05 Aug 2005 - 03:55

JD on glitz in textbook publishing

I never knew textbook publishing was so full of landmines.

I've often complained that Ben's Prentice-Hall Mathematics Course 1 textbook, apart from being a basically decent text, is too full of pointless, distracting colors and pictures and charts. I wrote in the comments in this post that I suspected someone was actually counting the numbers of pictures of Asian and black and Hispanic and white and disabled kids to ensure they were all roughly equal (although, at the risk of being tasteless, I note that there are no facially deformed or cerebral palsied or even blind kids' pictures among the disabled kids; just perfectly typical-looking smiley kids on crutches and sitting in wheelchairs).

JdFisher, who hosts MathAndText, put up this post today that confirms my sense that this head-count is something textbook publishers pay a lot of attention to.

Why the distracting pictures of things that have no connection to the text, not even anything as tenuous as a link to an irrelevant aspect of the word problems in the text?

Why do we have to have a head count of photos of kids -- why not skip the photos completely?

J.D. writes:

The desire on the part of publishers to include images and "real-world connections" is so strong that publishers will face all kinds of headaches to put them in their books. Teachers and administrators want to motivate their students to approach mathematics, and publishers, to compete in today's textbook market, need to try to help teachers and administrators do this. These are the reasons for what some would call glitz.

It sounds as though the source of this problem is a misunderstanding, on the part of teachers and administrators, of what makes a successful textbook for the kids (the publishers, of course, know that from their perspective, what makes a successful text is whatever causes consumers to buy it).

Do they really suppose that kids come into math class with their little eyes glowing because their texts have 5 colors of text, and totally unrelated pictures of Amish people having communal barn-raising?

I think it's more likely that they are a huge source of distraction -- and kids from all walks of life are a lot more distractable when they're finding something difficult already.

Better a very clean presentation, I think, than a busy one; and that goes for all sorts of textbooks, not just math.

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Diane Ravitch wrote a whole book (The Language Police) on the fantasy world textbook publishers are required to present. Things like grandmothers fixing roofs, no social classes in ancient Egypt, quotas for who must be in picture, banned topics, etc.

http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/summer2003/thingruel.html

See this for bizarre censorship:

http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/summer2003/excised.html

Images to avoid: http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/summer2003/bannedwords.html

Stereotyped Images to Avoid in Texts,Illustrations, and Reading Passages in Tests Girls and Women/Boys and Men: Images To Avoid Girls as peaceful, emotional, warm [SF-AW] Girls as poor at math, science [SF-AW] Girls as neat [SF-AW, HRW3, MMH] Girls as shorter, smaller than boys [SF-AW] Men and boys as strong, brave, silent [AIR, RIV] Boys as strong, rough, competitive [SF-AW] Boys as curious, ingenious, able to overcome obstacles [NYC] Boys as intelligent, logical, mechanical [SF-AW, NYC] Boys as quiet, easygoing [SF-AW]

People of Color: Images To Avoid People of color as universally athletic [AIR] Minority children or adults as passive recipients, observers of action, or victims in need of rescue by others [MA] People of color who become successful by accepting discrimination and working hard [NYC] People of color who abandon their own culture and language to achieve success [NYC] People of color as exotic, childlike, folkloric [NYC] People of color as gangsters and criminals [NYC] People of color living in poor urban areas [AIR, ETS1] People of color being angry [AIR] People of color as politically liberal [AIR] People of color belonging to any one religion [AIR] People of color valued as tokens or valued by whites as professional peers [AIR] People of color sharing a common culture or preferences [AIR] People of color sharing common dress [AIR]

Persons Who Are Older: Images To Avoid Older people as meddlesome, demanding, childish, unattractive, inactive, victims of ridicule and violence [MMH, NYC] Older people in nursing homes or with canes, walkers, wheelchairs, orthopedic shoes, or eyeglasses [HRW1] Older people as helpless and dependent on others to take care of them [AIR, NYC, ETS2, RIV] Older people as ill, physically weak, feeble, or dependent [AIR, NYC, ETS1] Older people as funny, absent-minded, fussy, or charming [NES] Older people who have twinkles in their eyes, need afternoon naps, lose their hearing or sight, suffer aches and pains [NES] Older people who are retired, are at the end of their careers, have lived the most fruitful years of their lives, or are engaged in a life of leisure activities [NES, NYC] Older persons who are either sweet and gentle or irritable and pompous [HM1]

-- KtmGuest - 05 Aug 2005

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what, me again? -- well, stop being

so doggone interesting if you don't like it.

here's a letter i had published 10 years ago about distracting illustrations:

http://members.aol.com/vlorbik/odc/trends.html

-- KtmGuest - 05 Aug 2005

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hi again!

Here's my first opportunity to use the expression cognitive load:

Intrinsic load relates to the integral complexity of an idea or set of concepts, and reflects the inherent, absolute difficulty of the material to be learned. For example, the mental calculation of 2 + 2 has lower intrinsic load than solving a differential equation. Extraneous load is attributable to the design of the instructional materials, and shows itself as the unnecessary load found in inefficient instructional designs. For example, an audio-visual presentation format usually has lower extraneous load than a visual-only format, because in the former case, working memory has less information to process in the visual modality since the audio modality is also being used to convey information.

When you dump in gratuitous illustrations you are raising cognitive load. I'd put money on it.

And I know for a fact, because I've written enough about this subject, that it takes mental energy to filter things out, to ignore big, huge, 4-color pictures that are staring you in the face.

When you're trying to learn maths, you don't have a lot of mental energy to spare.

Another story: a couple of years ago I started putting office supplies in stark white boxes, with one white label on the outside.

I did this because I was getting too overrun by the cluttered visuals around me. When I mentioned this to a friend, she said she knew a graphic artist who had taken ALL of her books and packed them in simple boxes for the same reason.

-- CatherineJohnson - 05 Aug 2005

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He also makes the unsubstantiated charge that "new editions appear frequently to prevent books from being reused."

I just noticed this line over at V's letter--this is flat wrong.

Ed was hired to write a Western Civ textbook many years ago (the project unravelled eventually) and the entire reason the team was going to do it was because the text would be revised and reissued every 3 years.

The publishing company--Prentice Hall, as I recall--had full statistics on exactly how many new copies are sold in each year of the 3-year cycle.

Textbook publishing is a business. Of course new editions are put out regularly to increase sales. This isn't a secret; this is a mode of business.

Moreover, there is no reason on earth why a tenured professor would write a Western Civ textbook if this weren't the case. It's a huge undertaking, and you sacrifice research, scholarship, and promotions while you're working on it.

-- CatherineJohnson - 05 Aug 2005

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I find these trends scandalous and believe they should be resisted. Fortunately for us in Mathematics, inexpensive and well-produced texts are available; for example, the Dover reprint series, the hardy perennial Schaum's Outlines , various publications of the professional organizations, and "popular" books like those of William Dunham,, Rudy Rucker, and Ian Stewart.

I wanted to get these recommendations pulled over here so I don't forget them. (I'll get them onto the book recommendations page when I get back.)

-- CatherineJohnson - 05 Aug 2005

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There is a full page (in small print) of permissions. The illustrations include photos (of Elvis Presley and Bill Clinton among others) and comic strips as well as (many) illustrations with a more obvious bearing on the discussion in the actual text.

This is SOOOOOO wrong.

-- CatherineJohnson - 05 Aug 2005

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V's rebuttel to that somewhat snarky reply was quite good, also.

-- SusanS - 05 Aug 2005

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Which you just posted...

Hey, where are you, Catherine?

-- SusanS - 05 Aug 2005

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about that "unsubstantiated assertion": that new editions of textbooks are issued to prevent reuse. Well, what else? Does it take eight tries to get it right?

Publishing is a business.

A business.

Textbooks are created and sold for a profit.

Period.

People who write textbooks write them for money, and ALSO write them to create something important, useful, and sound.

It is possible to have more than one motivation for an undertaking.

It is not possible to create enormous, gaudy, visually repellant textbooks as a volunteer activity.

-- CatherineJohnson - 05 Aug 2005

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I've read a little of Ravitch's LANGUAGE POLICE. It's a horror.

One thing no textbook can show is a male being taller than a female.

You also can't locate anyone anywhere...for instance, you can't have a story where a child lives by the sea because, IIRC, that might cause children who don't live by the sea to feel bad (something like that).

-- CatherineJohnson - 05 Aug 2005

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What really ticks me off is that the one remaining group you CAN be negative about is white boys, who are now far behind white girls in school achievement. (The NYU student body is something like....60% girls???)

When I get around to it I'll post the sexist word problem in Everyday Math; the entire premise of the problem is that men are insensitive, unkind, and rude.

-- CatherineJohnson - 05 Aug 2005

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Men and boys as strong, brave, silent [AIR, RIV] Boys as strong, rough, competitive [SF-AW] Boys as curious, ingenious, able to overcome obstacles [NYC] Boys as intelligent, logical, mechanical [SF-AW, NYC] Boys as quiet, easygoing [SF-AW]

This is very interesting.

I had assumed that the willingness to be negative about boys was unconscious.

This implies that it's fully conscious. Positive stereotypes about boys have been banned.

What does that leave you with?

-- CatherineJohnson - 05 Aug 2005

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For years Christopher has been complaining that on TV the boys are always the dumb ones who lose.

It's true, too.

-- CatherineJohnson - 05 Aug 2005

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The fun thing about the Singapore Math books is that they're not politically correct.

So, in the story problems, the boys always have better grades or more money or there are just lots more of them.

He loves it!

-- CatherineJohnson - 05 Aug 2005

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Wow.

I just checked the source on the first Comment.

This needs to be a front page post.

The fact that textbooks are formally, consciously forbidding positive images of boys, coupled with a steep decline in boys welfare in the schools--people need know about this.

-- CatherineJohnson - 05 Aug 2005

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It seems contradictory to, on the one hand, see glitz as increasing cognitive load and, on the other, to see it as a distraction.

The idea behind this so-called extraneous cognitive load seems to be that it is attributed to outside elements of a text that make the text hard to read or comprehend. A distraction would conceivably only make it more difficult to GET to the content.

Also, there must be more than unexplored common sense involved in the idea that material extraneous to the content explored in the text could not motivate students to engage with that content.

We don't have to look far for examples of this, I think.

-- JdFisher - 08 Aug 2005