What is thought-provoking is then not anything that we determine. According to our assertion, what of itself gives us most to think about, what is most thought-provoking is this — that we are still not thinking. — Heidegger
Thoughtlessness is thought-provoking. It presents thought with a problem: when smart people do thoughtless things it raises eyebrows: huh? How can thinking people be thoughtless? Common sense says we are always thinking. Yet, the word “thoughtless” seems ideal for describing certain actions or comments that seem to be a failure to engage the mind.
Arguably one of the more famous examples of student thoughtlessness in education occurred with test-taking students in response to a NAEP arithmetic question a few years back:
An army bus holds 36 soldiers. If 1128 soldiers are being bused to their training site,, how many buses are needed?
Somewhat shockingly, although 70% of 8th graders did the correct computation (i.e. dividing 1128 by 36), only 23% gave the correct answer. How could that be? Through what can only be described as a failure to think. 29% said the number of buses needed was “31 remainder 12” and the remaining 18% rounded down instead of up. Students simply failed to think about the meaning of their computed answer – a remainder 12 bus?
Ever since, NAEP and many state tests use similar items to see if students are thinking about their answers. Here from the more recent 2007 NAEP is a simpler version of the above question, for 4th graders:
Five classes are going on a bus trip and each class has 21 students. If each bus holds only 40 students, how many buses are needed for the trip?
Only 40% got the answer right.
Nor should we think the problem is only in mathematics. Here is a question from MCAS 10th grade English test from Massachusetts. Students read a 17-paragraph non-fiction article, excerpted below:
1st paragraph:
A fellow fourth grader broke the news to me after she saw my effort on a class assignment involving scissors and construction paper. “You cut out a purple bluebird,” she said. There was no reproach in her voice, just a certain puzzlement. Her observation opened my eyes— not that my eyes particularly help—to the fact that I am colorblind. In the 36 years since, I’ve been trying to understand what that means. I’m still not sure I do….
17th (and final) paragraph:
Unlike left-handers, however, we seem disinclined to rally round our deviation from the norm. Thus there’s no ready source of information about how many presidents, or military heroes, or rock singers have been colorblind. Based on the law of averages, though, there must have been some. We are everywhere, trying to cope, trying to blend in. Usually we succeed. Until someone spots our purple bluebirds. Then the jig is up.
6 questions were asked of students. Almost all students got the first few questions – about surface details of the article – correct (so we know they read it). However, the last question related to this passage was apparently the hardest question on all subject-area tests given that year. Here is the question:
This selection is best described as –
A. a biography.
B. a scientific article.
C. an essay.
D. an investigative report.
Only 33% answered this question correctly. What gives? Fortunately, Massachusetts used to release all its tests once given, so the newspapers would routinely interview teachers and students about the hardest questions – thus, we know the answer to the puzzle. When interviewed by reporters about this question, many students said it couldn’t possibly be an essay since “an essay has 5 paragraphs.”
It is of course fashionable to bash standardized tests as the cause of such responses but methinks this is, itself, a thoughtless response. Because if we were more attentive, we would see and hear student thoughtlessness around every corner (as well as in answers to teacher-designed tests.)
Here are some examples from my own observation and from discussion with teachers on examples they have heard:
1. A 9th grader is given a performance task in a general science course to measure within a certain margin of error the size of the school’s main quadrangle, using only rulers and trigonometry. After a two-hour exercise he announces his answer: 184,000 sq. feet – the size of the entire school and all its playing fields.
2. In a discussion of the different roles of the President and the Executive branch, a middle school teacher solicits an enumeration of the “seven different hats” worn by the President in his various roles, as listed in the previous night’s reading. Amidst frantic waving of hands, the teacher calls on a girl who answers “Chief of State.” The teacher nods approval, then asks her: “What is a ‘chief of state’?” The girl shrugs her shoulders and says “I dunno.”
3. A 5th-grade straight-A student asks her teacher and classmates why – when she and her family flew cross-country last summer vacation – she didn’t see any lines of latitude or longitude below. Another student then wondered if there were physical borders marking the difference between the various regions of the country.
3. In a HS US History class, when a particular student answers a question, other students typically ignore him or more generally speak as if they have not heard what any previous speakers have said.
4. In a middle school language arts class, students consistently turn in papers with syntactical, punctuation, and logical errors – yet with a high self-assessment grade by the writers. (A self-assessment is required for each paper: students must give themselves a grade and write the comment they think the teacher will write.)
5. On the soccer field, after repeated demonstrations and drills on positioning and playing for defense when outnumbered by opposing players, defenders continue to rush after the person with the ball (thus making it even easier to advance the ball to the other players on their team since the defense is so outnumbered.)
6. In a physics lab, a successful student does a velocity/time experiment, plots the points on graph paper and comes up with crooked segments instead of the straight line that the text suggests would be expected. When asked to explain the graph, the student suggests that when the “experts” do the graphing, the points “no doubt” all come out co-linear since “they have better equipment.”
7. When the period ends (or a minute or two before it ends), students begin to gather up books, rustle papers and bolt up as soon as the bell rings – whether someone is speaking or not.
8. A math teacher, trying to further a discussion of the nature of theorems, asks students the difference between postulates and theorems. Answers include: the postulates are true, the postulates are self-evident, the theorems require proof. When one student replies that postulates need proving, no one questions this remark.
9. In a famous series of experiments done by Johns Hopkins researchers 30 years ago, graduates of college physics courses predict simple motions to a given problem that disobey the most basic laws. The college students make the same mistakes as Piaget’s child subjects. (This research was the basis for all modern tests of science misconceptions). Eric Mazur, Harvard Physics Professor, learns about the research but thinks it could not possibly apply to his bright and able students. Wrong. And thus begins his peer instruction process and the invention of the ‘clickers’ to bring such conceptions to the surface more readily.
Thoughtlessness bespeaks a larger problem than mere lack of knowledge or a simple deficit of attentiveness. Eric Mazur’s work and that of others in trying to more effectively listen and look for student thoughtlessness via formative assessment, is clearly a key way forward. I think we need to all think more deeply about thoughtlessness and its causes – especially since we may be unwittingly furthering thoughtlessness by our methods of instruction.
17 Responses
I have been stealing Dan Meyers three act tasks to use as goal less problems for my students . . . forcing them to verbally describe and generate answerable questions, then diagramming / graphing the data, then asking them to find out as many interesting quantities from the graphs, etc. as they can.
I am astounded that the hardest part for my students is to describe what is happening / generate answerable questions. They are all smart 9th graders, I just wonder if they have ever been forced to ‘think’ before! Of course there is no specified state standard on thinking, no learning goal written down. Has teaching been reduced down to assembly work?
“Has teaching been reduced down to assembly work?”
Yes. Teaching to the test really dumbs down teaching. Writing is reduced to a formula based on the rubrics used to evaluate it. I am not at all surprised that a student did not realize an essay was not defined by the number of paragraphs. Students are taught how to game multiple choice questions. Eliminate choices with absolutes like always or never. Thoughtfulness has to be taught to the brightest of children and actively encouraged. How many times have you found yourself saying to your own children, “What were you thinking, knowing full well that they weren’t!
But as I wrote, this problem is of long standing. I saw this phenomenon in private school students in 1974; the misconception research shows it is common in college science. So i don’t think your answer holds up. Test prep might actually yield a better answer than 26 remainder 12 buses….
What’s the good news?
The good news is that we can see the issue more clearly and address it – just as has happened with formative assessment in response to misconceptions.
So glad to see thinking about thoughtlessness! As I see it, thoughtlessness seems to be what happens when one is not thinking for a purpose. The examples show students who are not seeing or trying to see the whole. I’m always asking why my students should care about a problem or issue. Their “failure” to see the obvious, to see the big picture, is not confusion, but disengagement. It’s not a skills failure, one that can be remedied by more drilling or more problems, but a reality problem. The student’s mistake in assuming that the physical world might bear visible marks delineating separate states or countries — that’s priceless. School, maps, airplanes, the United States — all of these are just “academic” in the worst sense. The student’s school world is a deeply unreal and abstract place. What does it matter to the student whether latitude is a real or abstract line? The whole school environment suggests that there is no difference between the two. Despite romantic rhetoric to the contrary, there is really very little reason to go to school for most kids other than to fulfill the obligation to go to school. It prepares you for nothing but more school and then, if you are lucky, possessions. What’s not discussed is “What problems really need to be solved, and how can kids participate in their solution?” The weird mistakes kids make argue powerfully for more community work, extra-curricular work. Matthew Crawford in his *Shop Class as Soul Craft* gives a more philosophical spin on it, but as a teacher, I think the often greatest impediment to true thoughtFULLness is, unfortunately, school.
To put that in positive terms, thoughtfulness comes from purposefulness.
“Engagement” was exactly my thought as I read Mr. Wiggins blog. The student who answered, “chief of state” but did not know what that was, had engaged only with the finding of the seven roles, not what those roles meant. The history students who speak out in a stream of consciousness fashion with no thought to the thread of the conversation are engaged only with their own level of understanding and not with the flow of ideas in the discussion. Students who begin packing up their belongings while someone is speaking or while a presentation is continuing (and I have unfortunately been dismayed to be with teachers in professional development situations doing the same thing) have disengaged themselves with the content and are thoughtlessly and mundanely responding in true Pavlovian fashion to a bell or the movement of the hands of the clock. The task for us as teachers and presenters is to be thoughtful ourselves about how to raise the level of engagement in our students or, in many cases, how to even ignite that spark of engagement in the first place.
The problem “Five classes are going on a bus trip and each class has 21 students. If each bus holds only 40 students, how many buses are needed for the trip?” is not an easy one. First, how many teachers and chaperones are going? Is it acceptable to split a class between buses, or is the teacher for the class legally required to be on the same bus as his or her students? Does the field trip last long enough that spare dirvers need to be taken on the bus as well? Are the students taking any equipment (band instruments, football uniforms, …) and does the bus have separate luggage compartments or does the equipment have to take up seats?
I can see lots of gifted students getting bogged down in this “simple” question, which is only simple if you decide to ignore the meaning of the question and treat it as an arithmetic exercise.
But you are chastising students who used that strategy, as if there were a “correct” answer in the real world with the information given.
Your riff on the chaperones and equipment only make the point in a different way: in the real world you have to think about the consequences of your judgments. School often lets students get away with ‘theoretical’ and ‘thoughtless’ work.
Oh, I agree with you about the need for students to think about problems in context and understand the consequences. I just found it “thoughtless” of you to use the statement “Only 40% got the answer right” for a problem in which careful thought reveals that there is not a single “right” answer, though there are clearly many wrong answers.
Your example
“7. When the period ends (or a minute or two before it ends), students begin to gather up books, rustle papers and bolt up as soon as the bell rings – whether someone is speaking or not.”
stands out as being quite different—it is about politeness, not about thinking. In fact, the student may be thinking very clearly and rationally that unless they leave class exactly on time, there is no way they’ll make it to their next class on time, where they will be marked down for being tardy.
Not so – it is ‘thoughtless’ to consider only oneself and be rude to those at the moment; and it is related to the thoughtlessness of not listening to others. It’s like people who text while supposedly listening to you. I wrote my dissertation on the links between the 2 meanings of ‘thoughtfulness’ – that’s why I put this in – and I think both Piaget and Dewey who wrote extensively on this were correct in seeing the two as closely related. Perhaps I’ll excerpt some of my old dusty dissertation on this…
My private (?) fear is that only 10-20% of learners really care about thoughtfulness. Perhaps the majority are “satisficed” with “thinking-about-it-for-awhile” and then moving on to the next pressing issue.
Just in case you think the above characterization is weird; consider this. I have spent the last few days being lyrical (while reading) the contemplations of a deep chemistry “thinker” William B. Jensen. He IS really deep. He truly moved me as as an (ex) fellow chemist…
If I compare his 2011 writings to his mid 1990’s “biggies” – that I loved reading! – I detect a “deflation” in his presentation. I personally think he got demoralized by the the lack of thoughtfulness around him during his ardent journey. And he has done his worthy proselytizing for many decades.
All I am asking is: do we continue bravely doing it for the “non-majority”? [Let’s be honest…human history is NOT replete with examples of the the majority being heroic; the thoughtful ones usually come as the the minority voice].
Just wondering……………………….
I’m with you on this. Nietzsche said somewhere that the truly great thinkers just keep thinking one idea. The key word there is ‘keep’
Presumably there are multiple causes of this thoughtlessness apparent in students, which I have of course noticed myself as well.
Some questions to ponder:
1. Has thoughtlessness in students changed? Can we measure the rate of thoughtlessness in students? Have there always been thoughtless people?
2. Does the nature of school encourage thoughtlessness? It seems to me that if you spend your entire day trying to guess at what answer the teacher wants, you might not spend enough of it thinking about what questions you have…
3. What about the nature of our society outside of school? How does the bombardment of people by media affect their ability to think?
I appreciate your questions. While we want to address the critical topic of “thinking,” we don’t want to oversimplify the causes nor the solutions.
I see the elements and standards of thinking promoted by Linda Elder and Richard Paul as a framework that teachers can use to encourage thoughtfulness. It would seem that all of the examples of thoughtlessness you cite could be addressed if teachers considered these standards when questioning students and leading discussions.. Specifically, considering just the standards of critical thinking, teachers must ensure that student responses address the standards of logic, depth, breadth, accuracy, precision, significance, relevance, identify underlying assumptions and implied consequences. I have used these standards in my own teaching and, when used consistently, I see a reduction in the kinds of responses you cite above.