Spiraling is a complete disaster in the hands of a publishing industry that doesn't actually pay Subject-Expert AUTHORS to write textbooks. I'm convinced that the people assembling such a dog's breakfast genuinely fail to appreciate that they haven't taught the students some of the things they're presenting out of order.
Yes, exactly. The Brown/Dolciani books "spiral," but in a very different way than the current circus of books. Brown/Dolciani stay focused on one theme at a time. They present information, provide problems of increasing difficulty...and then, at the end of each section, they give 15-ish mixed review problems that are there to remind you about the stuff you learned last week.
I ask myself how the spiral idea originated. Maybe someone out there was thinking about mixed review exercises and decided that if 10 milligrams of spiraling worked well to cure forgetfulness, then, boy howdy! --- maybe we should try 10 full grams of the stuff! Dunno.
I tried a web search, but only found this kind of stuff:
The spiral also builds meaning as children learn to use and understand at a higher cognitive level.
In a spiral curriculum, learning is spread out over time rather than being concentrated in shorter periods. In a spiral curriculum, material is revisited repeatedly over months and across grades. Different terms are used to describe such an approach, including “distributed” and “spaced.”
The “spacing effect” – the learning boost from distributing rather than massing learning and practice – has been repeatedly found by researchers for more than 100 years. Findings about distributed learning are among the most robust in the learning sciences....
In other words, our curriculum has a florid case of ADHD. It can't sit still and it can't focus.
Some people even say it seems "spaced out."
