JDFisherOnTextbookFragmentation < Kitchen

31 Jul 2005 - 00:26

JD Fisher on textbook fragmentation

J.D. Fisher of MathandText left a comment today that reminded me I'd wanted to point people to his post on textbook fragmentation, which is a HUGE, documented factor in bad math ed here in the U.S.

One reason publishers maintain a great deal of fragmentation in elementary basal mathematics texts, for instance, is that such a structure allows adoption committees and other, similar decision-making bodies, to quickly judge, with great confidence, that a text has indeed covered all of the requisite state standards.
But this structure also has the effect of 'un-prioritizing' content. Simple ideas and less relevant topics are given the same priority and the same space as more robust, more relevant topics.

And check out his excerpt of a 2005 math textbook's TOC:

1 Place Value Through Hundred Thousands
2 Place Value and Exponents
3 Place Value Through Hundred Billions
4 Compare, Order, and Round Whole Numbers
5 Place Value Through Thousandths
6 Problem-Solving Strategy: Find a Pattern
7 Compare, Order, and Round Decimals

The blue lessons (with the possible exception of Lesson 2) represent the exact same concept applied to larger and larger--and then much smaller--numbers. The red lessons are also closely related, but are separated by two somewhat unrelated lessons.

writing is organizing

People tell you writing is rewriting, which is true, but the main reason for all the rewriting is that what writing really is, is organizing. Ed had this insight today when I read him a line from a terrific critique of constructivism by two cognitive scientists, and it was a Brand New Thought for both of us. More on this later.

In the meantime, I can tell you that I've had a visceral understanding of just how dangerous unprioritized content is ever since I listened to Temple's stories about what happens to animals in a meatpacking plant once the employees have lost sight of the difference between the big stuff and the small stuff.

PowerPoint makes you dumb

(although, in the case of dimensional analysis, I am going to be relying on PowerPoint to make me smart)

I have zero time at this moment (or possibly ever) to read Edward Tufte's discussion of Boeing's PowerPoint presentation on the space shuttle Columbia, but I'm hoping maybe J.D. will take a look and fill us in. As I understand it, Tufte argues that PowerPoint's built-in bulleting structure equalized or even 'unprioritized' the 'possible tile damage.' That's my impression.

Whether or not I've got the jist, I can easily imagine a poorly structured, unprioritizing report resulting in catastophic failure. Easily.

Getting back to children and math, a severely fragmented textbook is going to be at a bare minimum a catastrophic obstacle to learning.

Of that, I'm sure.

update

I've just tracked down Edwart Tufte's long essay, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.

And a blog called The Talent Show has a lengthy excerpt from the TIMES article on PowerPoint's role in the Columbia disaster that's worth quoting in full here, too:

In August, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board at NASA released Volume 1 of its report on why the space shuttle crashed. As expected, the ship's foam insulation was the main cause of the disaster. But the board also fingered another unusual culprit: PowerPoint, Microsoft's well-known ''slideware'' program.
NASA, the board argued, had become too reliant on presenting complex information via PowerPoint, instead of by means of traditional ink-and-paper technical reports. When NASA engineers assessed possible wing damage during the mission, they presented the findings in a confusing PowerPoint slide -- so crammed with nested bullet points and irregular short forms that it was nearly impossible to untangle. ''It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation,'' the board sternly noted.
PowerPoint is the world's most popular tool for presenting information. There are 400 million copies in circulation, and almost no corporate decision takes place without it. But what if PowerPoint is actually making us stupider?
This year, Edward Tufte -- the famous theorist of information presentation -- made precisely that argument in a blistering screed called The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. In his slim 28-page pamphlet, Tufte claimed that Microsoft's ubiquitous software forces people to mutilate data beyond comprehension. For example, the low resolution of a PowerPoint slide means that it usually contains only about 40 words, or barely eight seconds of reading. PowerPoint also encourages users to rely on bulleted lists, a ''faux analytical'' technique, Tufte wrote, that dodges the speaker's responsibility to tie his information together. And perhaps worst of all is how PowerPoint renders charts. Charts in newspapers like The Wall Street Journal contain up to 120 elements on average, allowing readers to compare large groupings of data. But, as Tufte found, PowerPoint users typically produce charts with only 12 elements. Ultimately, Tufte concluded, PowerPoint is infused with ''an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.''

(btw, these are the same problems we face writing for the web....

update 2

I'm pulling J.D.'s comment up front:

Mr. Tufte butters his bread by analyzing, among other things, the contexts under which information is presented. He is likely correct in his critique of Powerpoint as a tool for information sharing.
For anyone, even the TIMES, to suggest or insinuate that this technology was responsible for seven deaths is, I think, irresponsible.

I agree, and I certainly don't want to be seen to be blaming PowerPoint for 7 deaths.

I'll also add that the 'PowerPoint makes you stupid' heading is a joke! (That's the heading used by the blog I mentioned.) I don't remotely feel that bulleted points make people stupid, and as a matter of fact I do feel that bulleted points frequently make people much more clear.

It would be extremely difficult to make sense on the web without them.

screenplays are structure, fyi

Back when I first started out, I thought writing was good sentences if you were writing nonfiction, and good dialogue if you were writing fiction.

Wrong.

SCREENPLAYS ARE STRUCTURE," shouts William Goldman in Adventures in the Screen Trade. "The essential opening labor a screenwriter must execute is, of course, deciding what the proper structure should be for the particular screenplay you are writing."
This, he believes, is "the single most important lesson to be learned about writing for films... Yes, nifty dialog helps one hell of a lot; sure, it's nice if you can bring your characters to life. But you can have terrific characters spouting just swell talk to each other, and if the structure is unsound, forget it."

Real Craft

He's right.

And, on the same page, here's Syd Field:

In The Screenwriter's Workbook, Syd Field seconds Goldman. "Structure is the most important element in the screenplay. It is the force that holds everything together; it is the skeleton, the spine, the foundation."

People look at Saxon Math and think it's prosaic, obvious, behaviorist.

But what's brilliant about Saxon is mostly invisible.

It's the structure.

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"Writing is organizing." Now there's a great thought I can take to the bank. Thanks.

Here's one back for you: professional mathematics is organizing. You have vague thoughts, you notice a vague pattern, and you try to organize your thoughts, to nail down the pattern, to really clarify what's going on beneath the hood. When you've nailed it completely, when you understand with perfect perspicacity the essence of the pattern, then you've got a proof of a new theorem. If you've really organized it, you've got a theorem that goes in the "Book of God".

-- WichitaBoy - 31 Jul 2005

Oh, and your comment about Saxon Math is spot on. It's the structure. The structure is brilliant.

Read Confucius or Socrates. The ideal teacher should be able to fade into the background like the Cheshire cat. And so with the ideal textbook.

-- WichitaBoy - 31 Jul 2005

Tufte is another inspiration for MathandText. He and Saussure.

I purchased VDQI a few years ago and accidentally received two copies, so take my compliments with a grain of salt--I still owe the guy money, theoretically.

Regarding the Powerpoint 'point,' though, it's worth noting that this board alleges that it found a problem with NASA's over-reliance on Powerpoint to present complex information, not with Powerpoint itself.

If senior managers at NASA rely on Powerpoint presentations for their complete picture, that says something about senior managers at NASA. It says nothing about Powerpoint presentations.

(By the way, if the Powerpoint was used simply to highlight problematic scenarios, this would not be objectionable, given that these scenarios would have almost certainly been investigated and detailed at length in the more desirable and lengthy technical reports mentioned.)

Mr. Tufte butters his bread by analyzing, among other things, the contexts under which information is presented. He is likely correct in his critique of Powerpoint as a tool for information sharing.

For anyone, even the TIMES, to suggest or insinuate that this technology was responsible for seven deaths is, I think, irresponsible.

-- JdFisher - 31 Jul 2005

Yes, thanks for the clarification...I'm not remotely 'against' PowerPoint, and in fact am using core PowerPoint useability ideas (bullets, highly streamlined text, etc.) to write for ktm.

-- CatherineJohnson - 31 Jul 2005

AND.....as I say, I haven't read Tufte.

I'm a popular culture sort of person; I like TV; I don't like elites.....so my natural inclination would be to be 'pro' PowerPoint!

-- CatherineJohnson - 31 Jul 2005

Actually, I am a PowerPoint skeptic, thanks to something Ed told me, and to a terrific book on public relations (PUBLIC RELATIONS FOR DUMMIES, believe it or not).

Ed says you should never, ever, use PowerPoint while giving a lecture, because everyone stares at the screen or at the hard copies of the screen, not you.

Absolutely true.

PUBLIC RELATIONS FOR DUMMIES says virtually the same thing. He says you completely undermine yourself having a big, huge screen over your head that everyone's staring at.

I agree.

I've given a couple of talks this year, and I use essentially zero visuals. I'm the visual.

-- CatherineJohnson - 31 Jul 2005

Oh my gosh!

I have to get your whole comment up front!

Beautiful!

btw, Keith what's-his-face....Devlin?....I think so....

Devlin says mathematics is the science of patterns, and that this has been the accepted definition for about 20 years.

Is that right?

(I think Sawyer says pretty much the same thing--can't wait to get some of his stuff posted.)

-- CatherineJohnson - 31 Jul 2005

J.D. & everyone--in case you were wondering, the way you prevent TWiki from perceiving a phrase like MathandText^? as a wiki word and highlighting it in yellow is to write 'nop' in front of it, enclosed in ... whatever these thingies are:

< nop>

When you get rid of the space between the 'less than' symbol and 'nop,' it doesn't show up on the screen, and it tells TWiki not to interpret the bumpy word you've just written as a wiki word.

-- CatherineJohnson - 31 Jul 2005

I have to put in a ZILLION in the PowerPoint post.

-- CatherineJohnson - 31 Jul 2005

Oh my. I apologize if my comment sounded belligerent. My thought was that the TIMES was at fault for using the word "culprit" in reference to Powerpoint. I was under no illusion that anyone here at KTM or Mr. Tufte believed that Powerpoint was the first mover in the shuttle scenario.

A shackling contradiction that I deal with daily--sometimes to my delight--is that my work is focused solely on math texts, and yet I cannot avoid the truth that texts have no real power over the thinking of adults that they do not first give them.

This is not true for students, though, which is why we all do what we do.

-- JdFisher - 01 Aug 2005

No, you did me a favor.

Words without nonverbals can go seriously astray (that's why people invented emoticons), and any newcomer to ktm could think (probably would think) I was blaming PowerPoint for the Columbia deaths.

This is always encouraging to me, given how much claptrap is out there.

I think students have more independence than we might think, too.

Remember Christopher's 'saying': 'They don't get it. When they make math fun, it's MORE BORING.'

However, young kids don't have the option to learn things independently if the textbook is bad.

-- CatherineJohnson - 01 Aug 2005

Young kids don't see the big picture, either; they don't see where they need to go, and they don't know when they're being misled.

Same thing, by the way, goes for grad students in some fields, including mathematics.

-- CarolynJohnston - 01 Aug 2005

WebLogForm
Title:	JD Fisher on textbook fragmentation
TopicType:	WebLog
SubjectArea:	AboutCurricula, CognitiveScience
LogDate:	200507302025

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