The Era of Resource Abundance Part II: How to Navigate Through the Crap to Find the Rich and Useful Tasks
By: Hilary Kreisberg
Tags: Teaching, Choices, Mathematics, Math, Psychology

The Era of Resource Abundance Part II: How to Navigate Through the Crap to Find the Rich and Useful Tasks Hilary Kreisberg Follow Apr 7, 2019 · 7 min read

A little over a year ago I wrote a blog post on what I like to call “The Era of Resource Abundance.” You can find that post here. To continue the conversation, I presented at the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics Annual 2019 Conference on April 5, 2019 on the topic. This blog post serves as a reflection of the talk, especially for those who could not attend.

I think we have a serious problem in math education today. In simplest terms, there is just too much crap out there. As a former elementary educator, I know firsthand how challenging it is to teach multiple subject areas and do them all justice, especially mathematics if one does not have a strong pedagogical content knowledge of the subject. If a district provided curriculum (if one is even provided) doesn’t suffice, teachers are forced to supplement with alternative resources. How do they find those resources? How do they determine if those resources are good resources?

As I thought more about this issue, I came across a set of research studies conducted by Iyengar and Lepper (2000) in which these researchers sought to better understand how the presence of choice impacts our decision making. Using field experiments, they conducted three different studies, but the one I focused on for my talk was Study 1: The Jam Study. The study took place at Draeger’s Supermarket in Menlo Park, California. The site was chosen for two reasons: (1) the supermarket is an upscale grocery store that is known for its extraordinary collection of items (e.g., they sell 250 different types of mustards, 75 different types of olive oils, and 300 different types of jams); (2) there was a regular presence of tasting booths at this store, so the study would not seem out of the ordinary. On two consecutive Saturdays, researchers set up two different stands that were rotated every other hour so both tables were not present to the consumers at the same time.

Figure 1. The Jam Study

Stand A had six different types of jams, while Stand B had 24 different types of jams. So, which stand do you think attracted more people? Well, what if I told you that 40% of the 260 people who passed by Stand A stopped to try the jams? What percentage of those who passed Stand B then would you guess stopped to try the jams? It turns out that 60% of the 242 people who passed Stand B stopped to try the jams. This doesn’t seem unusual — there were many more options at Stand B, and as humans, we are curious!

Of the 260 people who passed by Stand A, 104 of them (or 40%) stopped to try the jam. Of the 104 people, what percent do you think actually bought the jam? Well, what if I told you that 30%, or 31 of the 104 people, bought the jam? What percentage of the 145 people who stopped at Stand B do you think bought the jam? Surprisingly, only 4 people (3%) bought the jam! People were at least six times more likely to buy the jam from Stand A than Stand B, even though there were ¼ of the choices available.

Professor and Choice Expert Sheena Iyengar (2000) said it best when she said, “The presence of choice might be appealing as a theory, but in reality, people might find more and more choice to actually be debilitating.” This is literally how I feel about mathematics education today.

Figure 2. The Jam Study Applied to Math Education

When I apply the Jam Study to Math Education, I realize why so many teachers, especially our elementary teachers, decide to stick to their traditional teaching methods or their district provided resource or resort to Pinterest or Teachers Pay Teachers — because there are just too many places to choose resources from and while the presence of choice seems appealing, it is actually debilitating. Case in point: if I want to find a Three-Act math task to use (assuming I’ve heard and know what that is), at this present time (if I’ve found them all) there are 11 different websites I can browse! I don’t know about you, but when I was an elementary educator, time was my most valuable resource of which I just didn’t have enough.

This lead me to learning more about what is called the paradox of choice and its ultimate decision or choice paralysis, which I face daily. The paradox is this: less is more, and more is stressful. One would think that the more choices there are, the happier we would be, but after a certain point, too much choice becomes overwhelming. Famous psychologist George Miller would say the magic number is 7 (+/- 2). More than 7 choices or things to remember and we are just overwhelmed. I connect to this understanding every time I go to the Cheesecake Factory.

Figure 3. Obtained from @AdamBroud Twitter

Who the heck needs 36 cheesecake options? I felt the same way this week at the Annual Conference. Just look at the program — for the 8:00 session on Day 1 there were 49 different options, not including the Exhibition Hall with over 110 booths, the Networking Lounge, Infinity Bar, and other things from which to choose. Now, I get it; we all have different likes and needs, so choice is needed, but there are times when too much choice is paralyzing and the problem with too much choice is that it causes us to overthink. Overthinking leads to: (1) lower performance; (2) lower creativity levels; (3) decision fatigue; and (4) dissatisfaction. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want teachers entering their classrooms with the impacts of overthinking before a lesson begins.

In further researching the impacts of overthinking, I came across a National Academy of Sciences study called Extraneous Factors in Judicial Decisions (2011). This study looked at how decision fatigue impacted the rulings made by parole judges. Look at Figure 4 to see a chart from the study.

Figure 4. Decision Fatigue and Its Impacts

Looking closely at the data, you can see that the percentage of favorable rulings in each session starts around 65% and then gradually drops to nearly zero within each decision session — with an abrupt return to about 65% after a break. Cases that came before the judges at the end of long sessions were more likely to be rejected. This phenomenon held true for over 1,100 cases, regardless of the severity of the crime. I fear a similar phenomenon is happening once a teacher has seen over 7 pins on Pinterest or any other website — their ability to make good judgment calls decreases and they end up settling on a poorly chosen task or feeling dissatisfied with what they did choose.

One way I’ve begun to combat this decision fatigue is through using a protocol. I looked everywhere to find one, and instead found many different ones, but none that met my personal needs. I decided to create one that worked for me — and I hope it works for you, too. When I see a task online, I take out my protocol and go through it as a checklist. If each and every criteria can be checked off, then I consider it a “good” task. The caveat here is that regardless of a good task or not, the pedagogy and instructional implementation is truly what matters. A good teacher can take a bland and boring worksheet and make it come alive. But, for those of you who struggle to do that, perhaps using this protocol might save you some mental energy. The protocol shown in Figure 5 encompasses what research and my personal philosophy states about high-quality tasks in what I think is an easy-to-use format.

Figure 5. My Personal Protocol to Identify a Good Task

During the workshop, I showed a variety of tasks and worksheets commonly seen in PK-2 classrooms and we used the protocol to determine whether or not the task was deemed as good. The conversations that ensued were tremendous. Perhaps in another blog I can go deeper into the rest of the workshop, but for now, give the protocol a try and let me know what you think. Always looking to improve. Oh, and be choosy about choosing, as Professor Sheena Iyengar (2011) says in her TED Talk.