Daniel T. Willingham

Daniel T. Willingham (born 1961) is a psychologist at the University of Virginia, where he is a professor in the Department of Psychology. Willingham's research focuses on the application of findings from cognitive psychology and neuroscience to K–12 education.

Willingham earned his BA from Duke University and his PhD under William Kaye Estes and Stephen Kosslyn in cognitive psychology from Harvard University. During the 1990s and into the early 2000s, his research focused on the brain mechanisms supporting learning, the question of whether different forms of memory are independent of one another and how these hypothetical systems might interact.

Since 2002, Willingham has written the "Ask the Cognitive Scientist" column for the American Educator published by the American Federation of Teachers. In 2009, he published Why Don't Students Like School, which received positive coverage in The Wall Street Journal^[1] and The Washington Post.^[2]

Willingham is known as a proponent of the use of scientific knowledge in classroom teaching and in education policy. He has sharply criticized learning styles theories as unsupported^[3] and has cautioned against the empty application of neuroscience in education.^[4] He has advocated for teaching students scientifically proven study habits,^[5][6] and for a greater focus on the importance of knowledge in driving reading comprehension.^[7]

In his book "Why Don't Students Like School?" he provides nine fundamental principles that can help teachers understand how students' minds work and improve their approach to teaching. He suggests that it is more useful to view the human species as bad at thinking, rather than cognitively gifted. He argues that the brain is not primarily designed for thinking through decisions; rather, it's designed to save you from having to do that. Because thinking is slow, effortful, and uncertain, we rely on memory for the vast majority of decisions we make. While memory is not always reliable, on balance it is much more effective than having to stop and think about every step of every decision you need to make (for example, when driving a car). He also suggests that, even though our brains are not very good at thinking, we actually like to think. While humans are naturally curious, the conditions have to be just right for curiosity to take hold (not too easy, not too hard). This idea is similar to Vygotsky's zone of proximal development (for example, a joke is funnier when you understand it without needing it to be explained). He suggests that this is because of the dopamine released by the brain's natural reward system whenever we solve a problem.