Willingham's Learning Theory (AQA GCSE Psychology): Revision Note

Willingham’s theory: his criticism of learning styles

• Willingham, a cognitive psychologist, is a strong critic of learning styles because there is no evidence that matching teaching to a 'style' improves learning

• He argues teaching should be based only on findings from well-designed scientific research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience

• His theory is a set of evidence-based recommendations covering praise, memory, self-regulation and neuroscience

Praise

• Praise should be for effort, not ability

• Praise works best when it is unexpected

  • If a child works hard in order to get praise, the praise becomes an external reward and destroys the child's own (intrinsic) motivation – as in Lepper et al. (1973), where children rewarded for drawing later drew less

Memory and forgetting

• Forgetting is mostly a failure of retrieval: the information is in memory but we lack the right cue to find it (the 'tip of the tongue' experience)

  • Tulving & Psotka (1971) showed that giving people the category name as a cue restored recall of words they had 'forgotten'

• So when learning something new, students should learn a cue alongside it to trigger recall later

• Students also tend to memorise when they should be retrieving

  • Regular testing improves long-term memory more than re-reading because it practises retrieval

Self-regulation

• Self-regulation is the ability to control your own behaviour, emotions and attention

• It includes delayed gratification – resisting a small reward now for a bigger reward later

• Mischel's marshmallow test demonstrates this:

  • A child is left alone with a marshmallow and told that if they wait until the researcher returns they can have two

  • Shoda et al. (1990) found that children who had waited longer went on to do better at school as teenagers

• Self-regulation is therefore a better predictor of school success than learning style, and Willingham argues it can be taught

Neuroscience

• Some learning difficulties have been linked to patterns of brain activity, e.g. Willingham & Lloyd (2007) noted that the pattern of brain waves in children with dyslexia differs from those without it

• If such patterns could be identified early, children could get specialist help before they fall behind

Evaluation of Willingham’s learning theory

Strengths

• Evidence-based: every recommendation is drawn from controlled scientific research, unlike learning styles, so the conclusions can be trusted

• Real-world application: the theory is aimed directly at classrooms – retrieval practice, effort-praise and teaching self-regulation are all things teachers can use

Weaknesses

• Neuroscience may mislead: learning difficulties such as dyslexia have many causes, so a diagnosis based on one brain pattern may be wrong – and once a child is labelled, the label tends to stick

• Self-regulation effects may be overstated: a large replication of the marshmallow test (Watts et al., 2018) found the link to later success was much weaker once family background was taken into account

• Not a single theory: it is a collection of separate findings rather than one explanation of learning, which makes it hard to test as a whole