Plus, I found a great summary by this Amazon reviewer:
Dan Willingham's book Why Don't Students Like School presents a whole bunch of these experimental results. Together, they challenge the notions that:
1. Students need to learn inquiry, argumentation, and higher-level thinking *rather than* tons of facts.
2. Integrating art into other subjects enhances learning; so does integrating computer technology.
3. Children learn best through self-guided discovery.
4. Drill is kill. Multiple strategies in a given lesson are better than a single strategy practiced multiple times.
5. Students learn best when constructing their own knowledge.
6. The best way to prepare students to become scientists and mathematicians is to teach them to solve problems the way scientists and mathematicians do.
The empirical data that Willingham cites show that, in fact:
1. Factual knowledge, lots of it, is a prerequisite to higher-level thinking.
2. Students are most likely to remember those aspects of a lesson that they end up thinking about the most. Corollary: Incorporating art or computer technology into another subject may sometimes cause students to think about the art or the technology more than the lesson content, such that they don't retain the latter.
3. Discovery learning should be reserved for environments where feedback about faulty strategies is immediate: "If students are left to explore ideas on their own," Willingham writes, they may "remember incorrect 'discoveries' as much as they will remember the correct ones."
4. In Willingham's words, "it is virtually impossible to become proficient at a mental task," or master underlying, abstract concepts, "without extended practice."
5. Unlike experts in a field, "students are ready to comprehend but not create knowledge."
6. Novices don't become experts by behaving like experts do. "Cognition early in training," Willingham writes, "is fundamentally different from cognition late in training."
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