Daniel Willingham

Daniel Willingham – Professor of Psychology University of Virginia Willingham is a cognitive scientist and links his ideas for curriculum design to cognitive science and link between memory and thought. Based on a large body of research, cognitive scientists have established that humans have a limited working memory but an expansive long-term memory. The more we can commit to long term memory, the more challenging concepts we can focus on with our working memory. He has coined the phrase ‘memory is the residue of thought’ and that a curriculum should provide work that requires students to think. Willingham argues for the importance of sequencing of content, so long-term memory is built up and working memory is not overloaded. He advocates interleaving, spaced practice and retrieval in curriculum design to revisit key knowledge.

Willingham believes that curriculum content should be based on knowledge that yields the greatest cognitive benefit. His research shows that any thinking skills can only grow from a body of knowledge. For Willingham, factual knowledge must precede skill. Willingham advocates teaching background or domain knowledge to help children become better readers.

Critics have focused on cognitive science being a very new field of science and that there is a difference between the lab and the classroom. Most of what we know about cognitive science has been discovered in the last 25 years. The strength of his argument can only grow or weaken, the more people test his theories in the classroom.