Getting to the Point
I can remember a meeting back in '01 or '02 in which I and other editors had the opportunity to comment on prototype pages for a basal revision.
I remember the meeting, because my comment got a very icy, if not downright hostile, reaction. The pages we were looking at were from a lesson opener, and they had a number of new vocabulary words, all boldfaced and highlighted in yellow. This was my comment:
I was also told that the highlighting at least helped kids remember what the important vocabulary of the lesson was, which is absolutely hilarious, given that—wait, where did I put that . . . is it . . . over . . . no . . . come on . . . ah! Here we go:
Reference:Learning from Text across Conceptual Domains. Contributors: Cynthia R. Hynd - editor. Publisher: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Mahwah, NJ (1998), p. 96.
I remember the meeting, because my comment got a very icy, if not downright hostile, reaction. The pages we were looking at were from a lesson opener, and they had a number of new vocabulary words, all boldfaced and highlighted in yellow. This was my comment:
I don't understand why we boldface and highlight vocabulary words. What purpose does that serve? Kids don't care. It's just a distraction.
I was also told that the highlighting at least helped kids remember what the important vocabulary of the lesson was, which is absolutely hilarious, given that—wait, where did I put that . . . is it . . . over . . . no . . . come on . . . ah! Here we go:
The literature supports the idea that typographical cues, such as underlining, facilitate memory for a text, but for the cued text only (Lorch, 1989). These studies manipulate location of, amount of, and type of typographical cue (Hartley, Bartlett, & Branthwaite, 1980; Lorch, Lorch, & Klusewitz, 1995), as well as subject underlining (Johnson, 1988). These manipulations generally produced better memory for cued information, whereas uncued information was unaffected.
Reference:Learning from Text across Conceptual Domains. Contributors: Cynthia R. Hynd - editor. Publisher: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Mahwah, NJ (1998), p. 96.
Comments:
I always thought that the writer should "cue" the important terms in a text so the student can know that it is indeed an important term and not just another word in the text, which would be useful mainly in hindsight if a student needed to go look up the definition of something.
For example, if my calculus students encountered a problem involving relative maximum values of a function, the first thing they need is to be fluent with the meaning of the term "relative maximum". If they're not, then they need to go look it up -- and the cues show them where to look (by flagging the point at which the term is first introduced).
That seems like a legitimate reason to cue terms, but maybe this is what you're going to address when you do "more later".
Indeedy.
Good to see you're up and blogging again! I like the new site layout.
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