andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-73 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Sometimes I follow up on the links of commenters and it turns out they have their own blogs. Here’s Joseph Delaney’s, on which I have a few comments: Delaney’s co-blogger Mark writes : There are some serious issues that need to be addressed (but almost never are) when comparing performance of teachers. Less serious but more annoying is the reporters’ wide-eyed amazement at common classroom techniques. Things like putting agendas on the board or calling on students by name without asking for volunteers (see here) or having students keep a journal and relate lessons to their own life (see any article on Erin Gruwell). Things that many or most teachers already do. Things that you’re taught in your first education class. Things that have their own damned boxes on the evaluation forms for student teachers. These techniques are very common and are generally good ideas. They are not, however, great innovations (with a handful of exceptions — Polya comes to mind) and they will seldo
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1 Here’s Joseph Delaney’s, on which I have a few comments: Delaney’s co-blogger Mark writes : There are some serious issues that need to be addressed (but almost never are) when comparing performance of teachers. [sent-2, score-0.316]
2 Less serious but more annoying is the reporters’ wide-eyed amazement at common classroom techniques. [sent-3, score-0.534]
3 Things like putting agendas on the board or calling on students by name without asking for volunteers (see here) or having students keep a journal and relate lessons to their own life (see any article on Erin Gruwell). [sent-4, score-0.956]
4 Things that you’re taught in your first education class. [sent-6, score-0.15]
5 Things that have their own damned boxes on the evaluation forms for student teachers. [sent-7, score-0.234]
6 These techniques are very common and are generally good ideas. [sent-8, score-0.108]
7 They are not, however, great innovations (with a handful of exceptions — Polya comes to mind) and they will seldom have that big of an impact on a class (again with exceptions like Polya and possibly Saxon). [sent-9, score-0.816]
8 Their absence or presence won’t tell you that much and they are certainly nothing new. [sent-10, score-0.426]
9 They never taught me this stuff when I was in grad school. [sent-12, score-0.346]
10 And our students don’t learn it too (unless they take my class). [sent-13, score-0.137]
11 Lots and lots of college teachers just stand up at the board and lecture. [sent-14, score-0.406]
12 So even if it’s “certainly nothing new,” it’s certainly new to many of us. [sent-16, score-0.244]
13 And here’s another one from Mark, reporting on a lawsuit under which a scientist, if he were found to have manipulated data, could have to return his research money–plus damages–to the state. [sent-17, score-0.371]
14 I just hope nobody asks me to return all the grant money I’ve received for projects I’ve begun with high hopes but never successfully finished. [sent-19, score-0.856]
15 I always end up making progress on related work, and that seems to satisfy the granting agencies, but if they ever were to go back and see if we’ve followed up on all our specific aims, well, then we’d be in big trouble. [sent-20, score-0.22]
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Introduction: Sometimes I follow up on the links of commenters and it turns out they have their own blogs. Here’s Joseph Delaney’s, on which I have a few comments: Delaney’s co-blogger Mark writes : There are some serious issues that need to be addressed (but almost never are) when comparing performance of teachers. Less serious but more annoying is the reporters’ wide-eyed amazement at common classroom techniques. Things like putting agendas on the board or calling on students by name without asking for volunteers (see here) or having students keep a journal and relate lessons to their own life (see any article on Erin Gruwell). Things that many or most teachers already do. Things that you’re taught in your first education class. Things that have their own damned boxes on the evaluation forms for student teachers. These techniques are very common and are generally good ideas. They are not, however, great innovations (with a handful of exceptions — Polya comes to mind) and they will seldo
Introduction: Alex Tabarrok reports on an analysis from the Los Angeles Times of teacher performance (as measured by so-called value-added analysis, which is basically compares teachers based on their students’ average test scores at the end of the year, after controlling for pre-test scores. It’s well known that some teachers are much better than others, but, as Alex points out, what’s striking about the L.A. Times study is that they are publishing the estimates for individual teachers . For example, this: Nice graphics, too. To me, this illustrates one of the big advantages of research in a non-academic environment. If you’re writing an article for the L.A. Times, you can do what you want (within the limits of the law). If you’re doing the same research study at a university, there are a million restrictions. For example, from an official documen t, “The primary purpose of an Institutional Review Board (IRB) is to protect the rights and welfare of human subjects participati
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Introduction: I’m not a great teacher. I can get by because I work hard and I know a lot, and for some students my classes are just great, but it’s not a natural talent of mine. I know people who are amazing teachers, and they have something that I just don’t have. I wrote that book, Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks (with Deb Nolan) because I’m not a good teacher and hence need to develop all sorts of techniques to be able to do what good teachers can do without even trying. I’m not proud of being mediocre at teaching. I don’t think that low teaching skill is some sort of indicator that I’m a great researcher. The other think about teaching ability is that I think it’s hard to detect without actually seeing someone teach a class. If you see me give a seminar presentation or even a guest lecture, you’d think I’m an awesome teacher. But, actually, no. I’m an excellent speaker, not such a great teacher. This all came to mind when I received the following email from anthropologist Hen
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Introduction: Rachel Schutt (the author of the Taxonomy of Confusion) has a blog! for the course she’s teaching at Columbia, “Introduction to Data Science.” It sounds like a great course—I wish I could take it! Her latest post is “On Inspiring Students and Being Human”: Of course one hopes as a teacher that one will inspire students . . . But what I actually mean by “inspiring students” is that you are inspiring me; you are students who inspire: “inspiring students”. This is one of the happy unintended consequences of this course so far for me. She then gives examples of some of the students in her class and some of their interesting ideas: Phillip is a PhD student in the sociology department . . . He’s in the process of developing his thesis topic around some of the themes we’ve been discussing in this class, such as the emerging data science community. Arvi works at the College Board and is a part time student . . . He analyzes user-level data of students who have signed up f
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Introduction: Interesting discussion from David Gorski (which I found via this link from Joseph Delaney). I don’t have anything really to add to this discussion except to note the value of this sort of anecdote in a statistics discussion. It’s only n=1 and adds almost nothing to the literature on the effectiveness of various treatments, but a story like this can help focus one’s thoughts on the decision problems.
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Introduction: Sometimes I follow up on the links of commenters and it turns out they have their own blogs. Here’s Joseph Delaney’s, on which I have a few comments: Delaney’s co-blogger Mark writes : There are some serious issues that need to be addressed (but almost never are) when comparing performance of teachers. Less serious but more annoying is the reporters’ wide-eyed amazement at common classroom techniques. Things like putting agendas on the board or calling on students by name without asking for volunteers (see here) or having students keep a journal and relate lessons to their own life (see any article on Erin Gruwell). Things that many or most teachers already do. Things that you’re taught in your first education class. Things that have their own damned boxes on the evaluation forms for student teachers. These techniques are very common and are generally good ideas. They are not, however, great innovations (with a handful of exceptions — Polya comes to mind) and they will seldo
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3 0.83391756 71 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-07-Pay for an A?
Introduction: Judah Guber writes about his new company : What we have done with Ultrinsic is created a system of incentives for students to allow them to invest in their ability to achieve a certain grade and when they achieve that grade we reward them with a cash incentive on top of receiving their original investment. This helps remove one of the large barriers students have to studying and staying motivated over the course of long semesters of college by giving them rewards on a much more immediate basis. We have been doing a pilot program in 2 schools, NYU and Penn, for the past year or so, and are currently in the process of a major roll out of our services to 37 schools all across the country. This is due to our popularity and inquiries from students in tons of schools all around the country regarding getting Ultrinsic’s services in their school. In the Fall 2010 semester, Ultrinsic will be revolutionizing student motivation on a grand scale . This is the dream of many economists: to c
Introduction: A couple months ago, the students in our Teaching Statistics class practiced one-on-one tutoring. We paired up the students (most of them are second-year Ph.D. students in our statistics department), with student A playing the role of instructor and student B playing the role of a confused student who was coming in for office hours. Within each pair, A tried to teach B (using pen and paper or the blackboard) for five minutes. Then they both took notes on what worked and what didn’t work, and then they switched roles, so that B got some practice teaching. While this was all happening, Val and I walked around the room and watched what they did. And we took some notes, and wrote down some ideas: In no particular order: Who’s holding the pen? Mort of the pairs did their communication on paper, and in most of these cases, the person holding the pen (and with the paper closest to him/herself) was the teacher. That ain’t right. Let the student hold the pen. The student’s the on
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Introduction: Peter Woit links to Steve Hsu linking to a 1977 interview by Katherine Sopka of physics professor Sidney Coleman. I don’t know anything about Coleman’s research but the interview caught my eye because one of my roommates in grad school was one of Coleman’s advisees. Anyway, here’s the key bit from the interview: Sopka: But you do enjoy working with students or do you? Coleman: No. I hate it. You do it as part of the job. Well, that’s of course false…or maybe more true than false when I say I hate it. Occasionally there’s a student who is a joy to work with. But I certainly would be just as happy if I had no graduate students… Sopka: I guess your remark means then that you would like to avoid teaching undergraduate courses or even required graduate courses… Coleman: Or even special topics courses. Teaching is unpleasant work. No question about it. It has its rewards. One feels happy about having a job well done. Washing the dishes, waxing the floors (things I also
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Introduction: Mike Axelrod writes: I [Axelrod] am interested in building a model that predicts voting on the precinct level, using variables such as party registration, age, sex, income etc. Surely political scientists have worked on this problem. I would be grateful for any reference you could provide in the way of articles and books. My reply: Political scientists have worked on this problem, and it’s easy enough to imagine hierarchical models of the sort discussed in my book with Jennifer. I can picture what I would do if asked to forecast at the precinct level, for example to model exit polls. (In fact, I was briefly hired by the exit poll consortium in 2000 to do this, but then after I told them about hierarchical Bayes, they un-hired me!) But I don’t actually know of any literature on precinct-level forecasting. Perhaps one of you out there knows of some references?
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Introduction: A comment by Mark Palko reminded me that, while I’m a huge Marquand fan, I think The Late George Apley is way overrated. My theory is that Marquand’s best books don’t fit into the modernist way of looking about literature, and that the gatekeepers of the 1930s and 1940s, when judging Marquand by these standards, conveniently labeled Apley has his best book because it had a form–Edith-Wharton-style satire–that they could handle. In contrast, Point of No Return and all the other classics are a mixture of seriousness and satire that left critics uneasy. Perhaps there’s a way to study this sort of thing more systematically?
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Introduction: Sometimes I follow up on the links of commenters and it turns out they have their own blogs. Here’s Joseph Delaney’s, on which I have a few comments: Delaney’s co-blogger Mark writes : There are some serious issues that need to be addressed (but almost never are) when comparing performance of teachers. Less serious but more annoying is the reporters’ wide-eyed amazement at common classroom techniques. Things like putting agendas on the board or calling on students by name without asking for volunteers (see here) or having students keep a journal and relate lessons to their own life (see any article on Erin Gruwell). Things that many or most teachers already do. Things that you’re taught in your first education class. Things that have their own damned boxes on the evaluation forms for student teachers. These techniques are very common and are generally good ideas. They are not, however, great innovations (with a handful of exceptions — Polya comes to mind) and they will seldo
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Introduction: Subhash Lele writes: I was wondering if you might know some good references to Bayesian treatment of parameter estimation for U(0,b) type distributions. I am looking for cases where the parameter is on the boundary. I would appreciate any help and advice you could provide. I am, in particular, looking for an MCMC (preferably in WinBUGS) based approach. I figured out the WinBUGS part but I am still curious about the theoretical papers, asymptotics etc. I actually can’t think of any examples! But maybe you, the readers, can. We also should think of the best way to implement this model in Stan. We like to transform to avoid hard boundary constraints, but it seems a bit tacky to do a data-based transformation (which itself would not work if there are latent variables). P.S. I actually saw Lele speak at a statistics conference around 20 years ago. There was a lively exchange between Lele and an older guy who was working on similar problems using a different method. The oth
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Introduction: The commenting feature doesn’t work for me on Helen DeWitt’s blog so I’m forced to comment on her entries here. 1. She discusses whether it’s fair to characterize The Last Samurai . I have a slightly different perspective on this: I’ve never really understood the idea that a “beach read” should be something light and fluffy. On the beach, you can relax, you have the time to get into anything. I could see wanting something light on the subway–you have to be able to get into it right away and follow it amid all the jostles. I guess the point is that when you’re at the beach, you’re far from the library. So what you really want for the beach is not necessarily something relaxing or easy to read, but rather a sure thing , a known quantity that you’ll definitely enjoy. No point sitting on the beach reading a book that you hate. 2. In an interesting discussion of translation, DeWitt recommends learning a language by reading great literature in the original tongue. Seems f
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