Do U.S. Students Need to Struggle More?
From Elizabeth Murray
James Stigler is a professor of psychology at UCLA who studies teaching and learning around the world. I recently heard about his research on National Public Radio, and it resonated with me in explaining why U.S. students may be giving up on the study of challenging STEM subjects. He believes that from a very early age, American students see struggle as an indicator that a person is just not very smart. “It’s a sign of low ability — people who are smart don’t struggle, they just naturally get it, that’s our folk theory. Whereas in Asian cultures they tend to see struggle more as an opportunity.”

In Eastern cultures, both parents and students alike believe that struggle is an integral part of the learning process. Since it is assumed that everyone will struggle when learning something new, it is the persistence with which one faces the struggle that becomes a goal to attain and something to be admired. Professor Stigler recognized that it was this level of persistency that counted. It didn’t matter so much that a student “didn’t get it,” what mattered more was that a student didn’t give up. This is very different than the Western view that intelligence is a “cause” and that learning is more about intrinsic ability than about behavior.

All of this matters because if struggle indicates strength — an ability to face down the challenges that inevitably occur when you are trying to learn something — you’re more willing to accept it. Inversely, if struggle indicates weakness — a lack of intelligence — it makes you feel bad, and so you’re less likely to put up with it.

Is there a way to bring this attitude toward struggle and persistence into US classrooms? Professor Stigler believes that we could change our views of learning and place more emphasis on struggle. For example, Stigler says, “in the Japanese classrooms that he’s studied, teachers consciously design tasks that are slightly beyond the capabilities of the students they teach, so the students can actually experience struggling with something just outside their reach. Then, once the task is mastered, the teachers actively point out that the student was able to accomplish it through hard work and struggle.” He believes that especially in U.S. schools, we don’t create enough of these types of learning experiences, and then, when we do, we don’t point them out clearly enough.

Professor Stigler is working on bringing these new attitudes and teaching methods into his own field - the teaching of mathematics. To briefly sum up his approach, he believes that math must be taught not as bunch of procedures to be performed, but rather as a form of quantitative thinking where procedures are connected to concepts and problems. And he contends that this can only be accomplished in the classroom by providing plenty of time for:

• Struggle with important math concepts
• Explicit connections to math concepts
• Deliberate practice applying concepts/procedures to solving problems

To learn more about Professor Stigler’s ideas on this topic, go to: http://vimeo.com/19999049

Elizabeth Murray is Project Manager of the MIT BLOSSOMS Initiative

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