David Didau

This is the final post in a series of chapter summaries of the arguments made in my new book, Making Kids Cleverer. The rest of the series can be found here. And so, we finally reach the conclusion. Here I explicitly take on the arguments of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in The Bell Curve. They argue that the normal distribution of intelligence across a population is more or less immutable and that "the story of attempts to raise intelligence is one of high hopes, flamboyant claims, and disappointing results." According to the data, they're pretty much correct. Or at least, it would be correct [...]

This post is part of a series of chapter summaries of the arguments made in my new book, Making Kids Cleverer. The rest of the series can be found here. This last chapter is aimed specifically at teachers and makes the case that if our aim is to make children cleverer then we should adopt explicit instruction. We look at why other methodologies which have problem solving at their heart are likely to be ineffective and look back to Chapter 6 on memory to understand why explicit instruction is likely to work best. One thing to make clear is that explicit instruction - or [...]

This post is part of a series of chapter summaries of the arguments made in my new book, Making Kids Cleverer. The rest of the series can be found here. This chapter moves our discussion of how to make children cleverer from theory into practice. In chapters 6 and 7 we talked about how knowledge can be embedded in long-term memory as 'skill' and here we move to a discussion of how best to make this happen. Practising the wrong things in the wrong ways makes us better at doing things badly; only by practising the right things in the right ways will we [...]

This post is part of a series of chapter summaries of the arguments made in my new book, Making Kids Cleverer. The rest of the series can be found here. Having made the case that by teaching children more knowledge we are likely to make them cleverer, it's important to address the question of what knowledge ought to be taught. The case made in this chapter is that we should inoculate children against by trapped in a bubble of the present by teaching them that which that allows them to think new thoughts and make startling connections. The first point to make is that while [...]

This post summarises the arguments in the seventh chapter of my new book, Making Kids Cleverer. The rest of the chapter summaries can be found here. I'm sure that some readers who my be otherwise sympathetic to the arguments I advance about making children cleverer will take issue with some of the points I make in this chapter, particularly as I side step some of the thorniest philosophical debates about what precisely constitutes knowledge. Clearly I'd prefer what children know to be composed entirely of justified true beliefs, but sadly our brains are as full of misconceptions, confusions and falsehoods as they are anything [...]

This post is part of a series of chapter summaries of the arguments made in my new book, Making Kids Cleverer. The rest of the series can be found here. If you've been following the argument so far, you'll know that I'm suggesting that we can make children cleverer by increasing their crystallised intelligence - their store of knowledge in long-term memory - and to do that we need to find ways of helping children to remember more stuff. When people speak about memorisation in education it seems to conjure up all sorts of negative associations. In fact, most memorisation takes place without conscious [...]

This post summarises the arguments in the fifth chapter of my new book, Making Kids Cleverer. The rest of the chapter summaries can be found here. If intelligence is casually connected with heath, happiness and safety, if the environment matters in determining how intelligent we end up, how can we go about making ourselves cleverer? One thing we can be fairly sure will raise children’s intelligence is sending them to school. Education and intelligence have a two-way interaction: the more intelligent you are, the longer you stay in school and the longer you stay in school, the more intelligent you become. The evidence supporting [...]

This post summarises the arguments in the fourth chapter of my new book, Making Kids Cleverer. The rest of the chapter summaries can be found here. A central consideration to the project of making kids cleverer is where intelligence comes from; is it in our genes or is it a product of our environments? The answer is, both. In a very obvious sense no one is ‘born clever’. Babies would universally perform poorly on IQ tests, but some may have a greater potential for intelligence than others. The mistake is to believe that our genes represent our fate. The science of behavioural genetics is [...]

This post summarises the arguments in the third chapter of my new book, Making Kids Cleverer. The rest of the chapter summaries can be found here. Whatever it is you value, intelligence seems to be intimately connected with it. When experts are asked to define intelligence they come up with an unhelpfully broad and diverse range of definitions. Although we all tend to know what we mean when we describe a person as intelligent it's surprisingly hard to nail down a pithy description. However, as long as you're prepared to accept a description that isn't at all pithy, we can make some progress. [...]

This is the second of a series of posts summarising the arguments in my new book, Making Kids Cleverer.  The second chapter reviews some what we know from evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology and archeology about how we learn and think. The human mind is both built for and by culture. Although our brains are essentially the same as those of our Palaeolithic ancestors, our access to the vast accumulation of human culture is what makes us special. However, learning is a costly activity and we have evolved to maximise what can be learned in as short a time as possible. All learning is [...]