On a recent morning, I had the chance to read poems my ninth-grade English students had written about encounters with racism. I was struck by the beauty and poignance of many of their lines. Yet I ...

The world is full of things to learn. Where to start? How to choose what to pay attention to? What motivates someone to seek new knowledge? The desire to learn is partly a preference for novelty: we ...

Mr. Willingham is a psychologist at the University of Virginia and the author, most recently, of “Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning Is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy.” See more of our coverage in ...