Month: September 2014

Total 7 Posts

“You Can Always Add. You Can’t Subtract.” Ctd.

Bryan Anderson and Joel Patterson simply subtracted elements from printed tasks, added them back in later, and watched their classrooms become more interesting places for students.

Anderson took a task from the Shell Centre and delayed all the calculation questions, making room for a lot of informal dialog first.

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Patterson took a Discovering Geometry task and removed the part where the textbook specified that the solution space ran from zero to eight.

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“It turns out that by shortening the question,” Joel Patterson said, “I opened the question up, and the kids surprised themselves and me!”

I believe EDC calls these “tail-less problems.” I call it being less helpful.

BTW. These are great task designers here. I spent the coldest winter of my life at the Shell Centre because I wanted to learn their craft. Discovering Geometry was written by friend-of-the-blog Michael Serra. This only demonstrates how unforgiving the print medium is to interesting math tasks, like asking Picasso to paint with a toilet plunger. You have to add everything at once.

A Response To The Founder Of Mathspace On The Costs And Benefits Of Adaptive Math Software

Mo Jebara, the founder of Mathspace, has responded to my concerns about adaptive math software in general and his in particular. Feel free to read his entire comment. I believe he has articulated several misconceptions about math education and about feedback that are prevalent in his field. I’ll excerpt those misconceptions and respond below.

Computer & Mouse v. Paper & Pencil

Jebara:

Just like learning Math requires persistence and struggle, so too is learning a new interface.

I think Mathspace has made a poor business decision to blame their user (the daughter of an earlier commenter) for misunderstanding their user interface. Business isn’t my business, though. I’ll note instead that adaptive math software here again requires students to learn a new language (computers) before they find out if they’re able to speak the language they’re trying to learn (math).

For example, here is a tutorial screen from software developed by Kenneth Tilton, a frequent commenter here who has requested feedback on his designs:

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Writing that same expression with paper and pencil instead is more intuitive by an order of magnitude. Paper and pencil is an interface that is omnipresent and easily learned, one that costs a bare fraction of the computer Mathspace’s interface requires, one that never needs to be plugged into a wall.

None of this means we should reject adaptive math software, especially not Mathspace, the interface of which allows handwriting. But these user interface issues pile high in the “cost” column, which means the software cannot skimp on the benefits.

Misunderstanding the Status Quo

Jebara:

Does a teacher have time to sit side by side with 30 students in a classroom for every math question they attempt?

[..]

But teachers can’t watch while every student completes 10,000 lines of Math on their way to failing Algebra.

[..]

I talk to teachers every single day and they are crying out for [instant feedback software].

Existing classroom practice has its own cost and benefit columns and Jebara makes the case that classroom costs are exorbitant.

Without adaptive feedback software, to hear Jebara tell it, students are wandering in the dark from problem to problem, completely uncertain if they’re doing anything right. Teachers are beleaguered and unsure how they’ll manage to review every student’s work on every assigned problem. Thirty different students will reveal thirty unique misconceptions for each one of thirty problems. That’s 27,000 unique responses teachers have to make in a 45 minute period. That’s ten responses per second! No wonder all these teachers are crying.

This is all Dickens-level bleak and misunderstands, I believe, the possible sources of feedback in a classroom.

There is the textbook’s answer key, of course. Some teachers make regular practice of posting all the answers in advance of an exercise set, also, so students have a sense that they’re heading in the right direction and focus on process not product.

Commenter Matt Bury also notes that a student’s classmates are a useful source of feedback. Since I recommended Classkick last week, several readers have tried it out in their classes. Amy Roediger writes about the feature that allows students to help other students:

… the best part was how my students embraced collaborating with each other. As the problems got progressively more challenging, they became more and more willing to pitch in and help each other.

All of these forms of feedback exist within their own webs of costs and benefits too, but the idea that without adaptive math software the teacher is the only source of feedback just isn’t accurate.

Immediate v. Delayed Feedback

Most companies in this space make the same set of assumptions:

  1. Any feedback is better than no feedback.
  2. Immediate feedback is better than delayed feedback.

Tilton has written here, “Feedback a day later is not feedback. Feedback is immediate.”

In fact, Kluger & DeNisi found in their meta-analysis of feedback interventions that feedback reduced performance in more than one third of studies. What evidence do we have that adaptive math software vendors offer students the right kind of feedback?

The immediate kind of feedback isn’t without complication either. With immediate feedback, we may find students trying answer after answer, looking for the red x change to a green check mark, learning little more than systematic guessing.

Immediate feedback risks underdeveloping a student’s own answer-checking capabilities also. If I get 37 as my answer to 14 + 22, immediate feedback doesn’t give me any time to reflect on my knowledge that the sum of two even numbers is always even and make the correction myself. Along those lines, Cope and Simmons found that restricting feedback in a Logo-style environment led to better discussions and higher-level problem-solving strategies.

What Computers Do To Interesting Exercises

Jebara:

Can you imagine a teacher trying to provide feedback on 30 hand-drawn probability trees on their iPad in Classkick?

[..]

Can you imagine a teacher trying to provide feedback on 30 responses for a Geometric reasoning problem letting students know where they haven’t shown enough of a proof?

I can’t imagine it, but not because that’s too much grading. I can’t imagine assigning those problems because I don’t think they’re worth a class’ limited time and I don’t think they do justice to the interesting concepts they represent.

Bluntly, they’re boring. They’re boring, but that isn’t because the team at Mathspace is unimaginative or hates fun or anything. They’re boring because a) computers have a difficult time assessing interesting problems, and b) interesting problems are expensive to create.

Please don’t think I mean “interesting” week-long project-based units or something. (The costs there are enormous also.) I mean interesting exercises:

Pick any candy that has multiple colors. Now pick two candies from its bag. Create a probability tree for the candies you see in front of you. Now trade your tree with five students. Guess what candy their tree represents and then compute their probabilities.

The students are working five exercises there. But you won’t find that exercise or exercises like it on Mathspace or any other adaptive math platform for a very long time because a) they’re very hard to assess algorithmically and b) they’re more expensive to create than the kind of problem Jebara has shown us above.

I’m thinking Classkick’s student-sharing feature could be very helpful here, though.

Summary

Jebara:

So why don’t we try and automate the parts that can be automated and build great tools like Classkick to deal with the parts that can’t be automated?

My answer is pretty boring:

Because the costs outweigh the benefits.

In 2014, the benefits of that automation (students can find out instantly if they’re right or wrong) are dwarfed by the costs (see above).

That said, I can envision a future in which I use Mathspace, or some other adaptive math software. Better technology will resolve some of the problems I have outlined here. Judicious teacher use will resolve others. Math practice is important.

My concerns are with the 2014 implementations of the idea of adaptive math software and not with the idea itself. So I’m glad that Jebara and his team are tinkering at the edges of what’s possible with those ideas and willing, also, to debate them with this community of math educators.

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Mercy — all of them. Just read the thread if you want to be smarter.

Can Sports Save Math?

A Sports Illustrated editor emailed me last week:

I’d like to write a column re: how sports could be an effective tool to teach probability/fractions/ even behavioral economics to kids. Wonder if you have thoughts here….

My response, which will hopefully serve to illustrate my last post:

I tend to side with Daniel Willingham, a cognitive psychologist who wrote in his book Why Students Don’t Like School, “Trying to make the material relevant to students’ interests doesn’t work.” That’s because, with math, there are contexts like sports or shopping but then there’s the work students do in those contexts. The boredom of the work often overwhelms the interest of the context.

To give you an example, I could have my students take the NBA’s efficiency formula and calculate it for their five favorite players. But calculating — putting numbers into a formula and then working out the arithmetic — is boring work. Important but boring. The interesting work is in coming up with the formula, in asking ourselves, “If you had to take all the available stats out there, what would your formula use? Points? Steals? Turnovers? Playing time? Shoe size? How will you assemble those in a formula?” Realizing you need to subtract turnovers from points instead of adding them is the interesting work. Actually doing the subtraction isn’t all that interesting.

So using sports as a context for math could surely increase student interest in math but only if the work they’re doing in that context is interesting also.

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Marcia Weinhold:

After my AP stats exam, I had my students come up with their own project to program into their TI-83 calculators. The only one I remember is the student who did what you suggest — some kind of sports formula for ranking. I remember it because he was so into it, and his classmates got into it, too, but I hardly knew what they were talking about.

He had good enough explanations for everything he put into the formula, and he ranked some well known players by his formula and everyone agreed with it. But it was building the formula that hooked him, and then he had his calculator crank out the numbers.

Real Work v. Real World

“Make the problem about mobile phones. Kids love mobile phones.”

I’ve heard dozens of variations on that recommendation in my task design workshops. I heard it at Twitter Math Camp this summer. That statement measures tasks along one axis only: the realness of the world of the problem.

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But teachers report time and again that these tasks don’t measurably move the needle on student engagement in challenging mathematics. They’re real world, so students are disarmed of their usual question, “When will I ever use this?” But the questions are still boring.

That’s because there is a second axis we focus on less. That axis looks at work. It looks at what students do.

That work can be real or fake also. The fake work is narrowly focused on precise, abstract, formal calculation. It’s necessary but it interests students less. It interests the world less also. Real work — interesting work, the sort of work students might like to do later in life — involves problem formulation and question development.

That plane looks like this:

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We overrate student interest in doing fake work in the real world. We underrate student interest in doing real work in the fake world. There is so much gold in that top-left quadrant. There is much less gold than we think in the bottom-right.

BTW. I really dislike the term “real,” which is subjective beyond all belief. (eg. What’s “real” to a thirty-year-old white male math teacher and what’s real to his students often don’t correlate at all.) Feel free to swap in “concrete” and “abstract” in place of “real” and “fake.”

Related. Culture Beats Curriculum.

This is a series about “developing the question” in math class.

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Bob Lochel:

I would add that tasks in the bottom-right quadrant, those designed with a “SIMS world” premise, provide less transfer to the abstract than teachers hope during the lesson design process. This becomes counter-productive when a seemingly “progressive” lesson doesn’t produce the intended result on tests, then we go back not only to square 1, but square -5.

Fred Thomas:

I love this distinction between real world and real work, but I wonder about methods for incorporating feedback into real work problems. In my experience, students continue to look at most problems as “fake” so long as they depend on the teacher (or an answer key or even other students) to let them know which answers are better than others. We like to use tasks such as “Write algebraic functions for the percent intensity of red and green light, r=f(t) and g=f(t), to make the on-screen color box change smoothly from black to bright yellow in 10 seconds.” Adding the direct, immediate feedback of watching the colors change makes the task much more real and motivating.

Five Reasons To Download Classkick

Before I get to the good, here’s the tragic, a comment from a father about a math feedback platform that I don’t want to single out by name. This problem is typical of the genre:

My daughter just tried the sine rule on a question and was asked to give the answer to one decimal place. She wrote down the correct answer and it was marked wrong. But it is correct!!! No feedback given just — it’s wrong. She is now distraught by this that all her friends and teacher will think she is stupid. I don’t understand! It’s not clear at all how to write down the answer — does it have to be over at least two lines? My daughter gets the sine rule but is very upset by this software.

My skin crawls — seriously. Math involves enough intrinsic difficulty and struggle. We don’t need our software tying extraneous weight around our students’ ankles.

Enter Classkick. Even though I’m somewhat curmudgeonly about this space, I think Classkick has loads of promise and it charms the hell out of me.

Five reasons why:

  1. Teachers provide the feedback. Classkick makes it faster. This is a really ideal division of labor. In the quote above we see the computer fall apart over an assessment a novice teacher could make. With Classkick, the computer organizes student work and puts it in front of teachers in a way that makes smart teacher feedback faster.
  2. Consequently, students can do more interesting work. When computers have to assess the math, the math is often trivialized. Rich questions involving written justifications turn into simpler questions involving multiple choice responses. Because the teacher is providing feedback in Classkick, students aren’t limited to the kind of work that is easiest for a computer to assess. (Why the demo video shows students completing multiple choice questions, then, is befuddling.)
  3. Written feedback templates. Butler is often cited for her finding that certain kinds of written feedback are superior to numerical feedback. While many feedback platforms only offer numerical feedback, with Classkick, teachers can give students freeform written feedback and can also set up written feedback templates for the remarks that show up most often.
  4. Peer feedback. I’m very curious to see how much use this feature gets in a classroom but I like the principle a lot. Students can ask questions and request help from their peers.
  5. A simple assignment workflow for iPads. I’m pretty okay with these computery things and yet I often get dizzy hearing people describe all the work and wires it takes to get an assignment to and from a student on an iPad. Dropbox folders and WebDAV and etc. If nothing else, Classkick seems to have a super smooth workflow that requires a single login.

Issues?

Handwriting math on a tablet is a chore. An iPad screen stretches 45 square inches. Go ahead and write all the math you can on an iPad screen — equations, diagrams, etc — then take 45 square inches of paper and do the same thing. Then compare the difference. This problem isn’t exclusive to Classkick.

Classkick doesn’t specify a business model though they, like everybody, think being free is awesome. In 2014, I hope we’re all a little more skeptical of “free” than we were before all our favorite services folded for lack of revenue.

This isn’t “instant student feedback” like their website claims. This is feedback from humans and humans don’t do “instant.” I’m great with that! Timeliness is only one important characteristic of feedback. The quality of that feedback is another far more important characteristic.

In a field crowded with programs that offer mediocre feedback instantaneously, I’m happy to see Classkick chart a course towards offering good feedback just a little faster.

2014 Sep 17. Solid reservations from Scott Farrar and some useful classroom testimony from Adrian Pumphrey.

2014 Sep 21. Jonathan Newman praises the student sharing feature.

2014 Sep 21. More positive classroom testimony, this entry from Amy Roediger.

2014 Sep 22. Mo Jebara, the founder of Mathspace, has responded to my initial note with a long comment arguing for the adaptive math software in the classroom. I have responded back.