Research School Network: Slowing pupils’ thinking

Imagine a classroom: the pupils are all beautifully motivated, they’re listening to you, responding well to show engagement and enthusiasm. You’re building up to introducing something new, scaffolding the learning using prior knowledge which has been mastered to take them to greater heights. In building up to new knowledge acquisition, you ask what you conceive of as a simple question in the totally expectation that no-one could possibly answer incorrectly.

And little Johnny immediately answers and it’s wrong.

This feels like a complete face palm moment, and the teacher brain scrambles around to work out where this has come from – what is the misconception here? What prior knowledge could Johnny have possibly taken out of context? What prior learning has been misapplied to get such a simple question wrong? But maybe it’s not a misconception at all.

In order to consider an alternative possibility here, it’s useful to refer to psychology and modes of thinking. Daniel Kahnemann, winner of the Novel Prize in Economics, has considered how humans think in ​‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ (2011) which he wrote because he wanted to improve ​‘watercooler conversations’ so that errors in judgement and choice can be better understood.

Kahnemann describes two ​‘systems’, or ways of thinking, originally coined by Keith Stanovich and Richard West, with the labels now being widely used in psychology.

As Kahnemann describes it:

System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control, and is used for thinking such as: answering 2 + 2; understanding simple sentences; driving a car on an empty road.

System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of system 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice and concentration. System 2 would be used for thinking such as telling someone your phone number; parking in a narrow space; checking out the validity of a logical argument.

So far, so good. We can all subscribe to the fact that some things we need to think deeply about and others less so. My question is: do our pupils always think as deeply as they should, particularly when an answer occurs to them immediately? Do they engage their System 2 when they should, or are they reliant on believing that their first answer is the right one?

Again, I will turn to Kahnemann to consider this. Here is a simple puzzle which I’d like you to solve using your gut instinct only:

A bat and a ball costs £1.10. The bat costs one pound more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Easy, right? You thought of a number instinctively, which was probably 10, therefore your answer is 10p.

But this answer is wrong. If the bat did cost 10p, then the ball would cost £1.10, and then together the cost would be £1.20. Spend a little longer to work it out and you’ll come to conclusion that the answer is in fact 5p.

Some people may have got this correct straight away, but they will have found a way to not listen to their intuition and to allow their System 2 to check their answer before submitting it.

So what does this tell us? It demonstrates that we don’t always engage our System 2 to fact check something. We just accepted the initial answer, but a little bit more effort in considering the true answer wouldn’t cost us much as the problem isn’t actually difficult.

Don’t feel bad if you ended up with the wrong answer to the bat and ball problem – you are not alone in reaching that solution. When Kahnemann and Shane Frederick tested thousands of American university students, they were shocked at the results: ​‘more than 50% of students at Harvard, MIT and Princetown gave the incorrect answer. At less selective universities, the rate of demonstrable failure to check was in excess of 80%.’

So is this an example of laziness with our System 2 or of the feeling of over-confidence in gut instinct? If we as adults don’t always engage our System 2, then it stands to reason that neither will our pupils.

You may consider Johnny as being lazy in not thinking deeply enough in the opening anecdote, but all humans are capable of attempting to bypass deep thinking. The EEF 2017 maths guidance recommends that we ​‘teach pupils to interrogate and use their existing mathematical knowledge to solve problems’ (https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/school-themes/mathematics/) and that is the simple answer here. There was no misconception with Johnny; there just wasn’t enough engagement of thinking, interrogation of the question, or fact-checking before committing to an answer.

There are a few ways to try to avoid the speedy wrong first answer in the classroom:

• Enforce ​‘thinking time’ before any response is given. This would also have the added benefit of giving additional processing time to those who may require it due to SEND;
• Don’t ask for hands up to answer questions – pupils will switch off their thinking if they are confident they won’t be asked;
• Use mini-whiteboards for the pupils to write down their answer, and all show simultaneously when asked – this increases the level of commitment pupils’ have to have with their answer, thus increasing the level of effort they’ll put into their thinking;
• Consider your teaching pace – there is a middle ground between keeping things at a good speed, and moving too quickly, leaving thinking (and some pupils, probably) lagging behind.

There will always be those pupils who want to be the first to an answer, and who will therefore often get this wrong. It is our job as educators to slow them down, developing self-regulation skills and to encourage true engagement with their learning.

by Ro King