’t believe it is quite the case that any book is fine “as long as they’re reading.” Naturally, if a child has a history of resisting reading, I’d be happy if she picked up any book at all. But once she is over that hump, I’d start trying to nudge her toward books at the appropriate reading level. It’s rather obvious that a student doesn’t gain much from reading books several grades below her reading level. I’m all for reading for pleasure, but there are fun, fascinating books at every reading level, so why not encourage age-appropriate materials? It’s just as obvious that a too difficult book is a bad idea.The student won’t understand it and will just end up frustrated.The school librarian should be a tremendous resource and ally in helping children learn to love reading, and she is arguably the most important person in any school when it comes to reading.

Why Don't Students Like School?

Contrary to popular belief, the brain is not designed for thinking. It’s designed to save you from having to think, because the brain is actually not very good at thinking.Thinking is slow and unreliable. Nevertheless, people enjoy mental work if it is successful. People like to solve problems, but not to work on unsolvable problems. If schoolwork is always just a bit too difficult for a student, it should be no surprise that she doesn’t like school much.

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People are naturally curious, but we are not naturally good thinkers; unless the cognitive conditions are right, we will avoid thinking.

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The implication of this principle is that teachers should reconsider how they encourage their students to think, in order to maximize the likelihood that students will get the pleasurable rush that comes from successful thought.

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Shakespeare extolled our cognitive ability in Hamlet: “What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason!” Some three hundred years later, however, Henry Ford more cynically observed, “Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few people engage in it.”* They both had a point. Humans are good at certain types of reasoning, particularly in comparison to other animals, but we exercise those abilities infrequently. A cognitive scientist would add another observation: Humans don’t think very often because our brains are designed not for thought but for the avoidance of thought. Thinking is not only effortful, as Ford noted, it’s also slow and unreliable. 

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Your brain serves many purposes, and thinking is not the one it serves best.

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So far I’ve described two ways in which your brain is set up to save you from having to think. First, some of the most important functions (for example, vision and movement) don’t require thought: you don’t have to reason about what you see; you just immediately know what’s out in the world. Second, you are biased to use memory to guide your actions rather than to think. But your brain doesn’t leave it there; it is capable of changing in order to save you from having to think. If you repeat the same thought-demanding task again and again, it will eventually become automatic; your brain will change so that you can complete the task without thinking about it.


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Despite the fact that we’re not that good at it, we actually like to think.We are naturally curious, and we look for opportunities to engage in certain types of thought. But because thinking is so hard, the conditions have to be right for this curiosity to thrive, or we quit thinking rather readily.


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There is a sense of satisfaction, of fulfillment, in successful thinking. In the last ten years neuroscientists have discovered that there is overlap between the brain areas and chemicals that are important in learning and those that are important in the brain’s natural reward system. Many neuroscientists suspect that the two systems are related. Rats in a maze learn better when rewarded with cheese.When you solve a problem, your brain may reward itself with a small dose of dopamine, a naturally occurring chemical that is important to the brain’s pleasure system. Neuroscientists know that dopamine is important in both systems—learning and pleasure—but haven’t yet worked out the explicit tie between them. Even though the neurochemistry is not completely understood, it seems undeniable that people take pleasure in solving problems.

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Mental work appeals to us because it offers the opportunity for that pleasant feeling when it succeeds. But not all types of thinking are equally attractive. People choose to work crossword puzzles but not algebra problems.

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Thinking is slow, effortful, and uncertain. Nevertheless, people like to think—or more properly, we like to think if we judge that the mental work will pay off with the pleasurable feeling we get when we solve a problem. So there is no inconsistency in claiming that people avoid thought and in claiming that people are naturally curious—curiosity prompts people to explore new ideas and problems, but when we do, we quickly evaluate how much mental work it will take to solve the problem. If it’s too much or too little, we stop working on the problem if we can.

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So what’s the solution? Give the student easier work? You could, but of course you’d have to be careful not to make it so easy that the student would be bored. And anyway, wouldn’t it be better to boost the student’s ability a little bit? Instead of making the work easier, is it possible to make thinking easier?

In sum, successful thinking relies on four factors: information from the environment, facts in long-term memory, procedures in long-term memory, and the amount of space in working memory. If any one of these factors is inadequate, thinking will likely fail. 

Let me summarize what I've said in this chapter. People's minds are not especially well-suited to thinking; thinking is slow, effortful, and uncertain. For this reason, deliberate thinking does not guide people's behavior in most situations. Rather,  we rely on our memories, following courses of action that we have taken before. 

Nevertheless, we find successful thinking pleasurable. We like solving problems, understanding new ideas, and so forth. Thus, we will seek out opportunities to think, but we are selective in doing so; we choose problems that pose some challenge but that seem likely to be solvable, because these are the problems that lead to feelings of pleasure and satisfaction. For problems to be solved, the thinker needs adequate information from the environment, room in working memory, and the required facts and procedures in long-term memory.