Why Do Some Students Understand and Others Don't?
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By Julian Dance —
Tags: Cognitive Science, Learning Science, Misconceptions, Knowledge in Education, Learning & Memory, Science of Learning, Education
After nearly twenty years in the classroom, I've become fascinated by a simple question: why do some students develop deep understanding while others struggle despite working hard? Looking back at a career's worth of books on teaching, cognitive science and misconceptions, I realised they were all helping me explore the same challenge.
By Julian Dance, Co-Founder of SideCog, Head of Science and Head of Big Ideas Reflections After Twenty Years in the Classroom As I prepare to leave classroom teaching at the end of this term, I've been gradually bringing my books home. There are too many to do it in one trip. Every few days I seem to arrive home carrying another small pile from school. Some haven't been opened for years. Others are full of notes, folded corners and post-it notes. A few are so battered they look as though they've survived a small war. Looking through them recently, I realised they tell a story I hadn't really noticed before. At first glance, they look like a collection of books about teaching. But they're not. They're really a record of a question I've been trying to answer for the last twenty years. Why do some students understand and others don't? Looking back, that's probably been the question sitting behind most of my reading and thinking throughout my career. Schools spend a lot of time talking about attainment, behaviour and revision. All of those things matter. But over the years I've become increasingly convinced that understanding is the thing that sits underneath them all. If students genuinely understand something, achievement tends to follow. If they don't, no amount of revision strategies, exam technique or last-minute cramming can fully compensate for it. What's interesting is that I didn't originally set out to become a teacher. Before entering education, I worked in sales. Looking back, that experience probably shaped me more than I realised at the time. Good salespeople spend a lot of time trying to understand how people think. What assumptions are they making? Why have they reached a particular conclusion? Why does one explanation resonate while another falls flat? Years later, standing in front of a classroom, I found myself asking remarkably similar questions. Why had one student understood an idea immediately while another had misunderstood it completely? Why would a student confidently explain a concept one week and then struggle to apply the same idea in a different context a fortnight later? Why did some misconceptions seem so stubborn? The longer I taught, the more I realised that knowing how to teach was only part of the puzzle. To become a better teacher, I needed to understand more about learning itself. Looking at the shelves now, I can actually see that journey. The early books are largely about the craft of teaching. Geoff Petty, Sue Cowley, Bill Rogers, Jackie Beere and others helped me become a better classroom practitioner. How do you explain things clearly? How do you manage behaviour? How do you structure lessons? How do you create a classroom where learning can happen? Those books were invaluable. But further along the shelves, the questions begin to change. The books become less about what the teacher is doing and more about what the student is thinking. That's where I found Graham Nuthall, Daniel Willingham, Rosalind Driver and Keith Taber. Those authors fundamentally changed how I viewed learning. One of the most powerful ideas came from the work of Driver and Taber. Students do not arrive in lessons as blank slates waiting to be filled with knowledge. They arrive with explanations already in place. They have spent years trying to make sense of the world around them and have developed ideas that seem perfectly reasonable from their perspective. The challenge is that some of those explanations aren't quite right. A student might believe that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones. They might think that plants get their food from the soil. They might believe electrical current gets used up as it moves around a circuit. These aren't careless mistakes. In many ways, they're evidence of learning. The student is doing exactly what humans do. They're looking for patterns, building explanations and trying to make sense of the world. The problem is that once an explanation becomes established, it can be remarkably difficult to replace. Suddenly, many of the things I had been observing in classrooms started to make sense. The students who struggled most were rarely those who knew the least. More often, they were the ones whose understanding had developed in slightly the wrong direction and had then become increasingly difficult to untangle. What looked from the outside like a lack of progress was often something quite different. The student wasn't failing to learn. They were learning perfectly well. They were simply building an explanation that was taking them further away from the one we were trying to teach. That realisation changed the way I thought about teaching. It changed how I questioned students. It changed how I assessed them. Most of all, it changed how I interpreted mistakes. A wrong answer stopped being evidence of failure and became evidence of thinking. It became a clue. A glimpse into how a student was making sense of what they had been taught. Over the years, many other authors joined those shelves. Nuthall led to Willingham. Willingham led to wider cognitive science. Later came writers such as Daisy Christodoulou, Tom Sherrington, David Didau, Peps McCrea, Megan Sumeracki and Yana Weinstein. Although they approached education from different directions, they all seemed to be wrestling with variations of the same question: How do we help students build understanding? Looking at those shelves now, I can see twenty years of professional development. But more than that, I can see twenty years of curiosity. The names changed. The research evolved. New ideas emerged and old assumptions were challenged. The question never really changed. Why do some students understand and others don't? As I prepare to leave the classroom, that's still the question that interests me most. In fact, it's the question that will continue to shape what comes next.