ABSTRACT
It is important to recognise that Dr Willingham was not suggesting that students actively dislike school. In fact, there is no serious evidence indicating that students, on average, dislike going to school. This aspect has been known since the 1920s, when research surveys were first carried out in this area. The findings remain much the same today. Researchers ask students how much they like school by inviting them to respond to items on a survey instrument. Surveys typically allow responses along a 5-point scale such as –2, –1, 0, 1, and 2, where, minus 2 means strongly dislike, 0 stands for neither like nor dislike, and 2 means strongly like.
