Daniel Willingham
@DTWillingham
Prof @ UVa who's puttin' the funk back in functional brain imaging and the psycho in psychometrics. One study is just one study, folks.
Guy I know was complaining about making his 8th grader's lunch. I didn't have presence of mind to say anything so 3 days later I made this. I don't think the guy's is on Twitter, this is my therapy.
I've seen Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" prominently displayed in two bookstores in the last week. So I'm posting Sam Wineburg's critique of the book in Slate from 2018. slate.com/human-interest…
New substack: What is the science of reading? And why the definition matters.... dtwuva.substack.com/p/what-is-the-…
Is AI eroding our critical thinking? I'm on The Inquiry via @bbcworldservice bbc.com/audio/play/w3c…
WHOLE BOOKS! I pop into this wonderful podcast episode from @Doug_Lemov via @KnowledgeMatrs on the value of reading whole books knowledgematterscampaign.org/post/ep-4-lite…
Just re-read @dtwillingham's "When can you trust the experts?" I dipped into it while planning a session at the @learningandtheb conference in November, but it's so good, I read the whole thing again: authoritative, and a delight to read. It really deserves to be better known!
The problems posed by LLMs for education are immediate and obvious, and the promised benefits remain untested and uncertain. But I see one way that LLMs may inadvertently improve student thinking. substack.com/inbox/post/167…
New data suggests that Race to the Top policies had small positive effects on student achievement, as measured by NAEP reading & math scores. I called that one wrong, I was sure they would have no impact. journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.310…
"Our results suggest that word reading and spelling are one and the same, almost, but that spoken vocabulary knowledge is more closely related to reading than to spelling." Open article from the great Rebecca Treiman and colleagues. link.springer.com/article/10.100…
Art of Teaching podcast w Matt Green, touching on a lot of topics from Why Don't Students Like School theartofteaching.podbean.com/e/dr-daniel-t-…
Video lectures: is engagement/learning affected by instructor visibility? No, but engagement is improved is the student's *preference* for visibility is honored. Also, they replicated the finding that speeding the lecture improved learning efficiency onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.10…
Always loved the phrase "the windy side of care" but never knew just what Shakespeare meant by it. So I asked ChatGPT, which put the words in the mouth of the wrong character ("It's classic Benedick"), in a quotation that doesn't appear in the play. So I guess I still don't know.
Cool people are the same everywhere. psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-30…
1 of the nicest, sharpest ppl in Ed--@arotherham--is doing the Pan-Mass bike ride. 192 miles though Massachusetts to raise $$ for Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Andy is out there in the heat dome! Pls consider even 5 bucks to support a great cause! profile.pmc.org/AR0140
I enjoyed being a guest on Amplify’s Science of Reading Podcast--talked with Susan Lambert about the benefits and limitations of comprehension strategies: amplify.com/science-of-rea…
Wiley just put the audio version of Why Don't Students Like School on sale--50% off! audiobooks.com/promotions/pro…
An introductory course makes people think they know more about a subject than they do. pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.128…
Does screen use lead to socioemotional problems in children, or do socioemotional problems prompt children to engage in more screen time? Both, concludes a meta-analysis of longitudinal studies, and both effects are small (open) psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2026-…
Please sign the open letter condemning the President's exec order on "gold standard science." Sounds great, but it would make a political appointee the sole arbiter of whether science meets that standard (and thus would influence policy) #StandUpForScience actionnetwork.org/petitions/open…
