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Empowering authors to diagnose comprehension burden in textbooks

Published: 12 August 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Good textbooks are organized in a systematically progressive fashion so that students acquire new knowledge and learn new concepts based on known items of information. We provide a diagnostic tool for quantitatively assessing the comprehension burden that a textbook imposes on the reader due to non-sequential presentation of concepts. We present a formal definition of comprehension burden and propose an algorithmic approach for computing it. We apply the tool to a corpus of high school textbooks from India and empirically examine its effectiveness in helping authors identify sections of textbooks that can benefit from reorganizing the material presented.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      KDD '12: Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
      August 2012
      1616 pages
      ISBN:9781450314626
      DOI:10.1145/2339530
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 12 August 2012

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      Author Tags

      1. comprehension burden
      2. concepts
      3. data mining
      4. diagnostic tool for authors
      5. education
      6. knowledge discovery
      7. textbooks

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      • (2021)CollectiveTeach: A System To Generate And Sequence Web-Annotated Lesson PlansProceedings of the 4th ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/3460112.3471938(1-13)Online publication date: 28-Jun-2021
      • (2021)Fake Document Generation for Cyber Deception by Manipulating Text ComprehensibilityIEEE Systems Journal10.1109/JSYST.2020.298017715:1(835-845)Online publication date: Mar-2021
      • (2018)Generating Hard to Comprehend Fake Documents for Defensive Cyber DeceptionIEEE Intelligent Systems10.1109/MIS.2018.287727733:5(16-25)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2018
      • (2018)Computing Exposition Coherence Across Learning ResourcesOn the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems. OTM 2018 Conferences10.1007/978-3-030-02671-4_26(423-440)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2018
      • (2015)Smarter learning content management using the learning content hubIBM Journal of Research and Development10.1147/JRD.2015.245569159:6(3:1-3:9)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2015
      • (2014)Towards Generating Text Summaries for Entity ChainsProceedings of the 36th European Conference on IR Research on Advances in Information Retrieval - Volume 841610.5555/2964060.2964162(136-147)Online publication date: 13-Apr-2014
      • (2014)Entity-centric summarizationProceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web10.1145/2567948.2567959(33-38)Online publication date: 7-Apr-2014
      • (2014)Assessing the Need of Augmenting Video Lectures with Supporting InformationLearning and Collaboration Technologies. Designing and Developing Novel Learning Experiences10.1007/978-3-319-07482-5_23(238-249)Online publication date: 2014
      • (2014)Towards Generating Text Summaries for Entity ChainsAdvances in Information Retrieval10.1007/978-3-319-06028-6_12(136-147)Online publication date: 2014
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