Students' math scores jumped 20% with iPad textbooks, publisher says

[onehandle]

A yearlong pilot program with digital textbooks on Apple's iPad found that students' algebra scores increased by 20 percent. On the heels of Apple's e-textbook announcement in New York City this week, publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced the results of its "HMC Fuse: Algebra I" pilot program at Ameila Earhart Middle School in California's Riverside Unified School District. The Algebra I digital textbook is touted as the world's first full-curriculum algebra application developed exclusively for Apple's iPad.

In its test run, the "HMH Fuse" application helped more than 78 percent of students score "Proficient" or "Advanced" on the spring 2011 California Standards Test. That was significantly higher than the 59 percent of peers who used traditional textbooks.

"By engineering a comprehensive platform that combines the best learning material with technology that embraces students' strengths and addresses their weaknesses, we've gone far beyond the capabilities of an e-book to turn a one-way math lesson into an engaging, interactive, supportive learning experience," said Bethlam Forsa, executive vice president of Global Content and Product Development at HMH. "With HMH Fuse, teachers can assess student progress in real time and tailor instruction as needed.”

The first pilot program took place during the second trimester of the 2010-2011 school year, when students using "HMH Fuse" were said to have scored an average of 10 points higher than their peers. But that number jumped even higher for the California Standards Test in spring 2011, when "HMH Fuse" students scored about 20 percent higher than students who used traditional textbooks.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/01/20/students_math_scores_jumped_20_with_ipad_textbooks_publisher_says_.html

[TlalocW]

1. Is it possibly because

iPads have a built-in calculator?

TlalocW

[Matariki]

2. That doesn't matter

The article refers to learning algebra, which requires understanding math concepts, not how well you can multiply or divide in your head.

[BadgerKid]

3. Well, there's an app for that.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wolfram-algebra-course-assistant/id410592976?mt=8

[angstlessk]

4. back in the old days, when I went to college

when I took pre-calculus I had the concept down, but often my arithmetic was wrong so the answer was wrong..what I would have given to have a calculator to use!

[TlalocW]

9. Yes, but a lot of algebra is solving for x

Which normally is a number of some sort that you have to arrive at through various mathematical calculations.

TlalocW

[Matariki]

11. Well obviously, but knowing multiplication tables by heart doesn't mean you understand math

The ipad apps appear to be working because they are helping kids learn the underlying algebraic formulas and concepts.

A calculator is just a helpful tool - if you don't understand the formulas the calculator does little good.

[MattBaggins]

16. Is it possible

that the ipad is working so well because they want to sell more of them?

[redqueen]

17. I don't think we should be talking about Apple.

I think the thing that's helping so much is the way that e-books can immediately provide feedback to students, allowing them to study more efficiently and faster, since they don't have to wait a day for a teacher to grade a paper, hand it back, and then expect the student to hunt down the information in the text, while they're also busy doing the next day's work.

With e-books, the results are immediate, the review is immediate, and then you can move on after already covering whatever your weak spots were on the previous assignment/section.

[Matariki]

26. Exactly. Brings to mind the interactive books in The Diamond Age.

[phleshdef]

10. Lil off topic, but I remember math teachers saying I'd never be able to use a calc in the real world

And they were completely wrong.

[redqueen]

5. These e-books can target the problem areas.

I've used them and it's an incredible tool, to be able to take a quiz, and then get a list of areas to go back over, then retake the quiz.

We should have started using electronic textbooks as a standard a decade ago.

[Warren DeMontague]

6. Technology! Evil! Apple! Hipsters! Cultists!

GET OFF MAH LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWNNNNNNNNNN!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Matariki]

12. lol

[Pholus]

7. Hmmm, interesting article -- considering Apple's desire to make money from that field.

Personally, as a teacher that takes the output of high school math classes, I have a strong opinion about electronics in the classroom.

The students allow them to replace their brain. Critical thought by and large disappears. I have wayyyyy too many 2nd year engineering students that cannot take the cross product of two cartesian vectors without using the built in function in their calculators.

Electronics advocates would say that they've been "freed to concentrate on the concepts" but to tell you the truth they ain't got those either. So what did they learn from their classes before mine? From the evidence, not too much.

And we wring our hands about the lack of engineers...

So, pardon me if I'm less than impressed that Apple execs see a new revenue stream in the classroom. To me, it is wasted money.

[TlalocW]

13. I hear ya

I was a math and physics major in college, and while I didn't expect engineers to be at my "exalted" level, I did have worries that I would eventually have to drive over a bridge designed by one of the students I tutored.

TlalocW

[Pholus]

15. Hehehe. For me it was realizing after teaching premeds that I had better stay healthy....

Then again, I can look at my own undergraduate work. I don't have too high an opinion of that guy either...

[SwissTony]

18. They can't calculate a cross product????

They need to know that the values the get from the functions don't appear as if by magic. If they make a typo in the function, they may get a rubbish answer which is dangerously wrong. If they can't even do order of magnitude calculations, their bridges could be seriously dangerous.

That's scary.

[Pholus]

19. Tell me about it. Tech is cool, but there is a point in learning where it should not be allowed...

As a member of the first scientific calculator generation (not graphing, not symbolic manipulations) I had my slide rule elders talk about all the intuition I lost because the calculator did so much for me. I believe they were right now, 30 years on. Having to
include errorbars on every calculation gave you a very fine intuition for how firmly a particular result could be trusted and how to do complicated calculations in a certain order to get at the most important answers first before rounding error set in.

A particular memory sticks out crystal clear every time I hear some technical device billed as being some kind of miracle device that makes learning the hard sciences and math easy...

When I was in college the first symbolic algebra calculators were coming out. A dear friend took the "alternative calculus" where the calculator was used to "reduce the drudgery of computation and allow deeper exploration of the concepts" where I, being of lesser potential according to the placement tests, suffered through the traditional college calculus class.

A year later we were in physics together and had a problem that after a lot of manipulation reduced to having to find the roots of:

x^2 -5x +6 = 0 (or something just like that, of course I don't remember the exact equation but it WAS a simple binomial).

It's just algebra. The same kind of algebra that was used in the placement test in the first place. She BLEW ME AWAY on that test by multiple sigmas I remember.

But here we were facing this problem.

Me? Okay what two numbers multiply to +6 but add to -5. Oh, okay we are talking about -3 and -2 so the factors are x-3 and x-2 and so the roots are 2 and 3. You could just SEE that looking at the binomial. Heck it was easy compared to the ones we'd been drilled in calc III during series.

My friend? Reached for her calculator. I couldn't believe it and asked her to just try to do it without the calculator (basically because I had the answers and didn't want to wait -- youth is impatient at times).

She could NOT do it. A year after being very adept. She said she just couldn't remember how. Within that same year she was out of a STEM major. Despite the high potential. The only difference in our backgrounds was in our math preparation. I think she'd have made a damn fine engineer or scientist but the math preparation ruined her.

In the end, I cannot even see how she could possibly have gained any more intuition that I did about the concepts behind the math, since a VERY simple binomial's roots escaped her. How could she have understood what that root even meant? After all, my "in your head" technique forced me to face what the definition of a root was -- a zero in the factors of the binomial. Kind of like my engineers and cross products. How can you really know geometrically what it is if you don't understand how to manually manipulate the vectors even using the determinant trick?

So pardon me for being VERY skeptical that tech makes learning a hard science or math any easier. It might "help you through" or "make the homework easier" but at what cost? I think in the same fashion where I could say I can bench 320 if my spotter lifts 160 of it for me. I've done the problem, though not necessarily by developing the prerequisites that are the benefit I was actually seeking. It means that I will probably not be able to lift 330 if my spotter isn't doing 165 of it...

So this made me a luddite at age 21. Despite being a techie. Sometimes it MUST COME DOWN to you and a pencil and paper and the clarity of your thoughts. So a single industry backed study does not convince me a bit.

[SwissTony]

30. I agree. If you know how to invert a 3x3 matrix, you're ok.

If it's 10x10, tech's ok. But do the 3x3 by hand, at least a couple of times.

[bemildred]

8. "It's like magic!!!"

What bullshit.

[surrealAmerican]

14. It was probably a grossly inadequate "traditional textbook" the control group was using.

There are some real duds out there.

[Karmadillo]

20. LOL

[FarCenter]

21. There's very little reason to teach people to do arithmetic with paper and pencil

I used to know how to calculate square roots with paper and pencil. I've forgotten.

When was the last time you saw someone calculate a square root that way?

There is really no reason to learn how to do long division or multiplication either.

What people really need to learn is how to read word problems, set up the right equations, and compute the right answers.

[Pholus]

22. I guess you have to be there....

> What people really need to learn is how to read word problems, set up the right equations, and compute the right answers.

Now ya did it -- I am in full on "preach" mode. Every one of my students would agree with you, but I attribute that to a lack of experience. Once you have progressed far enough, you realize that LIFE is not merely a word problem with a beginning, an end and an answer but an extended interaction with nature. The real skill is in trying to understand WHY someone thought that a particular word problem was worth including because frankly they're all based on applications in the real world. When you can do that proficiently most of the time, you can consider yourself a professional.

> When was the last time you saw someone calculate a square root that way?

In my field (science, not math) all the time. We do calculations for a living, after all. The better ones do it in their head to a several digits of precision. After years of practice, I can quickly do two places in my head but that is definitely a lesser display of the skill. Many of us appreciate skills like that for their own sake and because they also indicate some level of mental agility.

Actually, let's be completely serious that isn't even one of the deeper things you SHOULD know. If you're going to do science/math/research/engineering for a living these days you had better not be caught with your pants down during a conversation on any kind of math covered in the first two years of your undergraduate major. You might not have aced it when you took it the first time, but you had BETTER eventually be able to ace it without cracking the book or what prayer do you have for the really hard stuff.

Professional conversations tend to be explorations between two experts of something neither has considered before. Doesn't mean the answer is impossible, just that the reference is not handy at the moment. Many of these answers can be quickly solved through techniques you should have learned already , if you get tripped up by an integral which would be solved by hand using a simple textbook technique, goodbye modicum of credibility.

It's just human nature, you will be done for...

Even with some TI Inspire calculator could eventually do all the dirty work of the calculations for you.

Even with an e-textbook that could give you immediate interactive quizzes and feedback.

Even with freaking Mathematica running on a freaking Mac.

If you cannot understand the material to the degree that you can use it without some kind of aid, you do not understand it period. That takes time, and that takes work. My weightlifting analogy applies here -- you physically cannot get to high levels of proficiency without repeated practice and strain. The more outside assistance you use, the less you actually develop.

I might sound arrogant here and I don't mean to. It's just that after years and years and years of facing your material you will naturally get to the point where it should seem second nature. I think that forms a failure of many teachers though too -- after teaching the same thing 10 years straight you get to the point where you simply can't understand why your students can't see something sooooooo obvious. It wasn't the first time through and it wasn't obvious to you more than likely -- but it gets that way. But you didn't get there without a lot of effort.

The more your technology helps you get there, the less your personal growth was on the journey.

[JackRiddler]

24. Applause!

Wonderful piece.

[Pholus]

25. Blush...

Thanks!

[Karmadillo]

27. Great post. I've seen a fair number of bright adolescents reach for

their calculator to solve such challenges as 51 + 34. I've heard people who should know better claim memorization is an obsolete skill because anyone can google whatever they need to know. I understand the need for corporations to try to hoodwink us into buying their products in order to fatten the bottom line, but it's hard to understand the enthusiasm of so many rushing to carry the corporate flag when the results suggest a fair amount of caution before plunking down scarce education funds on technology that carries a significant potential of doing more harm than good.

[Pholus]

32. Thanks and I think you're absolutely right on this one...

Don't get me started on cramster either....

What cramster did for me was to finally have me admit that homework is now meaningless as an exercise measuring actual student effort. HW went from 40% of my course grade to 10%, with the difference going to tests. That's too bad and it was a hard decision because I value sustained work effort over the ability to take a test -- but the reality is that I get nothing BUT perfect homeworks anymore and it isn't translating into the ability to pass the test.

So it's exactly what you said -- you can't learn to think when the answers are constantly spoon fed to you -- regardless of what the vendor says...

[FarCenter]

29. I agree with much of what you say

But I still don't see the utility of teaching kids arithmetic. Even less useful is the current approach of trying to get the kid to invent how to multiply, or alternatively, the teaching of multiple ways to multiply.

Also, a lot of time is spent on the manipulation of fractions and doing arithmetic with fractions. Most of this makes a lot more sense after an introduction to algebra.

Math is a pretty big field. Even after six years of undergrad and graduate math course, I was missing the modern algebra needed for coding theory and missing a lot of statistics that would have been useful. So lets cut out the elementary busy work and move on to the meat of the subject.

As for arithmetic, almost all science and engineering calculations are done using some device that implements IEEE 754. The engineers and scientists using them almost always have no clue how the hardware implements some actual algorithm to do the arithmetic. Neither do most investigate what actual algorithms are used to implement the standard math function packages unless they have some need to understand the limits of accuracy.

[bemildred]

23. If you want to be a competent mathematician, of any sort,

you have to learn the methods. For bean counters and business majors and other denizens of the bullshit world of work, business and economics, OK, you don't; but for "hard" disciplines, you need to know the methods, not merely which buttons to push, in which order.

And EVERYBODY needs to understand statistics a lot better, we are awash in statistical methods used for propaganda and obfuscation.

[NYC_SKP]

28. Like it or not, you can't stop progress. More important than scores, however....

...will these skills and habits translate into useful lifelong applications, will they serve to scaffold toward development of more sophisticated skills and concepts?

Or are we just seeing better scores?

Covering algebra content and passing tests doesn't mean a thing, really, if it doesn't serve a developmental purpose or help the learner is ways more critical than having a higher GPA.

[Dreamer Tatum]

31. Then Apple should be glad to give them away for free. nt