Montessori education has been in existence for over a century, but does it actually work?
Dr. Angeline Stoll Lillard spent years researching this question, and her book, Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius, is a must-read.
In her book, Dr. Lillard identifies eight principles at the heart of Montessori education. What’s key is that these Montessori principles align with what developmental science tells us about how humans actually learn. The remarkable thing is that Dr. Maria Montessori arrived at most of these insights through careful observation of children, decades before the research existed to corroborate how children learn.
In this two-part blog post, we’ll examine these eight principles and the connected research.
PRINCIPLE ONE: Movement and Learning Are Deeply Entwined
In traditional private and public schools, children are still expected to sit still, as if stillness is a prerequisite for learning. At Wheaton Montessori School, we understand how movement and thinking are intertwined. And research backs this up. Studies have found that physical activity improves cognition, judgment, memory, and social reasoning. Moving the body isn't a break from learning. Rather, the movement is connected to the learning.
Montessori materials are designed to be touched, carried, sorted, and manipulated. Your young children working with the knobbed cylinder blocks are actively perceiving, making judgments, and reasoning through their hands. The same is true when children sort fabric squares by texture, shake and compare sound cylinders, or lay out bead bars to represent quantities. Your elementary children are walking across the rooms, remembering aspects of timelines to build their own. The algebra tiles in our adolescent community are manipulated to represent positive and negative integers. Every material helps your children and adolescents integrate their minds and bodies.
Practical life activities take this even further. When children learn to pour, button, clean laundry, or prepare meals, they are engaging in organized sequences of purposeful action that develop concentration and executive function skills.
What the Research Shows
A Milwaukee study found that high school students who had previously attended Montessori programs significantly outperformed peers on math and science assessments, subjects that rely heavily on the kind of reasoning that, in Montessori, is first built through hands-on materials.
PRINCIPLE TWO: Choice Improves Both Learning and Well-Being
The freedom to choose is at the heart of Montessori education, but this isn’t just about enjoyment. Having choice measurably affects how well children learn and how they feel about themselves. In a striking series of studies, children aged seven to nine were given anagram puzzles to solve. Those who chose their own category of puzzle solved twice as many as children whose category had been chosen for them, even though the actual puzzles were identical. Those who had a choice also spent far more time voluntarily working on puzzles during free time.
The key finding is that the perception of independence, choice, control, or autonomy (even in small things) activates a fundamentally different relationship to the work. Children who feel in control tend to engage more deeply, persist longer, and take more ownership of their learning. Don’t you find this true in your own lives as well?
In an authentic Montessori classroom, children choose their own work throughout the day. Importantly, Dr. Lillard notes that this freedom is always paired with responsibility, and that too many choices can be as demotivating as none. High-fidelity Montessori environments offer meaningful choices. Rather than an overwhelming array, each classroom has a selection of purposeful materials designed to match children’s developmental readiness.
Choice and concentration are closely connected, too. When children choose work that genuinely engages them, they're far more likely to reach a deep state of focus, or what psychologists call a “flow state.”
PRINCIPLE THREE: Children Learn Best When They're Genuinely Interested
This sounds obvious, of course! It makes sense that we learn better when we are interested. However, think about this in terms of how classrooms are typically structured. If interest is one of the most powerful drivers of learning, then organizing a school day around a single curriculum delivered to the whole class at once works against almost every child in the room. Scheduling gym or music for a set time each week limits children to believe that actively using their bodies or singing is reserved for when a clock dictates.
Dr. Montessori understood children's interests as signals pointing toward what their developing minds most need to engage with at that moment in their lives. These windows of opportunity, or "sensitive periods,” are particular stretches of development during which children are uniquely primed to absorb certain kinds of learning. During these windows, learning that matches the child's inner readiness can be extraordinarily effortless and lasting.
The role of interest is why Montessori materials are designed to be beautiful, engaging, and self-correcting. The sensorial materials, for example, aren't only teaching discrimination of size or color. They are designed to help children become more interested in noticing the world around them. The adult’s role is to observe and assess ideal moments to present new lessons.
PRINCIPLE FOUR: Rewards Undermine the Motivation They're Meant to Build
Offering children external rewards (e.g., stickers, prizes, praise for being smart) for activities they already enjoy reliably reduces their intrinsic motivation to do those things later.
What the Research Shows
Researchers identified preschoolers who loved drawing with markers. They then told one group they would receive a "Good Player Award" for drawing (a fancy certificate with a gold star). Weeks later, the children who had expected the reward used the markers far less than they had before, and half as much as children who had never been offered a reward at all. Expecting a reward had turned something they loved into something they did for a prize. And when the prize was gone, so was much of the pleasure.
Rewards like sticker charts, gold stars, and even grades and honor rolls, shift children’s relationship to learning from "I do this because it interests me" to "I do this to get the reward." When the reward is taken away, children’s inner drive has often already weakened.
At Wheaton Montessori School, one way feedback comes is through the work itself. Our classrooms are filled with beautiful and intriguing activities, which include self-correcting aspects. Children are able to discover their own errors without solely relying on external judgment. The outcome is that children's relationship to learning remains intrinsic, personal, and lifelong.
This doesn't mean feedback is absent, though! What matters is the kind of feedback. Research by psychologist Carol Dweck found that praising children for effort (e.g., "you worked really hard on that”) produces dramatically better outcomes than praising ability (e.g., “you’re so smart”). Children noticed for effort choose harder challenges, persist longer after failure, and actually improve their performance over time. Children praised for their intelligence begin avoiding challenges, fearing that failure will expose them as not as smart as they were told they were.
In our upcoming blog post on Monday, April 27th, 2026, we’ll explore the next four Montessori principles outlined in Dr. Angeline Stoll Lillard’s book, Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius:
- Children Learn Powerfully from Each Other
- Meaningful Context Makes Learning Richer and More Lasting
- How Adults Interact with Children Shapes Everything
- Order in the Environment Supports Order in the Mind
