Dan Willingham

New Willingham Substack When Everyone Makes Sense and Nobody Learns: A friendly challenge to the education commentariat. dtwuva.substack.com/p/when-every...

Proud to be a contributor to this American Psychological Association Expert Report: "Children’s and adolescents’ learning with educational technology." www.apa.org/pubs/reports...

New Substack: : Students should only use AI for things that they already know how to do well. dtwuva.substack.com/p/students-s...

James Traub in the NY Times making the point that, whatever you think of the particular curricular choices that Texas has made, they are taking the right approach on curriculum to support students' reading comprehension and critical thinking. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/03/o...

Large dataset from chess.com shows much better improvement from deliberate practice than from game play. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

AI changes feedback on student writing when it knows student race, gender www.edweek.org/technology/a...

“To learn how to teach and test yourself brings much comfort and is not as dangerous as shaving yourself; everyone should learn it at a certain age for fear of one day becoming the victim of an ill-guided razor.” —Georg Lichtenberg

Robert Pondiscio: 19 reasons that knowledge-rich curricula have not been broadly adopted in the US, despite strong research support. I'd add this one: "educators underestimate what young children can learn, and the joy with which they will learn it." thenext30years.substack.com/p/why-knowle...

What to do with the kids this summer? "Every day, do something for your mind, something for your body, and something for the family." www.washingtonpost.com/education/20...

Small study shows surprisingly encouraging results of a critical thing college class in reducing four biases psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

People are more transported by stories they hear, rather than read. For storytellers, the opposite is true. myscp.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

New research on providing information to parents who are selecting a school: information and social factors matter. Via @mattbarnum.bsky.social www.chalkbeat.org/2026/05/19/l...

When students are anxious/depressed, one method of remediation might be TEACHING THEM TO DO SCHOOL BETTER. Just got this message from a college mental health professional.

Call for papers: Symposium in Toronto on teaching art history. Hope to see you there! arthistory.utoronto.ca/news/call-pa...

Do Students Today Have Reduced Attention Spans? In this American Educator article, I argue they don't. (This piece is mostly a reprint of the one I published last year in Education Next.) www.aft.org/ae/spring202...

“Most Russian writers have been tremendously interested in Truth’s exact whereabouts and essential properties. Tolstoy marched straight at it, head bent and fists clenched.” —Nabokov

The main teachers' union in NY state took on the job of educating in-service teachers in the science of reading. They blew it. hechingerreport.org/new-york-ten...

New article from E. D. Hirsch and me on (1) the evidence for the importance of knowledge in reading; (2) why it’s taken so long for people to acknowledge the evidence; (3) what we predict if the role of knowledge is taken seriously. www.educationnext.org/rediscoverin...

I still hear this justification re: AI in classrooms: “It’s out there & we can't be left behind.” Friendly challenge: which happens more often? 1. Schools regretted waiting too long to adopt a technology. 2. Schools regretted adopting a technology before they fully understood how to use it.

"During the first 1,000 days, the brain builds itself at a breathtaking pace, forming up to a million neural connections per second..." news.virginia.edu/content/qa-w...

Generative AI has been adopted in US workplaces more rapidly than PCs or the internet pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Sending babies to nursery (daycare, for Americans) completely changes their microbiome www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Executives say AI is a huge time-saver. Their employees disagree. (link is WSJ gift article) www.wsj.com/lifestyle/wo...

It's not the case that children with dyslexia need identical instruction as typically developing kids, just a higher dose: Mark Seidenberg explains www.seidenbergreading.net/blog/oexqqvu...

Contra predictions of a decade ago, physical bookstores and sales of paper books are doing well www.nytimes.com/2025/12/30/b...

Decades of lab evidence show spacing effect but S's self-report spaced study doesn't correlate w grades. Why? Bes E asked about study sessions, not whether same material was repeated in spaced sessions. When you ask that Q, you see predicted correlation. psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

@mattbarnum.bsky.social with a sensible take on declining test scores...no one knows what's going on, and it's probably complicated. cbnewsletters.chalkbeat.org/p/what-expla...

Data from 117 grad programs at one university indicate that making applications GRE-optional did not increase diversity of applications. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

I'll no longer review for journals that use an editorial platform. If I provide free a service to publishers, I think 1) they should care about my convenience, and these platforms are a pain 2) the data use statement should simply say "we don't" but, predictably, it doesn't.

New meta-analysis concludes that prequestions confer an advantage to content relevant to the prequestions, but the advantage does not bleed over to other content. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

In the face of chatbot cheating, more professors turning to oral exams. Not really an option in my class of 350... www.washingtonpost.com/education/20...

New American Educator article with Eric Turkheimer @ent3c.bsky.social on what IQ scores mean. www.aft.org/ae/winter202...

New article with Eric Turkheimer: "What Do IQ Scores Mean?" www.aft.org/ae/winter202...

B. F. Skinner: *shrugs* www.pianistmagazine.com/blogs/i-taug...

Math anxiety: meta analysis of longitudinal studies suggests a bi-directional relationship. Being bad at math makes you anxious when doing it AND being anxious about it impairs performance. psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/01/w...

Retractions in medical journals disproportionately less likely to include women authors. journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Using PISA data from 73 countries, researchers estimated the extent to which growth mindset mediates the association of SES on achievement, and find results consistent w/ the picture of the last 10 years. It's a real effect. It's small. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Exercise improves academic performance in Norwegian college students (open) www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1...

Every psychologist knows this feeling: you’re not mad that these two sections are adjacent. You’re grateful that they’re separate sections.

Data from Peru: telling women they've met the exam cut-off to pursue a STEM major increases the probability they'll take it. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Although it's commonly believed that left-handedness is associated with creativity...it's not. link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Really inspiring review of five decades of cardiac medicine that almost certainly kept Dick Cheney alive, his first heart attack was at age 37...and the importance of the US scientific infrastructure--currently under existential threat--to those miracles. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

The circle of hell Dante forgot - Who Raised You - is teeming w people who put their bags on Amtrak seats. Their curse is to eternally battle NJ Transiters watching videos at full blast & those who trample tiny kids to deplane 30 sec sooner. Feels like a promising reality tv concept.

BREAKING: Survey by @nature.com reveals that "supervisors who make a conscious effort to support and mentor their PhD candidates have more-satisfied students." Science marches on! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

RCT of Montessori preschool: at end of K, significantly higher reading, short-term memory, theory of mind, and executive function scores. Intention-to-treat effect sizes > .20. www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

Not so fast…UVa rejects compact but is reportedly near a deal w the feds www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/u...

uva rejects the compact

I review Google's new AI tool. Not ready, not really close to ready, but shows promise. dtwuva.substack.com/p/will-googl...