1. Students Learn More with Less Text that Covers the Same Core Topics Frank Vahid 1,3, Alex Edgcomb 1,3, and Roman Lysecky 2,3 1 Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Univ. of California, Riverside 2 Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Univ. of Arizona 3 Also with zyBooks.com Copyright © 2015 Frank Vahid and Alex Edgcomb, UC Riverside. 1 of 9

2. Design adage Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. -Antoine de Saint-Exupery, 1939 Copyright © 2015 Frank Vahid and Alex Edgcomb, UC Riverside. 2 of 9

3. Perfection when nothing to take away Copyright © 2015 Frank Vahid and Alex Edgcomb, UC Riverside. 3 of 9

4. Normal text vs. minimal text Copyright © 2015 Frank Vahid and Alex Edgcomb, UC Riverside. 4 of 9

5. Reactions

6. Minimizing text IS NOT watering down / lowering standards – IS conveying same ideas with minimal words/letters. Reducing is hard Methods – Avoid extra words / phrases – Declarative sentences, subject/verb/object Before: There is another method that is also very helpful when searching for items on the web, namely the method of using quotes. After: Quotes also help during search. – Move text to tables when appropriate – (And use animations / learning questions / etc. – other work)

7. Text on same topic Copyright © 2015 Frank Vahid and Alex Edgcomb, UC Riverside. 7 of 9

8. Experiment setup Text styles: – Normal: 1,255 words – Minimal: 211 words Study: 1.Pre-quiz 2.Lesson (random text style; same topic) 3.Post-quiz 4.Survey Participants: 168 CS0 students Copyright © 2015 Frank Vahid and Alex Edgcomb, UC Riverside. 8 of 9

9. Results Copyright © 2015 Frank Vahid and Alex Edgcomb, UC Riverside. 9 of 9 (Max) Normal textMinimal textp-value Lesson was right length3.84.8 < 0.001 Liked writing style3.04.3 0.03 Students preferred minimal text p-value < 0.001

10. Web: Rethink conveying Traditional: Text and figures Web: Animations, learning questions, tinker tools, simulators, much more, text, and figures Copyright © 2015 Frank Vahid and Alex Edgcomb, UC Riverside. 10 of 9

11. Conclusion Copyright © 2015 Frank Vahid and Alex Edgcomb, UC Riverside. 11 of 9 Students learned more with less text than normal text Building web-native, interactive textbooks [1] Digital DesignComputing Technology for AllMaterial and Energy and Balances [1] zyBooks. www.zybooks.com. Oct. 2015. We are grateful for support of this research by the NSF and Google.