What Cognitive Science Misses

Architects, like teachers, usually have multiple goals they try to satisfy simultaneously. Safety is nonnegotiable, but architects may also be thinking to a greater or lesser extent about energy efficiency, aesthetics, functionality, and so on. In the same way, some goals for teachers are nonnegotiable — teaching kids to read, for example — but after that, the goals are likely to vary with the context. In addition, architects make use of scientific knowledge, notably principles of physics, and materials science. But this knowledge is certainly not prescriptive. It doesn’t tell the architect what a building must look like. Rather, it sets boundary conditions for construction to ensure that the building will not fall down, that the floors can support sufficient weight, and so on.

In the same way, basic scientific knowledge about how kids learn, about how they interact, about how they respond to discipline — this knowledge ought to be seen as a boundary condition for teachers and parents, meaning that this knowledge sets boundaries that, if crossed, increase the probability of bad outcomes. Within these broad boundaries, parents and teachers pursue their goals.

-Daniel Willingham, When Can You Trust the Experts? (p. 221)

I think about that quote often. I love learning about cognitive science and better understanding how the human mind learns. But I also try to remember that cognitive science can't tell me how to teach. Even at its best, cognitive science can often only help me understand when I've gone wrong, and give me some hints as to where and what I might try differently.

Along those lines, this tweet caught my eye:

I think the slide is a great distillation of some ways that cognitive science can help teachers. These are simple questions I can ask myself about my teaching. Are students thinking right now? What are they thinking about? Do they have the knowledge they need for that thinking? These are important questions, and questions I could ask myself every day and continue learning about teaching.

But what cognitive science often misses is an equity perspective. Equity is hard to measure, so cognitive scientists don't spend too much time thinking about it. At each step I can ask questions about why a student isn't learning. A student isn't engaged? Why not? A student is compliant but not truly thinking? Why not? A student isn't thinking about the right stuff? Why not? A student is cognitively overloaded? Why?

These questions often lead to important realizations about learning, classrooms, schools, and people. Students don't learn for all kinds of reasons. Uncovering those reasons is the part of teaching that tries to be responsive to every student.