Khan Academy Ed Talks with Dan Willingham, PhD - Wednesday, April 21

Hello and welcome to ED Talks with Khan Academy where we talk to influential people in the field of education. I am excited today to talk with Dr. Dan Willingham. Before we get started with that, I want to remind all of you that Khan Academy is a non-profit that relies on donations from folks like yourself to help us keep more people learning. You can find the space to donate there on our site.

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Today, as I said, I'm excited to talk to Dr. Dan Willingham. When people ask me, "Hey, where can I read more about learning science and how people learn?" his book, "Why Don't Students Like School?" is one of the first places I send people to. The second edition of that book is out this week, so go find that at your favorite bookseller. In addition to all the good previous content, it also covers educational technology, which is, of course, a place that is near and dear to my heart.

But Dan, welcome and thanks for joining us!

Dan Willingham: Hi Kristin, I'm so glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Kristin: Absolutely! So, I'm going to, as usual in these talks, start off with some questions that I have from reading your works, and then we'll go to audience questions. Those of you who are listening, feel free to add things and questions into the chat and I will pick those up as well.

I'm interested in starting and thinking about curiosity, which is something that you talk about upfront in one of your first chapters. There are things that it seems like we're curious about and there's some natural curiosity when you think about young kids asking questions and where that is. But then sometimes it seems to kind of fade away and we kind of lose some of that. So how should we think about curiosity and helping us learn?

Dan Willingham: Yeah, curiosity is one of the things that I find so fascinating because I noticed this in myself before I was a cognitive psychologist or studied any of these things formally. We think of curiosity as being driven by content. You think, "I'm a cognitive psychologist, so I am curious about cognitive psychology." The truth is, that's sort of true but not remotely true as a general rule.

I have been to many conferences and attended cognitive psychology talks and found myself extraordinarily bored. I'm sure everybody listening to this talk now has had the same experience. You go into something, you start reading a book or watching a YouTube video because you're like, "Oh, I love this stuff! This is going to be great." And then it's horrible. The opposite can equally happen. Someone sort of forces you to watch a YouTube video about how they make dumbbells, and you're like, "That can't be interesting," and then, "Oh my god, it's totally fascinating!"

I think the through line for curiosity— you mentioned kids and how kids seem to be curious about everything. Then adults, not so much; they are much more selective. The through line for that, I think, is that curiosity is all about learning about your environment. We are continually sizing up our environment and figuring out if there's an opportunity for learning here. The unknown needs to be at sort of just the right level.

If you offer me some information on a topic like, "Would you like to know who the first president of the U.S. is?" I'm like, "That doesn't make me very curious because I already have that information." Likewise, if you said, "Would you like to know who the first president of Chad was?" I'm like, "Sort of, but I really don't know anything about Chad, so that's not going to help me very much."

So it's when there's information that's going to add to what we already know that seems to be a really critical trigger for curiosity. That helps us understand why small children are curious about everything—they don't know anything—so they are well-positioned to be sponges and be curious about everything because the world is offering all this information, and they don't know anything about the world.

Kristin: That's great. So as you said, you're a cognitive psychologist and a professor of psychology. What was your path to getting to that place in your career? How did you come to be a cognitive psychologist?

Dan Willingham: I came to it very much out of curiosity. Both of my parents were actually psychologists, neither one of them a cognitive psychologist, but they both had degrees in experimental psychology. My dad went off and became a psychometrician, my mother later became a counselor, and my uncle was also an experimental psychologist. I was really determined not to do anything in psychology at all.

But then in college, I thought, "Gosh, I guess I need to take an intro to psychology course or something so that I can keep up at Thanksgiving dinner." So I did, and I found myself absolutely fascinated. I started taking a broad array of courses, and cognitive psychology just really caught my fancy—I don't want to say that in a weird way, but it describes it pretty well—I just couldn't get enough of it. So I decided to go to graduate school and just keep doing what I loved.

Kristin: That's great! I love the "I don't want anything to do with what my parents did, but oh, it's actually kind of interesting too!"

Dan Willingham: Yeah, absolutely!

Kristin: So thinking generally across your education experience, were there any particular teachers who influenced you or that you found really helped you on your path?

Dan Willingham: Gosh, I had so many amazing teachers! I mentioned I was really captivated by cognitive psychology in college, and Ruth Day was the professor who taught that course. I took a psychology of language course afterwards with her and did a senior thesis with her, so she was certainly extremely influential in developing my love of psychology.

I also have to single out my fifth-grade teacher, Richard Lee, who was just a really inspiring teacher and really made me come to school excited to learn every day. He helped me see that school was something I was doing for myself. I think up until that point, I went to school just because you’re a kid and that's what you do. To the extent that I had any skin in the game, it was like I was doing this to make my parents happy—if I didn't go, my parents would be mad at me. Mr. Lee actually helped me see that learning was something that was fun and that I appreciated and benefited from. I'll never forget that sort of attitude towards school and learning.

Kristin: That's great! Actually, when people ask me about teachers, my fifth-grade teacher was also very influential in what we did. So I wonder too if there's something about that age that gets people inspired. As you were talking about that kind of inspiration and also building on what you learned, we talk about in motivation finding meaning for learning. One of the things that can help motivate students is finding meaning in what they're doing. And I know lots of teachers get the question of, “When am I going to use this? Why do I need this?” How should we help build meaning, and what do we do when it seems like the things that we need to learn don't have a lot of meaning in them?

Dan Willingham: I comment on this a little bit in "Why Don't Students Like School?" In a way, it concerns me a little bit. I don't feel like, "Will students find this meaningful?" is a very good litmus test to which we should hold content. The reason for that is I think there are a lot of things that students will enjoy knowing, will find beautiful, and will maybe even find important that they don't feel are meaningful in their life as they would describe it.

If you try and tempt them with, "Look, this is something that is important for you to know and you're going to find it interesting and important in your daily life," that will feel really strained because a lot of what we as adults kind of in our much more mature judgment think is important for a fifth grader to learn about is not immediately obvious to the fifth grader that it's going to be meaningful to them.

Conversely, we can make people curious about things by saying, "Here's this puzzle. Here's this odd fact in mathematics: Why does it work that way?" or "Here's this fact in science: What is that all about?" I think that's more effective when we're talking about motivation. Yes, things seeming personally meaningful and relevant can be powerful. But I think that narrows the scope of what we want students to know.

I also worry a little bit that it sends an implicit message that the students are kind of in the driver's seat. If I'm continually trying to show students this is meaningful, that implies the counterpoint that if I don't think it's meaningful, then that means I shouldn't be learning it. I don't think that fifth graders should have that control. Teachers are the ones who should be deciding what's important for them to learn, and it’s incumbent on me to make them intrigued about it.

Kristin: Interesting! As you were talking, I had this thought: just because it's not relevant to me, let's say the upper-middle-class white fifth grader in the suburban school, doesn't mean that it's not something that I should know to understand the experiences of other people too. So I wonder if there's a link there.

Dan Willingham: I agree. I think that's especially poignant—it's especially important to consider in the realm of human experience to say, "What do I have to learn about this story that's about someone who's totally unlike me?" No, that's kind of the point. First of all, it's interesting and important to learn about the perspectives of people from other cultures and those who are not like you. Second of all, you're going to see some similarities that maybe you didn't expect. There is universality in the human experience, and how are you going to know that unless you read about people who are different from you?

Kristin: Absolutely fascinating! I do want to get a little bit to talking about technology. During COVID, we've even more started relying on digital learning environments. One of the things we hear sometimes is, "Are all of these phones and screens changing how people learn? Are they getting different dopamine hits? Are our attention spans changing?" What are your thoughts on that?

Dan Willingham: Well, there are a lot of pieces to your question right there. There are really three different questions: Are screens changing our brains? Do we learn differently from screens? Let's take those two questions. Are screens changing our brains, and do we learn differently from screens?

The idea that screens are changing our brains, I've argued, is very improbable. The main way that people have suspected that screens are changing our brains is that they are reducing attention span or working memory span. First of all, we have data that that's not happening. There are certain tests of working memory that have been administered for close to 100 years.

We know that working memory span just hasn't changed with the digital revolution. So we have some data on that. From a theoretical perspective, you wouldn't expect the brain to be as plastic in response to the experiences with screens as people think. The brain is plastic, but it can't be that plastic. Take working memory in particular: there are so many cognitive processes that depend on working memory—reading, problem-solving, mathematics—all the things we care about in school depend on it.

So if working memory capacity were really plastic and changed with the environment and shrunk, the impact would cascade throughout the cognitive system. Basically, if working memory capacity shrunk significantly, everybody would be really stupid.

Now, in terms of whether or not we learn differently from screens, it's pretty clear that we do. Just think about zoom fatigue—that's enough to start with. Everybody has found during the pandemic that the signal you're getting from a screen is not as rich as the signal that you get from a live human being. One of the ways you're dealing with that is by expending more cognitive effort to try to make up for that signal.

For one thing, you frequently don't have gestures. You can occasionally see—I sort of self-consciously keep my hands up here so you can get a little more signal from that. Frequently, though, you are looking at a talking head and aren't getting gestures. The two-dimensionality makes a difference. You get a lag; there are all these problems with screens. The viewer is expending more cognitive energy trying to extract everything they can from that signal.

Kids, when little, are not very good at that. Little kids really struggle with screens. If you google the term "video deficit," you can find some of this research literature. You can certainly learn from screens, but it's not the same experience. We've made enormous strides in the last 10 or 15 years in figuring out how to do this effectively, but there are still issues that we are trying to overcome.

Kristin: Absolutely! So do you have recommendations about screen time and how much parents or teachers should be thinking about the amount of time students are spending on screens?

Dan Willingham: Like most people, I am very quick to say, "Well, it depends on what they’re doing on their screens." But the truth is: if your child is unsupervised when they have a laptop or an iPad, you kind of know what they’re doing—they're not looking at Shakespeare concordances. There is data that they are mostly consuming video content or texting their friends.

The way I put it in "Why Don't Students Like School?" is they're doing pretty much the stuff that kids have always liked to do and they're just doing it with technology now. When I was left to my own devices at 9, or 15 years old, I was mostly not doing the most enriching things. So it’s really less about, “What do you want your kids to be doing?” Is it really the screen per se, or is it that, "Gosh, I wish they were reading more books or nonfiction," or "I wish they were working on their social skills more?" Whatever it is you want them to do, they can probably do it on a screen and off a screen.

You need to figure out how you're going to encourage your child to engage in more of the activities you want. I think the thing that really bugs people about screen time is that it's mostly unsupervised. Most of what kids do when they're unsupervised on screens is not super enriching. It's kind of fun for them, but not very enriching.

I have to say, like, there were plenty of rules in my house. This is particularly true with the pandemic. Like most parents, we had lots of rules, and then the pandemic struck, and all my wife and I could think was, "Just play Among Us all you want! Whatever it is!" This is just a nightmare for everybody. I can’t blame you for just doing whatever you want!

Kristin: Absolutely!

Dan Willingham: So we talked about screens. There’s a comment from YouTube. Venkat Parkanen says that more audio learning should be implemented. "I never used audio learning in my high school but it's so much powerful now." Do you have thoughts about how learning is impacted by different communication methods or channels?

Dan Willingham: That's been pretty carefully researched when it comes to reading, so let's compare reading text versus listening to an audiobook. I don't know that there's been much research on audio learning more broadly.

There's a whole lot of overlap in the mental machinery that comprehends printed text versus listening to the same text read aloud. This is assuming that you are a very smooth, fluent decoder when you're reading print. If you are, there's a whole lot of overlap between the two processes because the processes that you use to comprehend written text are basically the same processes you use for oral language.

There are some differences, which are not trivial. One that’s pretty obvious is when you're listening to a book, someone is reading it to you. You get what scientists call prosodic information. Prosody is the sort of music of speech, and it tells you the difference between "What a great party!" and "What a great party!" Sarcasm is all a matter of prosody.

In that sense, listening to a text is a little easier because the person reading gives you that prosodic information. On the other hand, when you're reading print, it's very easy to go backwards in a text. You control the pace—you can read as quickly or slowly as you want—and it's easy to go back.

If you look at eye movements while people are reading, something like 10 to 15 percent of those movements are actually regressions. You're going back to pick up a few words because you had a little trouble unravelling the syntax of a sentence. You can go back when you're listening to an audiobook, but in practice it’s kind of awkward and most people don’t really do it. You’re also not in terrific control of the pace.

So that makes audiobooks slightly more difficult. Again, there’s lots and lots of overlap but there are some differences at the margins.

Kristin: Thank you! We’ve got a few more questions coming in. On Facebook, one of the things we keep hearing—Shelly Costa Thompson asks a question related to that: How do you keep teens motivated, especially this year? But over time, it just seems to be an ongoing question of how we keep them interested in wanting to learn.

Dan Willingham: Yes, particularly teens. I don't know whether the question is really from a parental perspective versus a teacher's perspective, because I think it is...

Shelly: She has a 14-year-old.

Dan Willingham: Okay, so it's from a parental perspective. It gets difficult because lots of other things crowd in on their time. Teens in particular become extraordinarily interested in their social lives. BJ Casey, a psychologist at Yale University, has a good take on this.

She points out that this is practice for them, preparation for becoming independent of their parents. So they're becoming extremely attuned to their peers because they're learning how to navigate this world where other people are going to be important as they move out of their home.

With that kind of competition, trig just does not seem to hold a lot of appeal. One of the things that is important to do, and this is not a full-blown solution, is to emphasize that this is a family value. I hope that this has been a family value all along!

Acknowledge and validate, "I get it that there are other things you are interested in. I also get it: Mr. Willingham, your history teacher, is pretty boring. That's legit! I'm not saying he's not." At the same time, some things have not changed. One of the things that hasn't changed is that in this family, we take school seriously.

We show up on time, we talk politely to our teachers—all the sorts of things that you've been doing all along are important and want to continue to be important. One of the things that continues to be important is trying your best in all of your classes and making sure you make time for that.

So in general, I’m a fan of trying to start with positivity and appealing to the best version of a teen’s sense of self—saying, “This is who you are. You want to be the kind of person who treats school this way,” as opposed to the punitive approach: “If you're not going to do your work, then I'm going to take your iPad away.” That’s not appealing to the best in the student and I find that it ends up being a bit of a game of cat and mouse.

It's sort of like, "If I can still get away with not doing what you want me to do and keep my iPad, then I'm winning." If I'm appealing to their sense of self, then they know whether or not they're living up to that.

Kristin: Got it! Thank you. I know that's a whole topic—how to motivate teens could be a whole new series of books! [Laughter] I feel your pain for sure!

Dan Willingham: Definitely!

Kristin: So you've been thinking about motivation; we talked earlier about curiosity. I wonder if there’s something—thinking about motivation and curiosity—I know you've talked recently about creativity too. Is there something there with appealing to students' creativity or opportunities that you see to encourage students and keep them interested in learning?

Dan Willingham: I think absolutely! This is something that I think most parents want to do and that most parents are doing as much as they can. But encouraging creative outlets that are not necessarily part of school is a wonderful opportunity to keep kids engaged with learning.

Especially kids who are struggling in a lot of their school subjects, that feeling that—because what you're really worried about and trying to guard against is a sense of self that doesn't include learning at all. It's like, "School is not a place where I succeed. School is not a place where I feel good about myself."

That extends to any type of learning that might happen. Conversely, if a student can feel like, "Yeah, the stuff I do at school, I struggle with that. That's really hard for me, and I'm not sure how I see that in my future long-term." But then there’s this other content they feel passionate about—they know they're good at that.

That entails learning, and I’m good at that type of learning. That seems like a really desirable way to go, and that doesn't just apply to students who are struggling in school. This is having that passion—especially feeling like they can go deep on something.

One of the things that I know is so frustrating for students is that everything is a million miles wide and two inches deep. They want to feel mastery, to feel like they know more about this than most adults do. That's really exciting for them. Every kid deserves to feel that way!

Kristin: Absolutely! That seems like a good note. The half hour's flown by, so we will wrap it up there. Thank you so much for your time today! Again, folks, Dr. Dan Willingham—check out the second edition of his book that's out now.

And I will remind all of you as well that tomorrow at the same time we have Ben Gomes from Google, talking about new learning initiatives at Google. So you can join us then. Thanks again to Dr. Dan Willingham for joining us. All of you have a good day, and we will see you next time!