Math Made Visual

Math Made Visual: Creating Images for Understanding Mathematics (Classroom Resource Material)

Does anyone know this book?

what's wrong with Power Point

a comment posted about Frank Cardulla's high school chemistry course at The Great Teaching Company:

"I bought this course to help my oldest son in his high school chemistry class. I had a tough time convincing him to view the videos so I decided that it might be better if I viewed them first and then used what I learned to tutor him. It worked like a charm. I would bring my personal DVD player each day on my workouts and finished the whole series in about two weeks. It gave me everything that I needed to help my son do better. Honestly, as a college instructor myself I found it refreshing that he made extensive use of the paper and easel. It was a nice relief from the PowerPoint "poisoning" that we are often subjected to in modern day classrooms and board rooms. It also was good to see how he slowly built up to the solution of a problem rather than simply magically having the answer appear in pretty text on the screen. This course was an absolute joy. If there is ever another course produced by him in the future I will be sure to buy it."

IQs up, verbal intelligence down

PowerPoint isn't writing

if Abe Lincoln had PowerPoint

Picture Overshadowing—are Sight Words overshadowing phonics skills?

Catherine’s Visual Learning Post got me thinking about my “picture overshadowing” theory of sight words.

I have a lot of theories about sight words (theories are at the end of the post.) All of my remedial students had problems with wildly guessing at words. From my survey of hundreds of children in schools which taught with varying emphasis on sight words, I found that the more sight words used and the longer the student was exposed to them, the harder it was to break out of these guessing habits and focus on sounding out words from left to right. I also found that more sight words resulted in more reading problems. In my sight word case study post, I examine the case of a girl who after learning the 220 Dolch sight words (this girl was not one of my students)

The skill of sounding out simple words, that she had been able to do shortly after she turned three, had been completely lost. If she didn't know a word by sight, she was stuck. [snip] ; even if a word was in her spoken vocabulary, she couldn't recognize it on the page if she hadn't seen it before in print, even if it was totally phonetically regular, with all short-vowel sounds. And when she came to these words she didn't recognize, she would try to guess…

While most of my students had not completely lost their ability to sound out words, it was like swimming through molasses to get them to sound out words. And, the more sight words taught, the thicker the molasses.

I had a theory about sight words and picture overshadowing already, but did not have a good explanation for how spelling fit in. I knew that spelling was helpful for my students, but spelling, like sight words, seemed to be dealing with wholes as well, at least on the surface. While I intuitively believed that spelling was different, I was not able to explicitly explain the difference.

Providentially, the article Catherine linked to, Words Get in the Way, provided the missing spelling explanation:

For instance, in a 1995 study, Schooler reported that verbal descriptions disrupted white volunteers' memories for the faces of white but not black individuals. He proposed that thanks to their extensive experience in looking at white faces, white volunteers used rapid, nonverbal perception to evaluate each such face as a unified entity. In contrast, volunteers spent more time studying individual features of the less-familiar black faces. Subsequent written descriptions were more consistent with the features that white participants remembered about the black faces than with the unified images they had stored for the white ones, Schooler concludes.

This led me to see how spelling could fit nicely into the picture overshadowing theory of sight words. While you do examine the whole word to learn it for spelling, you are also studying the individual features (letters) of the word.

Charles Perfetti’s article The role of discourse context in developing word form representations: A paradoxical relation between reading and learning states,

In our experiments, children attempted to read words they could not previously read, during a self-teaching period, either in context or in isolation. Later they were tested on how well they learned the words as a function of self teaching condition (isolation or context). Consistent with previous research, children read more words accurately in context than in isolation during self-teaching; however, children had better retention for words learned in isolation.

In my remedial work, I’ve found that students learn better when taught words in isolation. I try not to introduce any outside reading material until all phonics skills have been over-learned. When teaching my daughter to read, I found that she also did better when taught words in isolation, just like my remedial students. Moreover, she did even better when we switched to Webster’s Speller, learning spelling and syllables in isolation. Don Potter has found that his students (both beginning and remedial students) learn better when taught words in isolation as well. He is sharing a method for teaching phonics words in isolation with his nationwide campaign to get a free copy of Blend Phonics to every elementary teacher in America.

The article Words get in the Way states,

In one study, conducted by Kim Finger of Claremont (Calif.) Graduate University, participants who wrote a description of a man's face after studying the face for 5 minutes suffered no memory loss if they were then nudged back into a perceptual frame of mind. To do this, Finger asked them either to solve a printed maze or to listen to 5 minutes of instrumental music. Both strategies yielded face memory equal to that of volunteers who didn't provide a written description.

I’ve found that my students also do better when I get them switched back from “guessing mode” (visual) to “sounding mode” (verbal.) To switch them out of “guessing habits,” and into “sounding out habits,” I found the use of nonsense words helpful, especially if I announced up front that the upcoming words were nonsense words. Some of my students who had been exposed to sight words for years were very hard to break of their guessing habits. They would even try to guess at nonsense words—unless warned that the word was a nonsense word and that there was no way they would ever be able to guess it because it was not a real word. Repeated nonsense words would usually switch them from “guessing mode” to “sounding mode” and allow me to begin phonetic teaching work on regular words.

So, I now have a more complete theory of sight words and “picture overshadowing.” Sight words are processed on the visual side of the brain (pictures). Words taught with phonics are processed on the verbal side of the brain (sounds.) People with dyslexia (organic or induced by sight words) have been shown to improve their reading abilities and have changes in brain activity consistent with this picture overshadowing theory. [See note 2 below] This "picture overshadowing" explains the molasses effect I saw with sight words and my students' impaired ability to sound out words.

I believe that guessing at words from pictures or context can also switch students into this visual “guessing mode,” while reading words in isolation forces students to focus on the letters and sounds of the word, the verbal “sounding mode.”

In my informal survey of hundreds of children, those who read the best were those taught with phonics methods that used very few sight words.

You can determine if someone is suffering "picture overshadowing" from too many sight words by giving the Miller Word Identification Assessment, or MWIA, available for free download from Don Potter. It measures the speed at which a student reads sight words verses less frequent phonetic words. Anyone reading the phonetic words more than 10% slower than the holistic words should consider a good phonics program with no sight words.

Blend Phonics is a good program that uses no sight words, and does not teach words in context, which I also believe leads students to switch over from the verbal to the visual mode. Don Potter also has developed a Blend Phonics Reader which has words of similar configuration (bed, bid, bat, bit, etc.) next to each other to help the student learn to see and overcome visual configuration guessing habits.

Webster’s Speller is another very good phonics program that uses no sight words. Its use of spelling may also help prevent dyslexia by teaching students to sound out and spell words and syllables before they read them in context, making sure that they have a firm letter by letter mental image of the word before they attempt to read them in context. It also teaches using syllables via a syllabary, which may be helpful for preventing dyslexia. Syllables were also a very powerful reading method for my students and for Catherine’s son, resulting in rapid reading grade level improvements.

My free online phonics lessons also use syllables and teach no sight words. The first several lessons have now been switched to all uppercase to prevent guessing from visual configuration.

Richard G. Parker warned of the dangers of reading words you hadn’t yet learned to spell (and sound out, see note 3) in 1851:

I have little doubt will be found true, and that is, that it is scarcely possible to devote too much time to the spelling book. Teachers who are impatient of the slow progress of their pupils are too apt to lay it aside too soon. I have frequently seen the melancholy effects of this impatience. Among the many pupils that I have had under my charge, I have noticed that they who have made the most rapid progress in reading were invariably those who had been most faithfully drilled in the spelling book.

When I taught my daughter to read using a variety of phonics programs and only 2 sight words, I found that she would occasionally guess at words when reading stories. After learning to spell and sound out syllables and words using Webster’s Speller, she no longer guesses at words when reading them in context.

Note 1: all but 2 of the most commonly taught 220 sight words can be taught phonetically.

Note 2: I disagree with Flowers’ statement that this confirms that dyslexia is biologically based. While some forms of dyslexia probably have a genetic component, sight word teaching could be the cause of many of these brain differences, and parents who do not know phonics cannot teach their children to sound out words at home, which could account for the seeming genetic pattern of transmission. I was taught with a bit of phonics, then with whole word methods using sight words. My parents sounded out words for me when I struggled with words at home. A parent who did not know phonics would not be able to provide this kind of help for their children. My dyslexia page has more information about dyslexia, including links to articles and presentations about the brain changes that occur when dyslexic students are taught phontic reading and spelling.

Note 3: Spelling Books in the 1700's and early 1800's were used for both phonics and spelling purposes, and were used to teach children to read. Noah Webster himself explains this in his 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language. The entry for spelling-book reads, "n. A book for teaching children to spell and read."

visual learning

Late yesterday afternoon my Foldables rampage across the internet led to something good: I now possess a starter sense of "visual learning" and what its place in school may be. This is something I've puzzled over for ages, partly because of research Temple and I cited in Animals in Translation concerning verbal overshadowing. Verbal overshadowing is a conflict between visual and verbal representations in memory:

A series of laboratory studies found that memories for a mock criminal's face were much poorer among eyewitnesses who had described what the perpetrator looked like shortly after seeing him, compared with those who hadn't.
source:
Words Get in the Way
by Bruce Bower
Science News
Week of April 19, 2003; Vol. 163, No. 16, p. 250

Temple divides the world into visual and verbal thinkers and from one angle the verbal overshadowing studies seem to say she's right. (I have no doubt she's onto something - Temple really does think in pictures.)

At the same time, probably most of us have the sense that visual memory is more durable than verbal memory no matter what kind of thinkers we are, which is why Ms. Peacock tells her students to form a mental image of the word "vex." She's right: a mental image should allow all of them to remember the word the next time they see it, not just the "visual learners."

Which brings to mind a story. I once went to a friend's 40th birthday party where I didn't know a soul. At the time I'd just finished reading a book on memory so I formed mnemonic images of the names of every person to whom I was introduced -- and then I remembered every name. I was remembering names so accurately that it turned into a party trick; people were gathering 'round to watch me remember names. As well they should have. It was quite a feat.

So: verbal overshadowing on the one hand; mnemonic devices on the other.

I have no idea how these two ideas fit together. Perhaps visual images help memory for verbal material but verbal representations hurt memory for visual material? Don't know.

Don't know and am not going to spend today tracking down the people do know. Here's the post I wrote early yesterday evening:


Karen H pointed me to the Eide Neurloearning blog awhile back:

Several years ago, we experienced an epiphany while meeting with an obviously intelligent blind woman with a thirty-year history of diabetes. "There's probably nothing you can do," she started off saying, "but I still need to ask you if there's anything I can do about my memory. It's gotten so bad now that I'll forget what my daughter's telling me even before she's finished talking." Uh-oh, we thought, sounds bad. We had seen her brain scan before, and it had clearly shown diffuse damage from poorly controlled diabetes. Maybe there was nothing we could do.

We asked her to try to remember a list of numbers, and found to our dismay that she struggled to remember even 2 in a row. When asked to reverse them, she couldn't even keep the second number in mind. It looked pretty hopeless. Words of reassurance seemed empty.

But then we thought of something. We had recently seen an fMRI study which had shown that 'visual imagination' (visually imagining reversing a checkerboard) had a very diffuse distribution in the brain - and thought maybe enough of it could be preserved in this woman so that visual imagery could be used bypass her memory impairments. To our surprise and to hers, when prompted to visually imagine the numbers we read to her, she could now remember 7 digits (the normal limit)! ... [S]he merely needed to be made aware that she should translate 'heard' information into visual images - to go from being totally incapacitated memory-wise to 'normal'.

The fact that public schools are preoccupied with visual learning however defined^* reminds me of Horace Mann deciding that hearing children should be taught to read the same way deaf children were taught. High school students have young, healthy brains; they don't need to assign a distinct visual image to each and every unfamiliar vocabulary word they encounter while reading a play by Shakespeare. Not unless they've got diffuse brain damage, which by the time they've spent 16 years playing video games at home and folding Foldables at school, they may have.

The fastest way to teach vocabulary -- I'm pretty sure I'm right about this -- would probably be to produce a "Saxon Math" for prose: a sequence of textbooks with interesting short passages offering distributed practice in the vocabulary to be learned each school year, including homework sets that require students to -- yes -- write sentences using the words.

Based in my own experience as an obsessive child reader, I can tell you that it's possible to acquire a large vocabulary from voracious reading alone. However, no school (or parent) can require students to read obsessively, nor would we want them to. So we need textbooks that go some ways toward distilling and duplicating the critical elements of the natural born bookworm's reading habits; we need quality reading over quantity.

I continue to think Vocabulary Workshop probably does this, by the way. Just wish we were getting through the books faster. C. has spent 2 years on the first book in the series -- Level A -- and still isn't finished. (We continue to plug away at Megawords; we're midway through Book 5 now, with 3 to go.)


visual learning - the books to read

Having poked around Eideneurolearning a bit on the same day that I went looking for a Jeffrey Zacks paper on event segmentation, I've gleaned the following nuggets & reading recommendations:

• a combination of text with images probably always produces better "retention" - i.e., we remember the material better later on (not sure whether the people who study these things also believe we understand the material better - I think they do)
  
• animations are probably a bad idea; stills are preferable
• the seminal book on the relationship between words and pictures is: Mental representations: a dual coding approach by Allan Paivio
  
• the best book on dual coding as it applies to education is Richard Mayer's Multi-Media Learning
  

I'm sorely tempted to buy both of these books, which can be previewed on Google Book Search, but first I'm going to read all of the Eide posts on visual learning.







^{*I've seen it defined as "prefers reading to listening"}


visual learning

foldables
why lawyers burn out
Independent George re: foldables
your tax dollars at work part 2
my busy day
not your father's formative assessment
remembering key concepts in math with foldables
south of the border
Steve H and palisadesk on foldables
homeschooling convention: no foldables

you may have to hit refresh a couple of times to load these pages:
21st century skills in Singapore
the master plan
horselaughs are heard in Singapore
more horselaughs in Singapore

21st century skills, part 2

Independent George is on a roll today:

So in the interest of visual learning, we've managed to take all the math out of math, and the words out of English...

In ten years, schools will consist of nothing but finger-painting. Which might have been fine twenty years ago, but completely inappropriate for the crayola-based skills needed to compete in the 21st century.

My thoughts exactly!

Call me crazy, but I don't think the visual arts going to be getting easier in the 21st century.

palisadesk & Steve H on foldables & inclusion

from palisadesk:

This stuff has been around forever -- well since the early 90's, anyway. This Dinah person may have co-opted the term "foldables" but the activity was already out there in full bloom by 1992. That's the date on a resource book I have entitled Alternatives to Worksheets

I got it back in my former school where most of my seventh grade students read at a third grade level or lower (the top kids were at a fourth grade level).

I tried some of those activities, like the flip books and the lift-the-flap things and various shape books and whatnot in an effort to get the student to produce something -- anything -- related to the curriculum for the grade. Having them write essays or do research was clearly out of the question because their skills were so weak (their self-esteem, however, was sky-high -- interesting).

It was only partially successful. A few kids, mainly girls, liked doing these things, but most did not. AT my current school the emphasis with middle grade kids seems to be to get them to use a computer to produce something. [Catherine here: true at our middle school, which has just purchased Clay-Mation & Virtual Reality software.] At least the computer can read to them and they may learn something.

I think one major reason these things have taken off is because of "radical inclusion." If you have students who are 4-8 grades below grade level and can't read or write independently (and this is not unusual in many places), what are you going to get them to do to "show their learning?" You need a "product." This stuff takes tons of time, keeps kids busy and "engaged," the student may end up with something that "looks nice," and everyone is happy. Have they learned anything? Who knows. Does this go any distance towards boosting their weak skills? Not at all.

However, consultants and administrators oooooh and aaaaah over these things, I kid you not.

BTW, I posted that link about wakawaka but Blogger got ahead of me and posted it before I filled in my handle and clicked POST.

from Steve H:

I'm beginning to see the educational world as a hot market for add-on products, especially if you include seminars. All you have to do is come up with a unique angle or hook. It's good if you can somehow claim that less is really more; that lower expectations can produce more results; that their ed school ideas really can work. Talk in generalities and gloss over the details.

"radical inclusion."

I think our town qualifies for this term, but they just call it full inclusion. It continues mostly through sixth grade, but it's still there in seventh and eighth.

Our town is known for this. People move to our town for its emphasis on the learning disabled. People write letters to the editor about how wonderful it is. I met another parent this past weekend who told me she moved to our town specifically for her autistic son. She loves the idea that he is fully integrated with the other kids and doing the same(?) work. LD kids and their families move in and more kids get sent to private school.

The school claims that with differentiated instruction they can make this work. They can't. My sixth grade son is doing very little writing and direct reading comprehension. Posters, cards, dioramas, artifacts, and anything that produces a "product" that isn't anything like a book report or test. In fact, outside of his seventh grade math, he doesn't get any tests.

I've talked in the past about how they want it both ways, but it doesn't work. Parents complain that they want more for their kids, but all they get is enrichment and not acceleration.

My son got low marks on one assignment because he didn't know quite what to do with a girl on his team who just wanted to cut up tiny pieces of construction paper and complain. They like the social idea of these kids working together, but they give them no instruction on how to do it.

This is a very touchy subject. Twenty to twenty-five percent of our kids go to other schools, but many think that the parents just want an elite education. I've seen both sides. Some in town feel very satisfied that my son is back in the public schools. One teacher's aide commented to me that my son's public school is so good!

The principal is very nice. We have talked about kids who go to or come from private schools. She understands why, but she still thinks that kids "can" get a good education in the public schools. Unfortunately, it's up to parents to make sure that their kids make the transition from very low expectaion K-8 schools to high expectation honors classes in high school.

Their idea of education is much fuzzier than mine. It's the only way they can make full inclusion work. They know there are limitations and they know why kids get sent to private schools, but they say that they have concerns that private schools don't have to deal with. They say that private school kids are "pre-selected". It's a tacit admission that they should, but can't do more.

Full inclusion is more important than academics, and they redefine education to cover this up.

This is an interesting take, and I'm sure it's true.

I also think there's more to it. My friend told me that her child's high school English Honors teachers recently assigned a paper with two options:

• 5-page paper
  
• 3-page paper illustrated with drawings

That's Honors English, which is quite selective.

My niece, also a high school freshman, recently had to spend 2 days drawing an animal in biology class. Two days. With no instruction whatsoever.

I don't know how many of you have ever sat down and tried to draw an animal "from scratch." I have, and it's not pretty. As far as I know, the only people who can draw without instruction are autistic savants and people with frontotemporal dementia.




drawings of horses by typical 4-year olds




drawing by 3-year old autistic girl

I'm encountering two things:

• "visual learning" incorporated into all subjects across the board [update: having looked into the research on multimedia learning, I think that done right this may be a good idea when the instructor, not the student, creates the visuals]
  
• a complete and total absence of any instruction whatsoever in how to create things visual
  

I wonder whether there is an "absence of instructivism" effect here. Because ed schools teach only constructivism, new teachers presumably haven't learned much if anything about learning theory, memory, distributed practice, etc.

The result -- and I've seen this, at times, in my own district -- is that when students absolutely must commit material to longterm memory, teachers fall back on the memory tricks we all know, e.g. direct memorization and the creation of mnemonic devices. That's what Ms. Peacock is talking about in the WordPOP! videos. She is talking about having students come up with visual images that will help them remember unfamiliar words such as "vex."

Mnemonic devices work, but you don't need a high school teacher to pass out worksheets and tell you to make some up.

You can just buy the book.


visual learning

foldables
why lawyers burn out
Independent George re: foldables
your tax dollars at work part 2
my busy day
not your father's formative assessment
remembering key concepts in math with foldables
south of the border
Steve H and palisadesk on foldables
homeschooling convention: no foldables

you may have to hit refresh a couple of times to load these pages:
21st century skills in Singapore
the master plan
horselaughs are heard in Singapore
more horselaughs in Singapore

south of the border

Dinah Zike's Teaching Science with Foldables
reviewed by Paloma Varela, Bridges, Mexico

When a friend of mine showed the materials that a publisher had sent her, my eyes gleamed like a leprechaun's eyes before his pot of gold. As I looked into the bag and glanced at the bounty my friend was sharing with me, I saw a title that caught my attention: Teaching Science with Foldables. When I opened it I noticed that, in fact, it was aimed at teaching not English, but science through Foldables. That was something extra that I was not expecting but I thought would certainly enhance the already positive values of the book. All at once, two main thoughts came to my mind: "Would it be easy to learn how to make them?" and "How can I use any of them in my day-to-day teaching?"

[snip]

In this book you will find a general tips for creating and using Foldables. Dinah Zike is an award-winning author, educator, educational consultant, and inventor, known internationally for these three-dimensional manipulatives made of everyday paper, glue, and scissors.

[snip]

Research has proven that students learn in different ways,^* so by using these three-dimensional materials the senses are brought into learning: students can touch and move objects to make visual representations of concepts. Manipulatives provide the student with new ways of exploring a topic.

* Research has proved no such thing.


visual learning

foldables
why lawyers burn out
Independent George re: foldables
your tax dollars at work part 2
my busy day
not your father's formative assessment
remembering key concepts in math with foldables
south of the border
Steve H and palisadesk on foldables
homeschooling convention: no foldables

you may have to hit refresh a couple of times to load these pages:
21st century skills in Singapore
the master plan
horselaughs are heard in Singapore
more horselaughs in Singapore

students against words

Reading and learning occur every day. For those who have the building blocks, this learning can be very meaningful and powerful. However, most often, we spend very little time gathering the powerful words and vocabulary concepts that we need to build understanding.

Unfortunately, many of the teachers who do teach vocabulary are still using the out-dated and ineffective method looking up words in a dictionary/glossary and writing them in sentences Research shows that not only does this not help students learn important concepts, but it actually turns them against words.

source:
WordPOP!

Unfortunately, as we see from this example, some teachers are still using the word "teachers" to refer to educators and "students" to refer to learners.

Ms. Peacock teaches the word "vex"

Margaret Peacock, a high school teacher of English and Language Arts, uses the VVWA to preview important vocabulary within Romeo and Juliet.

video length: 8:29

Eight minutes & twenty-nine seconds to teach "vex."

"We do this because not everyone is a verbal learner."

..................

VVWA template (pdf file)

a high school teacher's perspective on visual learners

high school student filling out a visual learning worksheet entitled "Images of Life at the Ranch"

Margaret Peacock, a high school teacher of English and Language Arts, shares her thoughts on using the VVWA in the classroom: watch the video

source:
WordPop

"relative effectiveness of the primary senses"

Some of you may remember this anecdote from the old site:

My sister-in-law is a federal prosecutor in Philadelphia. One day we were talking about learning styles. Pace Dan Willingham, I don't believe in learning styles, but since everyone else does I don't automatically launch into a cognitive science lecture when the subject comes up.

So we were talking about learning styles, and I said something about visual learning styles, and my sister-in-law said, "Everyone has a visual learning style."

"That's the first thing they tell you about presenting evidence to juries. If you want the jury to remember what you've said, you have to give them a visual."

I know she's right about this because..... because I just know. Visual memory was a topic Temple and I never managed to nail down while writing Animals in Translation. Memory for things visual is strong; that much we knew. But we couldn't figure out the research basis for this belief, or how exactly it related to the book's thesis or to the visual thinking of autistic people and animals.

A loose thread.

Ken Spencer's books posted online

Sunday I came across the books Temple and I needed: Media & Technology in Education (1966) and The Psychology of Educational and Instructional Media (199). Both look terrific, and both are posted in full.

This chart appears on page 1 of Chapter 5: Media and Technology in Education: Theory and Practice:

Figure 5-1. The Relative Effectiveness of the Primary Senses

WE LEARN:
1.0% THROUGH TASTE
1.5% THROUGH TOUCH
3.5% THROUGH SMELL
11.0% THROUGH HEARING
83.0% THROUGH SIGHT

PEOPLE GENERALLY REMEMBER:
10% OF WHAT THEY READ
20% OF WHAT THEY HEAR
30% OF WHAT THEY SEE
50% OF WHAT THEY SEE AND HEAR
70% OF WHAT THEY SAY AS THEY TALK
90% OF WHAT THEY SAY AS THEY DO A THING!

source:
Media and Technology in Education: Theory & Practice
by Ken Spencer
Chapter 5: Human Information Processing and the Audiovisual Approach to Education Educational (pdf file)

Assuming this is right, and I think it is, it explains a lot.

For one thing, it accounts for some of the effectiveness of peer tutoring and collaborative learning.

What's going on in peer tutoring and collaborative learning? Talking out loud!^*

When I gave the list to Ed he said, "That's why you learn so much from teaching. I never forget anything I've taught."

True for me, too.

I always thought that was because having to teach a subject forced you to organize it in your own mind, which I'm sure is true. But part of the effect probably stems from the simple fact that you're talking out loud.

Remember the Commenter who suggested I have C. teach math to me?

We're starting tomorrow.


^* The book Why Johnny Can't Write has fascinating material on talking-out-loud as a study technique. Will get to that at some point.