A WestEd research bulletin reports a curriculum revision that replaced a decorative photograph in a math problem with a problem-relevant sketch, on the developers' view that such photographs distract students¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · design r1 · q1

Subclaims¶

q1 i? The bulletin reports a developer's view, with no new data, that pictures not directly related to the math of a problem, such as an amusement park photograph, distract students, while sketches closely representing the problem's details better help students acquire the math content. → Merging Cognitive Science and Curriculum to Strengthen Middle School Math 2014

Evidence¶

Merging Cognitive Science and Curriculum to Strengthen Middle School Math 2014¶

Merging Cognitive Science and Curriculum to Strengthen Middle School Math. (2014). WestEd R&D Alert, Vol. 15, No. 1. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED559573

q1 · i? · design · r1

The authors' interpretation of cognitive science research as applied in the bumper car floor plan revision, where a photograph was replaced with a sketch of three possible floor plans including one that does not meet the requirements. No new empirical data are reported for this specific change.

"Schneider explains that pictures like the one of an amusement park are not just filling space unnecessarily but actually distract students because such pictures are not directly related to the math of the problem."

Discussion¶

Learner Variables¶

• Attention — outcome: instruction changes it

Related Claims¶

• Coherence Principle Irrelevant Material Hurts Learning — the general claim this finding bears on, with the studies behind it
• Decorative Illustrations Do Not Improve Learning — a broader claim this one bears on
• Adding relevant pictures or graphics to text improves learning from it, with a small pooled effect on reading comprehension, though whether dual coding explains the benefit is disputed — related
• Multiple representations improve learning — related
• Multimedia Principle Improves Learning — related
• A systematic review argues that concrete materials aid mathematics and science learning when they are explicitly and gradually connected to the abstract symbols they represent — related
• Multiple representations and explanations of math concepts aid student understanding, but faculty lack time to source or develop them — related
• Retrieval context has a sweet spot at Top-K = 10: raising it to 15 did not improve recall but significantly worsened context precision via the distraction issue — related
• Interactive visual grounding helped children interpret word problems by making hidden relational constraints manipulable and visible — related
• Sketching and viewing animations produced the best understanding of a geoscience text, while the photograph condition produced the worst — related
• Decorative pictures show consistently null effects on elementary schoolers' word problem-solving performance regardless of task characteristics — related
• Cluttered classroom walls distract children and reduce learning, while intermediate-stimulation orderly classrooms support it — related
• Verbal-protocol-guided revisions of functional documents improved comprehension, with error rates falling from 50% to 22% despite longer texts — related
• Related decorative pictures do not increase triggered or maintained situational interest; in Experiment 2 they reduced maintained interest — related
• Unfamiliar problem contexts and vocabulary distract students from the mathematics and reasoning a problem requires — related