Paul Smaldino is a psychology professor who is perhaps best known for his paper with Richard McElreath from a few years ago, “The Natural Selection of Bad Science,” which presents a sort of agent-based model that reproduces the growth in the publication of junk science that we’ve seen in recent decades.
Since then, it seems that Smaldino has been doing a lot of research and teaching on agent-based models in social science more generally, and he just came out with a book, “Modeling Social Behavior: Mathematical and Agent-Based Models of Social Dynamics and Cultural Evolution.” The book has social science, it has code, it has graphs—it’s got everything.
It’s an old-school textbook with modern materials, and I hope it’s taught in thousands of classes and sells a zillion copies.
There’s just one thing that bothers me. The book is entertainingly written and bursting with ideas, also does a great job of giving concerns about the models that it’s simulating, not just acting like everything’s already known. My concern is that nobody reads books anymore. If I think about students taking a class in agent-based modeling and using this book, it’s hard for me to picture most of them actually reading the book. They’ll start with the homework assignments and then flip through the book to try to figure out what they need. That’s how people read nonfiction books nowadays, which I guess is one reason that books, even those I like, are typically repetitive and low on content. Readers don’t want the book to offer a delightful reading experience, so authors don’t deliver it, and then readers don’t expect it, etc.
To be clear: this is a textbook, not a trade book. It’s a readable and entertaining book in the way that Regression and Other Stories is a readable and entertaining book, not in the way that Guns, Germs, and Steel is. Still, within the framework of being a social science methods book, it’s entertaining and thought-provoking. Also, I like it as a methods book because it’s focused on models rather than on statistical inference. We tried to get a similar feel with A Quantitative Tour of Social Sciences but with less success.
So it kinda makes me sad to see this effort of care put into a book that probably very few students will read from paragraph to paragraph. I think things were different 50 years ago: back then, there wasn’t anything online to read, you’d buy a textbook and it was in front of you so you’d read it. On the plus side, readers can now go in and make the graphs themselves—I assume that Smaldino has a website somewhere with all the necessary code—so there’s that.
P.S. In the preface, Smaldino is “grateful to all the modelers whose work has inspired this book’s chapters . . . particularly want to acknowledge the debt owed to the work of,” and then he lists 16 names, one of which is . . . Albert-Lázló Barabási!
Huh?? Is this the same Albert-Lázló Barabási who said that scientific citations are worth $100,000 each. I guess he did some good stuff too? Maybe this is worthy of an agent-based model of its own.
Last week, a student in a class I’m teaching asked for recommendations of textbooks on topics that weren’t part of his undergrad education, and his plan is to methodically read through them (as I’d do). So there’s hope!
One of the books I’ve written I used regularly in my courses. I can tell you that students do exactly as you stated: they go to the exercises and then, when they get stuck, go back to the text to see if anything can get them unstuck (which usually is not the case). Virtually nobody reads the text and works through the examples in the book, despite the fact that I tell them that is the best way to learn. I’m not naive – this doesn’t surprise me. But I’m not sure what to do about it. I can think of myriad different ways to make assignments, test whether they are reading the book, or spend class time going over what is in the book (which I don’t usually do, since that seems redundant and would further invite them to not read the book). But the reality is that my students work full-time, take multiple classes, and simply don’t spend the time required to learn they way I intended. I do wonder whether our entire education system is evolving in this direction.
A common pedagogical strategy is to provide the same information multiple times in different ways eg. the lectures and the textbook cover the same ground, and then the TA covers it again in tutorial sessions. This reduces the harm if any one repetition is not heard or not taken in.
It also (i) makes things mind-numbingly boring for students who do study/read, and many great / hardworking students complain about this, and (ii) makes it very clear that one doesn’t actually expect students to read, and therefore students, rationally, do not read.
Repetition can be good — there’s great evidence for spaced repetition in course design etc. — but immediate, inherently redundant repetition is not good.
My comment was overly blunt — we (myself included!) are often stuck teaching in this repetitive mode; breaking out of it is hard, especially because there’s a lot of student pushback to the alternatives, e.g. reading / videos that are actually necessary, and class time as motivation / exercises. I don’t think I, or my colleagues, are closer to an answer than we were 10 years ago…
Although I did most of the reading assigments as an undergrad for the most part they weren’t much use. The lectures in my classes were excellent and I spent most of my “homework” time rewriting, fleshing out and illustrating my notes, going over worked problems and annotating them and using lab and occasionally text book material for additional reference.
IMO a lot of textbooks in the 100-300 level courses were writen under my level, so they over-explained simple things – talk about boring people to death! They seem to target the median student, so it shouldn’t surprise people that the more motivated students don’t get much out of them.
I found the 400-level and grad textbooks quite a bit better – more interesting to read, more dense with info, writen at my reading and comprehension level and more relevant to class material – but even at that level some were pretty bad.
While it’s beneficial to read the textbook, my view is that it shouldn’t be critical in lower-mid level undergrad courses. The lecture should cover the relevant material while the textbook serves as an alternative explanation or provides peripheral content – and of course problems to work. Personally if students are going to do one or the other, I’d rather have them review the worked lecture examples before tackling assigned problems – and the lecture and assigned problems should be in a similar vein. I did have profs work lecture problems then assign wildly different problems from the textbook….not probably a great plan.
Echo what Raghu says. There are places for repetition but more often it is counterproductive. I’ve been given the advice numerous times that a presentation should begin with telling people what you are going to tell them, then tell them, and then tell them what you told them (something like that). Boring and an invitation to shut off the brains of speakers and audience.
Dale: I don’t think that any of the commentariat on this blog should use what worked for us to project what will work for average undergraduates let alone the population in general. One reason why discourse about teaching methods is so low quality is that almost everyone has THOUGHTS based on their experience or their kids’ experience and rigorous evidence is hard to obtain and mostly inconclusive.
Oral presentations have the additional issue that audiences may not hear a key phrase and cannot go back and repeat it like they can in text. So you absolutely have to include repetition if you want everyone to follow.
Sean
I don’t disagree with what you say here. But I’m not sure what your point is – that I should refrain from expressing my experience? Yes, it is my experience and does not generalize, at least not automatically. But I do have 45 years of teaching experience and have been a careful observer of many of my colleagues, and I base my opinions on that. I welcome hearing other people’s experiences and viewpoints – perhaps my experience is fairly unusual.
I would add another set of experiences. Among all the lectures (in classes, conferences, and otherwise), I have found the best were ones where I was not clearly told at the beginning what would be covered and then reminded at the end. The best have been invitations to a mystery and adventure, where the speaker developed their arguments in somewhat unpredictable ways. As I said, repetition does have its place, and one that you cite is a good example. I have taught numerous courses to non-native English speakers and repetition can be very important with that audience. I’m not against repetition, but in the case of students that haven’t done the work they should have, I think repetition is an invitation for them to continue their bad habits.
Dale: anecdotes about personal experience can be entertaining, but as soon as they become grand theories of education reform, and how everyone is TEACHING WRONG, I try to ignore them. Overwhelmingly they tell more about the theorist’s experiences and memories than about teaching and education in general.
One of the few solid results of education ‘research’ is that what works for one teacher and one group of students does not always work for a different teacher or students. There are whole books about cycles in the USA where a teacher gets great results, announces a new method of teaching, teaches it to students who get slightly better than average results, and retires around the time that his students’ students find that his methods work about as well for them as any other methods do.
Sean
I really don’t think I have proposed any general reforms for education nor have I made pronouncements about everyone doing things wrong, nor have I articulated an general theories of education. I agree that all such statements should be taken with more than a grain of salt – nor should they be totally dismissed. You seem to be reading things into what I’ve said that I don’t think I have said.
Sean:
I do think anecdotes have value, if they are anomalous and immutable; see our paper, When do stories work? Evidence and illustration in the social sciences.
Please excuse this unnecessary update, but I need an outlet for my frustration with the “mandatory” training required for faculty members. I just completed the FERPA training. The content was better than most and I even learned a few new things. But the pedagogy was infuriating. Talk about repetition – first provide a quiz that covers what will be covered in the videos (10 detailed questions), then have 5 video sections each addressing points in the quiz, then administer a final quiz covering the same topics and for which you are required (they don’t say what happens if you fail) to get 80% correct. As I said, the content wasn’t bad, but it was dull, paternalistic, and took 5 times as long as necessary. And it is mandated by the college’s insurance company – and I’m sure they know how to teach (after all, they used repetition repeatedly).
Mind-numblng. Curiosity-killiing. But it did link directly to the quiz material and that’s what really matters.
Andrew’s statement,
“My concern is that nobody reads books anymore. If I think about students taking a class in agent-based modeling and using this book, it’s hard for me to picture most of them actually reading the book. They’ll start with the homework assignments and then flip through the book to try to figure out what they need. That’s how people read nonfiction books nowadays, which I guess is one reason that books, even those I like, are typically repetitive and low on content. Readers don’t want the book to offer a delightful reading experience, so authors don’t deliver it, and then readers don’t expect it, etc.”
if true, is totally depressing. Although “nonfiction books” are singled out, there is a suggestion/hint that books in general lack zing and are noncompetitive in today’s world. It is certainly true that the card catalogue of my youth is long gone and my university library, teeming with books, is impressively unoccupied, just waiting for the university administration to convert it to offices for the staff of the various newly-minted assistant deans and associate deans. On the bright side, my local public library is still a center of human activity, albeit it too no longer has a card catalogue.
To be fair, the card catalogue was replaced with an electronic catalogue, and that happened in the late 80’s or early 90’s mostly.
The local library around here definitely checks out books, but also provides a community center type service…just yesterday we were at chess night where my son played with a bunch of other chess people. They also provide an open area with ten or so computers and free WiFi if you bring your own laptop, and they have some 3D printers and a lounge area for teens, as well as a passport application collection service and such. I’m pretty happy with our library and I don’t think the books go uncirculated.
Thanks Andrew. Ideally appreciate this review. I also had the concern about fewer people reading books anymore while I wrote it. Perhaps my readership will be smaller than it would have been 20 years ago, but I still love books, and I wanted to write one I would enjoy. Hopefully at least some others do too.
P.S. I’m also not a fan of Barabasi’s more recent “science of science” stuff. But he did create (or at least first study) the preferential attachment network algorithm for generating scale-free networks. Despite newer evidence than many if not lost long-tailed networks are not scale free, the algorithm can generate some cool insights, and I always enjoy teaching it.
I really, not ideally. Buh.
Paul, can one buy a pdf of the book? There is a website called perlego which requires a subscription to get the pdf.
Is there an online html version one can read? I’m surprised that there isn’t (I think).
For now, there’s a PDF version for purchase through the PUP app. I don’t love it, but there it is. If the price is a non-starter, send me an email.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/ebook/9780691224152/modeling-social-behavior
I’ve been reading Barabasi’s Network Science, and my main conclusion is that it’s not much of a science yet. But there is hope:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-34267-9
Dave:
It may not be a science yet, but at $100,000 per citation, it’s extremely valuable!
Ha, undoubtedly…
I had a set of experiences that corroborates what others are saying here. I wrote a pair of economics textbooks about a decade ago because none of the existing books were at all useful for the way I teach the subject. I also tried to make them interesting, fluent reads, wherever possible with a story line in each chapter. A few students liked them, but the most common response, verbally and in course evaluations, was that there were too many words, too much background, and it was too hard to find the bits you needed when you needed them. I didn’t realize at the time that this reflected less my own authorly talents or lack thereof and more the general drift in how students use books.
That said, there’s a partially positive side to the widespread impatience with long form writing. One of the consequences of the development of the internet has been the explosion of voices, perspectives and knowledges. When I was young you had to search out a subject (or enroll in a course), spend hours perusing the library stacks, etc. When you came across something interesting you could settle down with it. Now it’s a barrage. It’s difficult to set aside a large stretch of time to immerse yourself in something when every few moments something new and interesting pops up. Of course, there’s also a lot of junk, some of it malicious, in that flow, and we’re just beginning to figure out what to do about that.
One of the problems with teaching has always been that the teachers got to where they are by being different from most of their students. (That is super-true about math.) Maybe the ability and desire to immerse yourself, giving it the time it needs, is another dimension of this separation.
It’s true about so many subjects. Was just discussing this with folks teaching the first year seminar, and it’s the same there. It’s a very different experience for people who end up getting doctorates.
In my classes I make some assignments that only check whether people read the required readings ahead of class. They are called pre-class assignments (I learned the technique from someone else a long time ago). The questions in those assignments are apparent to anyone who completed the readings. Of course, you have to keep reminding the students to read the entire assigned chapter and not simply fish for the answers in the chapter. At the start of the quarter, the students are annoyed that they have to complete these assignments, but at the end of the quarter they report that it was useful to do this, to keep them from falling behind in their readings.
The method is not perfect, but is a vast improvement over the students showing up not having read anything ahead of class.
No kids read these days? Reminds me of this paper:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aav5916
“In five preregistered studies, we assess people’s tendency to believe “kids these days” are deficient relative to those of previous generations. Across three traits, American adults (N = 3458; Mage = 33 to 51 years) believe today’s youth are in decline; however, these perceptions are associated with people’s standing on those traits. Authoritarian people especially think youth are less respectful of their elders, intelligent people especially think youth are less intelligent, and well-read people especially think youth enjoy reading less. These beliefs are not predicted by irrelevant traits. Two mechanisms contribute to humanity’s perennial tendency to denigrate kids: a person-specific tendency to notice the limitations of others where one excels and a memory bias projecting one’s current qualities onto the youth of the past. When observing current children, we compare our biased memory to the present and a decline appears. This may explain why the kids these days effect has been happening for millennia.”
Anon:
I didn’t say that no kids read. I said that I don’t think college students read textbooks in the way they used to. I have no systematic evidence on this, so I could be all wrong here, but I don’t think what I’m saying is unreasonable. Students are still reading; they’re just reading short things online: wikipedia, stackoverflow, whatever, not to mention online entertainment media.
Some data on this topic is available.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41305102
One of the key conclusions is, “Even though students know it is important to read, know the professor expects them to read and know it will impact their grade, most students still do not read the textbook.”
This study was published in 2011; it is not clear whether behavior was different in the past (although this paper does have a nice review of previous research).
Thanks for the reference. These sorts of findings concern me – increasingly the longer I teach. It is also a concern I have about Eduardo’s post above. I have no doubt that students respond to incentives and that their reading can be influenced by whether or not we give them explicit credit for reading the textbook. Similarly for attendance. But the longer I teach, the less interested I become in training students to follow instructions and/or respond to incentives. I want to see them discover a sense of adventure and creativity. I want to see them gain new skills and become excited to apply them to things that interest them. Training them through credit for defined tasks increasingly seems to be going a different direction. I also have no doubt that they will respond positively to such incentives – students seem to appreciate knowing what the rules are, and that they will be rewarded for following those rules. There is nothing wrong with that – except that it might interfere with objectives I’ll label as “critical thinking” (although the term may not be the best – it is the easiest I can think of using here).
So as to not upset Sean by pronouncing my experience as a general theory of education, let me acknowledge that I am expressing my own quandaries. In my earliest teaching experiences I followed the traditional methods that most of my colleagues had employed: summarize the textbook in my lectures, test on that material, include some novel applications to distinguish from the really “talented” students from those that merely did the work. And, of course, those that didn’t do the work would be apparent. The longer I’ve been teaching the further I’ve moved away from that model. While I feel it has been successful, I would also note that I have become specialized in teaching working adults – I no longer teach undergraduates, partially because my approach doesn’t work with them well and partially because I have little interest in the traditional approach. My quandary is whether this just reflects my evolution (sounds better than aging) or whether I’ve been realizing how ill-suited the traditional approach is to my goal of critical thinking.
And, to anticipate chipmunk’s response, I don’t think we have good evidence that the traditional approach works well based on how smart we have become. Human knowledge has certainly advanced much in the past 500 years – but whether it is due to traditional teaching methods or in spite of them, I don’t know.
I am reminded of some advice I got in graduate school about teaching: Base your lecture on the best textbook for the course. Assign your students the second best textbook.
In my experience, textbooks are too oversimplified, out of date, bad at citing sources, and often just plain wrong or misleading (think of all the stats 101 textbooks). Why bother with them when the primary literature (that they are based on) is easily accessible on the internet?
Like say a bio textbook claimed the DNA in our cells is a double helix. It might show one or two x-ray crystallography pictures as proof. Ok, but why do we think the most easily crystallized form is also most conducive to the dynamics of life? In fact that structure may be too stable, so could represent inactive DNA. What are the other conformations of DNA, how stable are they? How do you measure stability anyway?
Such thoughts immediately send you to the primary literature, they wouldn’t fit in a textbook. And its going down enough of these rabbitholes that yields a deep understanding of the topic.