http://www.teacherplaces.com/willd/weblog/100.html

This topic came up as part of the TeacherPlaces Book Clubs discussion of Made to Stick, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.  Click here for the first post on this topic.

In that post, I cite the following definition for this phenomenon:

The book addresses a very interesting topic on pages 159 and following: the availability bias, defined as "a natural tendency that causes us, when estimating the probability of a particular event, to judge the event's probability by its availability in our memory." In other words, "we intuitively think that events are more likely when they are easier remember" (page 160). Hence people predict that homicide takes more lives than suicide, even though there are fifty percent more suicides in the United States in a year than homicides.

Tehre is more information about this bias at Wikipedia:

"The availability heuristic is a rule of thumb, heuristic, or cognitive bias, where people base their prediction of the frequency of an event or the proportion within a population based on how easily an example can be brought to mind. In these instances the ease of imagining an example or the vividness and emotional impact of that example becomes more credible than actual statistical probability." (Source: Wikipedia).

At the Book Club discussion, Sherry raises an interesting point about whether kids will now predict a greater probability of bridge collapse because of the bridge failure in Minnesota--a greater probability of bridges collapsing than, say, having an accident on a bridge.  Interesting question, and very pertinent to how our students build up cognitive biases based, in part, on how we handle the news of a particular event.

If anyone has example of this phenomenon to share, please do so here as a comment or at Book Clubs as a post.  When the Book Club is finished, we can keep this topic alive here if folks are interested. 

http://www.teacherplaces.com/leec/weblog/101.html

Well, we're back in the swing of things here in Orlando.  I've spent the last week doing team building and "get-to-know-you" activities, and now that the students' schedules have been corrected and adjusted, I'm ready to get us started on our books. 

I have 9th and 10th grade again this year, although unlike last year, this year three of my five classes are honors classes.  It's been fun to consider how I might do things differently with the honors class.

So, here's my plan for the beginning of the year.  I'm going to use Among the Hidden (Level 2) with the 9th graders.  It's so engaging and, while the reading level isn't incredibly challenging, there are really important concepts that we can discuss.  The one negative comment my students had last year was that I had them do too much 'stuff' while we were reading.  In retrospect, I agree with them.  There's so much to do and such good stuff in the teacher's guide, but it can be overwhelming for the students.  So, I'm going to try to focus on visualizing and vocabulary.  We'll do the "Vizualizing to find main idea" and "Visualizing reading by making connections."  We'll do one vocab word a day as a class and I'll ask students to find another word of their own to add to their notebooks.  We'll keep a word wall and develop and organization for the words we add to the wall.  We'll also use a few of the nonfiction pieces to begin practicing research skills like developing questions and noting facts.

Both of my 10th grade classes are honors classes.  We're beginning by doing The Hoopster (Level 3) as Book-in-a-Day.  This is actually an independent title, but I did this with the students last year and it went well.  Each student is responsible for a small part of the book.  They read, summarize, and note questions they have about what happened before and after their parts.  Then we go through the chapters and each person shares their information.

After The Hoopster we're going to begin Lay That Trumpet in Their Hands and then To Kill a Mockingbird.  We'll focus on tolerance and civil rights.  Then we'll move into a study of the Holocaust with Night .  Although this isn't a core novel in Level 3, we teach it to all 10th graders at our school.  There are several great nonfiction pieces in PITR that tie these two together nicely. 

That's my skeleton plan right now and I'll blog more details when we get going.