Daniel T. Willingham

Daniel T. Willingham is an American psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 1992. He earned a BA in psychology from Duke University in 1983 and a PhD in cognitive psychology from Harvard University in 1990. His research focuses on the application of cognitive psychology and cognitive science to K–16 education, including how principles of learning and memory can inform classroom practice.

Willingham is the author of several influential books on learning and reading, including Why Don’t Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom (first published in 2009) and The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads (2017). His other works include Raising Kids Who Read, Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning Is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy, and co‑authored texts such as Cognition: The Thinking Animal. He writes the “Ask the Cognitive Scientist” column for American Educator and was appointed in 2017 as a member of the National Board for Education Sciences.