Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What happens next is a podcast which
covers economics, finance, politics, and science. Today's episode is entitled Making Learning Easy.
Our guest today is Dan Willingham, who is professor of cognitive psychology at the University of
Virginia. He is the author of a new book entitled Out Smarcher Brain, Why Learning Is Hard and How
You Can Make It Easy. We're going to hear about how to be smarter about learning new material in
school and in life. There's much to cover, so buckle up. I make this podcast to learn and I
offer it free of charge. If you enjoy today's podcast, please subscribe from our website for
weekly emails so you can continue to enjoy this content. Let's begin with Dan's six-minute opening
remarks. Thanks very much for having me. Let me start by telling you how I got interested in people
regulating their own learning. I was really struck by the difference between pre-K and grade 12. Think
about a child in pre-K. Our expectations of their ability to regulate their own learning are
appropriately pretty close to zero. No parent ever says to their child when they come home like
your teacher called me and said you're really not trying to learn your colors. We think it's 100%
up to the teacher to create an environment where children are going to learn. But by the time
children are in grade 12, those expectations are actually very high. We expect children in grade
12 to sit and listen to a long, complicated lecture and really get something out of it. We think
nothing of sending them home with complicated readings. They're supposed to know how to commit
things to memory, to know whether or not they're prepared for a test. They have to plan their
schedule, deal with procrastination. So what was so striking to me is that no one's ever teaching them
how to do all of these tasks that I just mentioned. And we know that no one's teaching them from
surveys of college students. When you ask them, did anyone ever teach you to study in a typical survey
between 65 and 80% of them say no, no one ever said anything. And my hunch is that the ones who say yes
really means they were told a few study strategies. They weren't taught how to plan and how to deal
with procrastination and all the other things that I mentioned. So the first thing to notice is that
they don't use methods that are very effective. I mean, these students are in college. They're
clearly not using disastrous methods to regulate their own learning. But cognitive psychologists
have learned a great deal about more and less effective ways of accomplishing these tasks over
the last 40 years. And they're certainly not using the more effective methods that we know about.
The second thing that was really striking to me is that even though they have not all been told,
here's the way to do it. There's a fair amount of uniformity. And when you look at the methods that
they use, they all tend to gravitate towards methods that feel in the moment like they're working and
also aren't very difficult to execute. Now, that doesn't sound like bad poker on the part of students.
Like, why wouldn't you do something that feels like it's working and doesn't feel too difficult?
But in fact, that's not a great way to go. So here's the analogy that I draw on the book.
Suppose that you have a friend who's trying to get stronger. And one of their goals is to be able
to do a lot of pushups. So one day you go visit them while they're training and you find them
doing pushups on their knees. And you say, why if you want to be able to do a lot of pushups,
you should be doing regular pushups. In fact, it would be a whole lot better if you practice
the really difficult pushups, like the ones where you launch yourself off the floor and clap.
And your friend says, yeah, you know, a couple of people told me that. And I tried it, but I could
hardly do any of those. And the point here is I'm trying to do a lot of pushups. And look,
when I do them on my knees, I can do lots of pushups and I can do them really fast.
So when students are doing mental work and adults continue to use the same strategies,
when you're trying to regulate your own thought, most people do the mental equivalent of pushups
on their knees. They're not recognizing you do need to challenge yourself. And not everything
that feels difficult is going to bring benefit mentally. But the things that you bring the most
benefit are the things that are going to feel really difficult. So I'll give you one quick example.
And that would be what to do when you're reading new materials where you're trying to learn something
from what you're reading. The go to strategy for students and most adults is to read it with a
highlighter pen in hand and to highlight as you go. And that isn't very difficult. You're reading
it anyway and highlighting is not hard. And it feels like it's helping because you figure I'm
noting what's really important. And so later, I won't have to reread everything. I'll have the
important parts highlighted. The problem is when you're reading something on which you don't have a
lot of expertise, you don't know what's important and what's not important. And one of my favorite
studies, a bunch of researchers just went to a student bookstore and got like 10 copies of the
introduction to economics textbook, 10 copies of the introduction to psychology textbook. And they
compared what students had highlighted. And they found there was no correspondence across copies.
Everybody was highlighting something different. So that's just one example of this general principle
that doing things that feel like they're useful to you is not always that useful. And that's why
I titled the book about this out smart your brain. That's my six minutes.
My daughter, Hannah attended Horace Mann, which is one of the most academically challenging New
York City private schools. At a relatively early age, teachers started to give assignments that
were way beyond grade level. She effectively was assigned clapping pushups. Everything was over the
top. The readings and the essay assignments, the teachers had not taught my daughter how to write
an essay and she was overwhelmed. I tried to calm her down, helped her write an outline and
encourage her to go write her essay. The parent had to get involved. There's always a little
tension between parent and child. I'll tell you that from experience. Why not give assignments at
grade level with proper instruction instead of assigning clapping pushups?
I'm not sure I would want to stand behind that analogy. You certainly can go too far in terms of
challenge. I would say the parents shouldn't need to get involved most of the time. I mean,
the school should be providing instruction for the students to do whatever it is that they're
being asked to do. That's exactly what my point is. There's almost like a hidden curriculum running
in parallel to the visible curriculum that you just tell kids, okay, on Thursday, there's going
to be a quiz. Well, you're assuming that they know how to prepare for a quiz, but they probably
don't. You just need to provide instruction. The teachers of your children should not have left
them to fend for themselves. It's okay to give challenging work, but you have to provide instruction
so that students feel like they know how to do it. I took a statistics class with Professor Devaux
at the University of Pennsylvania my sophomore year, and I was assigned a project to do a statistical
regression to predict freshman student's grade point average. I used my fraternity's pledge class
as my sample. One of my survey questions asked, hours studied for a class. I remember asking one
of my best friends, how many hours they study, one to five hours, six to 10, 11 to 15, 16 to 20,
and he said, is that per year? And I said, no, it was per week. And he said, I guess one to five.
Now, this is an Ivy League school. National surveys show that studying has declined
since then materially. Why are so many kids doing pushups on their knees?
Well, doing pushups on your knees is better than nothing. A number of people have said this to me
when they're like, well, at least they're doing something. And I'm like, yeah, that wasn't really
the point. The point is really about what's the most efficient way to spend your time.
One of my favorite quotations is any analogy runs on three legs. There's always some point at which
it breaks down. What I think is most important to keep in mind is that the study strategies
that students use, like they could spend an equivalent amount of time studying and just
learn more and be more effective, or they could be equally effective and spend less time studying
if they use more efficient methods. I'm sure that study time in that small sample you had probably
did not come out to be terribly important in the regression because there are lots of things that
go into performance, not the least of which is what your preparation is going into the class,
which also contributes a lot to the effectiveness of whatever study methods you use, the two interact.
My impression is that study time is down in both higher ed and in at the high school level.
That's not optimal. The students could be doing more.
I went to Newture High School and I attended the 30th year reunion. And I took a school
tour with a principal who also ran the English department. I asked him what was new in the honors
AP English classes and he said that they were dumbing down the reading assignments.
Flavorgasted. I asked why. And he said that kids' reading comprehension was down even for the
best students because kids read less in their free time. What do you make of that assertion?
There are two points in there. One is that kids learn a whole lot from independent reading. The
second is that independent reading is dropped. I would qualify both of those. So it's true that
there are some surveys that indicate that leisure reading has dropped among teenagers. And this is
where activities on digital platforms usually take the blame. I am uncertain about those data
because most of the surveys that you see are self-report and they're retrospective.
They pose questions like how many books have you read in the last year. That's supposed that
students can actually remember how many books they've read in the last year. And also a question
like that is of course subject to presentation bias where I feel bad admitting to you that I
haven't read any books in the past year. So some of those surveys do show drops and it may
be it just seems more acceptable today than it did 15 years ago or 20 years ago to say I really read
very much. Now there's another reason to think that that might be the case because there are
much better data set comes from the American Time Use Survey which is a nationally representative
sample that's done every year by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And they use a diary method.
So they have people at the end of the day record what they've done. And you have a much smaller
problem with the possibility of presentation bias because even if I want to appear as a reader,
I may not really be thinking about that. It's not primed in the way it is if you ask me about my
reading. Even a reader doesn't necessarily read every day. So those data show two things. One is
that when you go like to 2004 to today reading hasn't really changed among teenagers. And the
second thing is it's really been low all the time. And that sort of comports with me as a kid who
grew up in the 70s my own personal anecdotal experience was it's not like my friends and I
looked at each other and said like what should we do? Well we don't have the internet let's read
Shakespeare. We found other ways of wasting our time. Now the second thing that your principal said
is this is a key driver of vocabulary and reading comprehension. It's probably helpful for reading
comprehension. It's probably much less important for vocabulary. The reason is that when kids do
leisure reading they tend to read in particular genres. If you're a big fan of fantasy then you're
seeing a lot of rare vocabulary words but they tend to be the same ones over and over again.
The word wizard and dwarf in a way that other kids don't. There's less exposure to broad-based
knowledge than you might think. This was a point made by Marilyn J. Graham Adams and she
is the example of the word Mars. We actually have statistics on how frequently any word including
the word Mars appears in general interest reading and it's surprisingly infrequent. And her point
from this example was if you count on leisure reading for children to know the word Mars they're
probably not going to but if they have a two-week unit on the solar system in third grade they will.
The point being curriculum is what's really going to give kids the background knowledge that is the
main driver behind reading comprehension. Your principal was appealing to broader cultural forces
outside the control of the school as the reason that the course needed to be dumbed down and I'm
suspicious. Dan in your new book Outsmarting Your Brain you offer 94 tips to students to improve
their performance. How did you think about organizing your book to make these suggestions?
I thought quite a lot about how to organize this book. The whole point was that I wanted it to be
useful for people who are trying to figure out their own learning. One of the mistakes that people
make is they think of learning as sort of this one-step process where I'm trying to emphasize
there are lots of different things that have to go right for learning to be effective. Once you
think about it that way you may not have any problem committing things to memory and your biggest
problem is procrastination or your biggest problem is planning or your problem is no taking or whatever.
So I wanted to organize it by task so that students could look just at the part of
getting the work done that was giving them trouble. Let's just offer lots of different options here
of ways that you can improve. Back to my newture high school in my freshman first semester
third week of class. My English teacher Miss Ambrosek gave us an inquest essay on the short story by
the waters of Babylon. Our teacher later handed out two A papers as samples of what she wanted from
the students in that class. And I think it was the last time in high school or in college for that
matter that a teacher handed out A papers as a guide for us to learn from others or know what
was to be expected. It seemed to me brilliant at the time. Why is this not a standard part of pedagogy?
Well we should. I'm pleased to tell you in the seminar that I'm teaching now I provide students
examples of excellent essays for the different assignments that I give. I try to break it down
and talk in detail. I mean it's not enough to just show them the final product. That's better than
nothing but they don't know the method that the author of that paper used to get there and so you
need to provide that as well. If you're asking students to do these things it only makes sense to
teach them how. You'll hear instructors express frustration that they come to me and they don't
know how to write a good paragraph. But you want them to be able to so like teach them. I don't
care that you're a ninth grade teacher and they should know that already. They don't so teach them.
Dan I've read four of your books because they're interesting and well written. You use humor and
the writing is for the general reader and a joy to read. One of the books that I chose to read was
your textbook on cognition. This book I did not like as much as the others. Why do textbooks
have to be written in a way that is less interesting to read? Textbooks are written with a different
purpose in mind. My other books are actually much more loaded with information than other
nonfiction books are. If you pick up a typical psychology book that's written for the general
public something by Adam Grant or something by Malcolm Gladwell. It's stories. The Gladwell
formula is every chapter starts with a story then there's an experiment and then at the end there's
like what this means in your daily life. The stories make up the bulk of it. My books are actually
unusual in that I don't tell a lot of stories. I'm not good at that and I'm somewhat less interested
in that. I'm more front-loading it with information. Textbooks are a much more extreme version of
that. There's no narrative component at all in a textbook. They're organized hierarchically.
They are there to serve a different purpose. The books that are right though, they're information
loaded. I well understand if this is an interesting nobody's going to read this.
But being interesting is not your main job as a textbook author. It's to cover the material.
And there's a hell of a lot of it especially the book that you read is an introductory course. It's
the very first course that you would take if you're interested in human cognition. Yeah, there's a
lot of definitions. There's a lot to cover. That's why it ends up being organized that way
and another skill that students have to learn. Students learn to read narratives. Those are the
first books that they encounter. And students come in to pre-K already knowing the narrative
structure that helps a great deal in comprehension. Then when things switch and they start reading
books that are more non-fiction information delivery textbook type, those are structured
differently. And they really ought to be taught how to decode them, tear them apart and figure out
how they're structured and what they're doing. Most college students don't. When I ask my students,
how do you read a textbook? They really don't know what I'm talking about. It's like, well,
I don't know, I sit in a chair. I mean, what are you talking about? You just sit down and read.
Right? But that's not the most effective way to tackle information heavy book like a textbook.
What is the right way? You may have heard of the SQ3R method. There are lots of methods like that.
All of them have a couple of properties in common. First, having a goal in mind when you're reading,
there's lots of research on this. You actually read differently when you go into a text with a
purpose in mind. And so surveying the chapter, and especially useful for this, is looking at the
headings and the subheadings to get some idea of what this is going to be about. Say to yourself,
okay, here's what I'm kind of expecting. I'm supposed to learn from this. By the end of reading this
chapter, here's what I think I should know and some questions that should be answered. And then
as you're reading, you sort of have that in the back of your mind. First of all, were those the
right questions? And if they were the right questions, what are the answers to those questions that I
pose to myself? That's especially effective because it keeps you thinking about what the
material means. One of the great challenges is, as we all know, we've all been in that situation
where your eyes are just skimming over, and you get to the bottom of a page, and you're like,
I was thinking about lunch, like I wasn't thinking at all about the content. So it's all very nice
to say, like, no, don't do that. Think about meaning. Well, it's hard to give your brain that
command. But when you've got a concrete task, like, hear these questions, and I'm looking for the
answer to these questions, it's much easier to focus on what things mean. So that's briefly what
you should do. There's some other things that ideally you would do afterwards in terms of sort of
connecting the different ideas that build up further connections among them that usually ends
up being very important. That's how you get to sort of the broader ideas and not just the nitty-gritty
pieces. At Neutre High School, I took a class in AP European history with a teacher who is retiring
at the end of the term and who is incredibly lazy. He gave an exam which had material that was not
covered in the text or in his lectures. The students were apoplectic despite a ridiculous curve.
I asked the teacher what textbook he had used previously to Palmer and Colton, and he said,
hey, I went to the library and checked out the hey's textbook, and sure enough, all the test
answers were covered in that textbook. And for the remainder of the semester, I read both texts.
I found that reading two different textbooks would superior to reading the same text twice.
What do you think of using supplemental reading in lieu of concentrating excessive time on the
same textbook? It's a wonderful idea. I think most instructors would love to have you in their
classroom. Meanwhile, your principal said like, yeah, we had to dumb down AP English, right,
because no one's doing the reading. So supplemental material, it's true. And I have students like that
now who I'll talk about something in class and they'll go off and find stuff and read it and
they'll come talk to me about it. And that of course is wonderful and exciting that people are
so interested. I have different expectations. So I'm teaching a undergraduate like senior seminar
now. So these are all cognitive science majors and psychology majors. You should be pretty
interested in this. If you're not interested in this, why are you majoring in it? And so my
expectations accordingly are higher. Like I expect you to really do the readings with care.
Whereas in my introduction to cognition course that I teach in the fall, last fall, I had 450
students. Some of these are freshmen who stumbled in here because it fit in their schedule, you know,
and they're really not that interested. I'm just trying to make sure everybody gets something out
of the course. You mentioned Malcolm Gladwell and his book writing process. His work is extremely
popular and I've read most of his books. I want to give you an example of a chapter from his work
Blink, which I read when it came out nearly 20 years ago. The story he told was about a fire
fighter working to put out a house fire and all of a sudden he screamed out,
everyone out through the door or the window if you have to. And the fireman hall ass and get out
and moments later the building explodes. When asked why the fireman said it was an unconscious
feeling that the fire wasn't progressing like normal and that he felt uncomfortable and thus
demanded everyone exit the building. This was the major argument of Gladwell's book Blink,
that the unconscious is a powerful force and we should all tap into it. I was so mesmerized by
that fireman story that I went to the footnotes and found the original source by Klein and reread
that book too. The Klein book was disappointing because it lacked a solid narrative. I was
actually amazed that Gladwell could read Klein's original material and then apply his masterful
storytelling ability to make the scene memorable 20 years later. That's his art and his genius.
Making sure that in the art you don't misinterpret the science. It so happens I'm teaching Klein
tomorrow in the seminar that I mentioned. I've got Klein's book on my desk. When he said something
I didn't recognize as a Klein story. Klein studied firefighters, EMTs, his specialty is decision making
with very high stakes and enormous time pressures. He's going to emergency rooms, he's following EMTs
around, he's going to watch firefighters and of course he's interested in the military and their
process for making decisions. For me Klein is absolutely fascinating but I'm of course reading
it from a different perspective because I'm putting it in
contrary distinction especially to Kahneman and Tversky who talk about decision making in a
completely different way. Now back to your question. There was a significant drawback to
Blink if I remember the book accurately which is that there was a lot in there about the power
of the unconscious and walking away from that book you could easily get the idea that you just
need to quiet your conscious mind and listen to what your unconscious is telling you.
What was omitted from that is when it works it works in people who have enormous experience.
It works in someone who has been fighting fires for 10 or 15 years. If you tried to quiet your mind
and take control of a fire that would not be a good situation at all.
Let's contrast that with Kahneman's work who you brought up a minute ago. Kahneman won the Nobel
Prize for Economics and is the author of the very popular book Thinking Fast and Slow. What I found
problematic about Kahneman's research is that he popularizes errors that people make when they
see problems for the first time and I don't think that's very important because people can learn
from their mistakes. They can ask questions from people who have experience and businesses can
continue to make mistakes go out of business and those firms that do the right things over time
succeed and prosper. Absolutely. There's a research at University of College London, David Shanks,
who has some pretty persuasive data that therefore some of the illusions that Kahneman
Tversky described. If you give people the right feedback they stop making the decision-making illusion
and of course, Gert Gigerens, or at the Mox Plonk Institute, has criticized Kahneman Tversky for many
years, has been one of their main critics on the point that you are alluding to, which is,
look, if we were also terrible at making decisions, we'd be dead. Evolutionarily, the species just
wouldn't survive. The right way to think about the Kahneman Tversky experiments is like visual
illusions. That this is the way the system works. Instead, these are mistakes that we make occasionally
in systems that are mostly quite good and visual illusions are interesting because the
circumstances under which the system breaks down can help illuminate the way the system operates.
A few months ago, we had an incredible podcast with a psychologist, Robert Sapolsky from Stanford,
who said that there is no free will. In your book, Outsmarting Your Brain,
you're trying to teach us how to hijack that little man in our head. What do you think of free
will in this battle to tackle your own mind? I think Sapolsky's talking sort of one step removed from
the level at which I'm describing things. To me, cognition is very hard to control. It's very hard to
attend to what you want to attend. You can't remember what you want to remember, deciding that you
want to remember something does absolutely nothing. Instead, you do have limited control in guiding
your cognitive system. One thing you can do is set tasks for yourself. At least for some brief
period of time, you will engage with that task. What the book is really about is a bunch of tasks
that are useful to set for yourself that will put you down the right cognitive path to achieve a goal
like comprehending what I read or committing things to memory or planning my schedule or whatever it is.
In terms of free will, these are questions that I don't think about much. I'm not old enough yet,
Larry. When you get to be a certain age in psychology, and then you start thinking about
consciousness, that's what I found. It's a little bit of a syndrome with a cognitive psychologist.
We get interested in consciousness as we approach retirement. I'm almost there, but not quite.
I've been reading your books over the past two decades about why students don't like school,
understanding how the mind reads, and now outsmarting your brain. Is there a progression or plan to
your research? I love the idea that there's a plan. It's been very opportunistic. It's sort of as
things occur to me that I'm like, oh, someone should really say something about this. Maybe I've
got something to say, then I do it. My next book is going to be about thinking, actually. It's going
to be on the coniment and diversity type decision-making we'll figure heavily in it. Problem-solving as
well. Creativity. All those topics. I wish I could say, well, there's this arc to my work,
and there's a master plan. I hope I live long enough to see it through. It's like, okay,
maybe I'll do this next, and that's about it. You're trying to reach an audience for your ideas.
You teach students at the University of Virginia. You write books for the public
and hold seminars to get your ideas to teachers. What are you doing now to get your ideas in the
public space? I started making videos on TikTok because this book is directed in no small part
to students. I have some social media presence mostly on Twitter and a bit on Facebook. My
publisher actually pointed out, students are on TikTok. You should be making TikToks, which I thought
was a terrible idea. I don't know how to video edit or anything, and I knew enough to know if
you don't understand video editing, your videos just look awful. We actually had a guest in the
department who's an expert in nonverbal communication, especially how people use pauses and they use
and stuff like that as bids for interaction. We started talking about the role that those play
in video. Little light bulb went off over my head and I started asking her about video communication,
and she said, oh, well, if your main thing would be credibility, so you should just make TikTok
videos with no video edits at all. You should leave in all the hemming and high because that's
going to make you just seem more authentic. I started making videos. First of all, I got a
surprising number of views. One of them has 2.4 million views. Several of them have several
hundred thousand views, but even more important to me in a way, are the comments like overwhelmingly
sort of middle school and high school students and college students. People are just positive.
Nobody is being negative about what I'm trying to do. Dan, what are you optimistic about?
I'm optimistic about the prospects of the type of work that I've been doing. When I first got
interested in education, there were not very many cognitive psychologists who were working in this
space and I got interested in it exactly because I thought this is the people that I'm reading,
there's a real contribution for the work that they've been doing to improve education and make
learning easier, make learning more interesting, and make it more productive close to 20 years now
that I've been doing this work. I think that that perspective has really gotten traction and I'm
optimistic that it's going to continue to do so. It's not everything in education, but I think there's
a real contribution to be made and I think we're starting to make it. Thanks, Dan, for joining us
today. If you missed last week's shows, check it out. Our first guest was Laura Hamilton, who is a
sociologist at the University of California, Merced, and the author of multiple books, including
Broke, Who is Paying for the Party and Parenting by Degree. Laura is interested in how socioeconomic
status influences who goes to college, how students perform their job prospects, and their marriage
market. Our second guest was Nicholas Farron of the Peterson Institute, who discussed the run on
the banks and the decision to guarantee the uninsured deposits at Silicon Valley and Signature Bank.
I would now like to take a plug for next week's podcast on the war in Ukraine with Stephen Biddle,
who is a professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University.
Stephen previously worked for General Petraeus in Iraq and General McChrystal in Afghanistan.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website, what happens next in six minutes.com.
If you enjoyed today's podcast, please subscribe to our weekly emails and follow us
on our podcast or Spotify. I would like to thank our audience for your continued engagement with
with these important issues.
Goodbye.
.