The subtle work of designing instructional materials

Daniel Willingham:

How should textbooks be designed? A new paper by Jennifer Kaminski and Vladimir Sloutsky shows that that can be real subtly in the answer.

The researchers examined early elementary materials meant to teach kids how to read graphs. They were specifically interested in comparing boring, monochromatic, abstract, bar graphs versus colorful, fun graphs that use a graphic. (Please excuse the black & white reproduction.)

We all know that textbook publishers are eager to make books more visually appealing. And in this case, what's the harm? The graph with the objects seems like a natural scaffold to learn the concept.

kaminski & Sloutsky found that some children shown the graph with embedded objects adopted a counting strategy to read a graph, even if they were taught to focus on the bar height and the axis. The authors surmise that the counting routine is so well-learned that when the child is presented with the vivid graphic with salient objects to count, it's simply very easy to go down that mental path. And of course the child does read the graph correctly.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at August 15, 2013 3:40 AM
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