PatternLearning

see also: SummerSupplement.

Another reason I want to supplement from the Prentice Hall text this summer is to familiarize Ben with the style of his middle school math series, so we can skip the format shock period at the beginning of the school year. This is the period when the style of the book seems so new and strange, and he can't find the problems he's supposed to do, and he can't focus on the topic just because of the strangeness of the book.

This is definitely something that has to be taken into account in Ben's learning. He copes better with transitions of all sorts over time, but there is still a cost to making changes.

Besides, he is starting middle school this fall. He doesn't know what's about to hit him, and his teachers keep assuring me that my concerns about his managing lockers, his homework, the transitions between classes, are all pointless. I hope they're right about that; I think they're crazy, but I hope I'm wrong.

At least, if all goes well this summer, Prentice-Hall Mathematics will be a familiar friend in the fall.

Catherine and I both have a lot of familiarity with 'format shock', because it's a characteristic that everyone has to one degree or another, and people on the autism spectrum have extreme cases. Transitions of any sort are just hard for people with autism disorders, even mild ones.

One of the things that autism affects is the ability to extract the main idea from something. This is why transitions are difficult; because in the prior learning experience, the person may have focused on, and felt supported by, something that wasn't central to the topic. When the support vanishes -- which it may at any time, if it's not central to the topic -- it's disruptive. The support itself can be something very insignificant, like the color or font of a 'highlights' box on the corner of a page.

But we all rely on incidental supports to some extent, when learning something new. Non-central props help support us as we move to the next stage in our learning. At the other extreme, imagine how frustrating it would be if you were trying to learn something really new and difficult -- like Mandarin, say -- and the font, style, and problem set layout were dramatically different from day to day.

When Ben was taking Saxon Math in grades 1-3, he became very comfortable with the predictable format of its worksheets: a word problem at the top (usually with a rectangle to do little drawings in), followed by problems attacking the central feature of the lesson from different angles, all laid out similarly from day to day, and always with the same font.

As long as it is actually helping Ben's learning instead of derailing it, I'm fine with Ben's depending on a predictable format. I want the book itself to be out of the way of his learning, not to hinder it by providing continual little shocks.

Still, pattern learning can really derail real learning, by preventing a kid from generalizing what he knows. Consider, for example, a kid who always does subtraction problems oriented vertically, and when introduced to a subtraction problem that's oriented horizontally, can't do the problem. It could happen; but most math books take great care to avoid introducing fixed patterns like that.

A little variation nudges a student toward full mastery, by whittling away what's unessential.

Most textbook writers know this. It's a much more common problem these days for the format, and the desired response, to be unpredictable.


PatternLearningPart2
PatternTraining

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