Every now and then, when we consider where education should go, it behooves us to pause and reflect on where we're coming from. The .Plan: A Quasi-Blog: Why the Third Pounder hamburger failed
Her source for the story is mentioned by Kevin Drum in The Great Third-Pound Burger Ripoff. I'm skeptical of the moral drawn by Green -- in fact I've tried to teach computer science to bright Colgate students who had major difficulty with fractions or even with "You know how many feet and inches tall you are; you know how many inches there are in a foot; what is your total height in inches?" I ended up attributing this to "Math Anxiety" as described by the books of Sheila Tobias, and I don't think that's what Green is talking about counteracting... Still it's a good story, and it might very well be true.
One of the most vivid arithmetic failings displayed by Americans occurred in the early 1980s, ... the A&W burger had more meat than the Quarter Pounder; in taste tests, customers preferred A&W’s burger. And it was less expensive. ... instead of leaping at the great value, customers snubbed it.
Only when the company held customer focus groups did it become clear why. The Third Pounder presented the American public with a test in fractions. And we failed. Misunderstanding the value of one-third, customers believed they were being overcharged. Why, they asked the researchers, should they pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as they did for a quarter-pound of meat at McDonald’s. The “4” in “¼,” larger than the “3” in “⅓,” led them astray.
--Elizabeth Green, NYT Magazine, on losing money by overestimating the American public's intelligence
Her source for the story is mentioned by Kevin Drum in The Great Third-Pound Burger Ripoff. I'm skeptical of the moral drawn by Green -- in fact I've tried to teach computer science to bright Colgate students who had major difficulty with fractions or even with "You know how many feet and inches tall you are; you know how many inches there are in a foot; what is your total height in inches?" I ended up attributing this to "Math Anxiety" as described by the books of Sheila Tobias, and I don't think that's what Green is talking about counteracting... Still it's a good story, and it might very well be true.
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