andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-542 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Interesting discussion here by Mark Palko on the difficulty of comparing charter schools to regular schools, even if the slots in the charter schools have been assigned by lottery. Beyond the direct importance of the topic, I found the discussion interesting because I always face a challenge in my own teaching to assign the right amount of homework, given that if I assign too much, students will simply rebel and not do it. To get back to the school-choice issue . . . Mark discussed selection effects: if a charter school is popular, it can require parents to sign a contract agreeing they will supervise their students to do lots of homework. Mark points out that there is a selection issue here, that the sort of parents who would sign that form are different from parents in general. But it seems to me there’s one more twist: These charter schools are popular, right? So that would imply that there is some reservoir of parents who would like to sign the form but don’t have the opp
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Interesting discussion here by Mark Palko on the difficulty of comparing charter schools to regular schools, even if the slots in the charter schools have been assigned by lottery. [sent-1, score-2.387]
2 Beyond the direct importance of the topic, I found the discussion interesting because I always face a challenge in my own teaching to assign the right amount of homework, given that if I assign too much, students will simply rebel and not do it. [sent-2, score-1.056]
3 Mark discussed selection effects: if a charter school is popular, it can require parents to sign a contract agreeing they will supervise their students to do lots of homework. [sent-6, score-1.62]
4 Mark points out that there is a selection issue here, that the sort of parents who would sign that form are different from parents in general. [sent-7, score-0.974]
5 But it seems to me there’s one more twist: These charter schools are popular, right? [sent-8, score-0.923]
6 So that would imply that there is some reservoir of parents who would like to sign the form but don’t have the opportunity to do so in a regular school. [sent-9, score-0.894]
7 So, even if the charter school is no more effective, conditional on the level of homework assigned, the spread of charter schools could increase the level of homework and thus be a good thing in general (assuming, of course, that you want your kid to do more homework). [sent-10, score-2.757]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('charter', 0.623), ('homework', 0.337), ('schools', 0.3), ('parents', 0.255), ('sign', 0.188), ('assigned', 0.155), ('mark', 0.153), ('assign', 0.151), ('regular', 0.121), ('rebel', 0.119), ('reservoir', 0.119), ('selection', 0.108), ('popular', 0.1), ('slots', 0.094), ('school', 0.092), ('agreeing', 0.089), ('form', 0.089), ('twist', 0.083), ('contract', 0.081), ('students', 0.079), ('issue', 0.079), ('level', 0.078), ('kid', 0.074), ('spread', 0.068), ('imply', 0.068), ('palko', 0.068), ('commenter', 0.064), ('challenge', 0.062), ('face', 0.062), ('interesting', 0.061), ('require', 0.061), ('importance', 0.059), ('effective', 0.059), ('discussion', 0.058), ('assuming', 0.057), ('difficulty', 0.057), ('comparing', 0.056), ('conditional', 0.056), ('amount', 0.055), ('right', 0.054), ('opportunity', 0.054), ('increase', 0.051), ('teaching', 0.051), ('direct', 0.051), ('missing', 0.05), ('discussed', 0.044), ('beyond', 0.044), ('simply', 0.043), ('thus', 0.04), ('topic', 0.04)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 1.0 542 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-28-Homework and treatment levels
Introduction: Interesting discussion here by Mark Palko on the difficulty of comparing charter schools to regular schools, even if the slots in the charter schools have been assigned by lottery. Beyond the direct importance of the topic, I found the discussion interesting because I always face a challenge in my own teaching to assign the right amount of homework, given that if I assign too much, students will simply rebel and not do it. To get back to the school-choice issue . . . Mark discussed selection effects: if a charter school is popular, it can require parents to sign a contract agreeing they will supervise their students to do lots of homework. Mark points out that there is a selection issue here, that the sort of parents who would sign that form are different from parents in general. But it seems to me there’s one more twist: These charter schools are popular, right? So that would imply that there is some reservoir of parents who would like to sign the form but don’t have the opp
2 0.32070246 957 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-14-Questions about a study of charter schools
Introduction: Phil Harris and Bruce Smith write: We have only recently chanced upon your blog while we were looking for responses to the “decline effect” in medical and scientific studies. We were especially taken by your comment that there is something wrong with the scientific method “if this method is defined as running experiments and doing data analysis in a patternless way and then reporting, as true, results that pass a statistical significance threshold.” To us, that seems to be standard operating procedure in much of social science, including our own field of education. Indeed quasi-experimental designs are the stock in trade of those who attempt to use “science” — we dare not say haruspicy, but you can if you like — to influence the course of public policy. Now, a new entrant into the cherry pickers sweepstakes seems to have emerged. It is on Charter School Performance in Indiana Schools . We are by no means professional statisticians or data analysts, but we have some background in
3 0.19945142 884 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-01-My course this fall on Bayesian Computation
Introduction: Bayesian Computation, Fall 2011, Andrew Gelman (Statistics G8325, section 002) Class meets Wed 9:30-12, Mudd Hall 1106B Research topics. We are working on the following Bayesian computation projects: - Automated adaptive Hamiltonian Monte Carlo - Penalized maximum likelihood for multilevel models - Weakly informative prior distributions - Multilevel regression and poststratification - Missing-data imputation using iterative regressions - Automating graphical displays for checking and understanding models Skills. In the homeworks, you will work in R to: - Program the following Markov chain samplers: Gibbs, Metropolis, Metropolis-Hastings, slice, Langevin, Hamiltonian, also variational Bayes - Make statistical graphs and perform posterior predictive checks - Check Bayesian inference programs using fake-data simulation All readings, class notes, and homeworks will be posted as pdfs at http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/bayecomputation As a start, you should down
4 0.18750526 1611 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-07-Feedback on my Bayesian Data Analysis class at Columbia
Introduction: In one of the final Jitts, we asked the students how the course could be improved. Some of their suggestions would work, some would not. I’m putting all the suggestions below, interpolating my responses. (Overall, I think the course went well. Please remember that the remarks below are not course evaluations; they are answers to my specific question of how the course could be better. If we’d had a Jitt asking all the ways the course was good, you’d be seeing lots of positive remarks. But that wouldn’t be particularly useful or interesting.) The best thing about the course is that the kids worked hard each week on their homeworks. OK, here are the comments and my replies: Could have been better if we did less amount but more in detail. I don’t know if this would’ve been possible. I wanted to get to the harder stuff (HMC, VB, nonparametric models) which required a certain amount of preparation. And, even so, there was not time for everything. And also, needs solut
5 0.18378699 452 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-06-Followup questions
Introduction: Upon returning from sabbatical I came across a few magazines from a year ago that I hadn’t gotten around to reading. I’m thinking that I should read everything on a one-year delay. The too-topical stuff (for example, promos tied to upcoming movies) I can ignore, and other items are enhanced by knowing what happened a year or two later. For example, the 11 May 2009 issue of the New Yorker featured an article by Douglas McGray about an organization in Los Angeles called Green Dot that runs charter schools. According to the article, Green Dot, unlike typical charter school operators, educate just about everyone in their schools’ areas and so don’t benefit so much from selection . I don’t know enough about the details to evaluate these claims, but I was curious about this bit: [L.A. schools superintendent] Cortines has also agreed in principle to a partnership in Los Angeles. . . . Green Dot could take over as many as five Los Angeles schools in 2010, and maybe more. This mont
6 0.16266507 370 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-25-Who gets wedding announcements in the Times?
7 0.1561584 1353 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-30-Question 20 of my final exam for Design and Analysis of Sample Surveys
8 0.1450114 1517 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-01-“On Inspiring Students and Being Human”
9 0.13594306 326 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-07-Peer pressure, selection, and educational reform
10 0.12399016 1352 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-29-Question 19 of my final exam for Design and Analysis of Sample Surveys
11 0.11503731 2141 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-20-Don’t douthat, man! Please give this fallacy a name.
12 0.11405128 1350 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-28-Value-added assessment: What went wrong?
13 0.10805089 277 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-14-In an introductory course, when does learning occur?
14 0.10706594 1038 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-02-Donate Your Data to Science!
15 0.1048244 632 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-28-Wobegon on the Potomac
16 0.10407668 1318 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-13-Stolen jokes
17 0.10104568 2104 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-17-Big bad education bureaucracy does big bad things
18 0.09780474 484 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-24-Foreign language skills as an intrinsic good; also, beware the tyranny of measurement
19 0.095714323 1132 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-21-A counterfeit data graphic
20 0.092461854 213 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-17-Matching at two levels
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.103), (1, -0.03), (2, 0.005), (3, -0.026), (4, 0.042), (5, 0.079), (6, 0.061), (7, 0.109), (8, -0.05), (9, -0.019), (10, 0.016), (11, 0.075), (12, -0.041), (13, -0.024), (14, 0.03), (15, -0.05), (16, 0.037), (17, 0.055), (18, -0.069), (19, 0.027), (20, -0.032), (21, 0.006), (22, -0.024), (23, -0.046), (24, 0.044), (25, -0.005), (26, 0.013), (27, 0.048), (28, -0.034), (29, 0.009), (30, -0.018), (31, 0.025), (32, 0.047), (33, -0.002), (34, 0.021), (35, 0.056), (36, -0.007), (37, 0.049), (38, 0.025), (39, 0.035), (40, 0.004), (41, 0.031), (42, 0.021), (43, -0.037), (44, -0.008), (45, 0.063), (46, -0.021), (47, -0.013), (48, 0.027), (49, 0.002)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.96652639 542 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-28-Homework and treatment levels
Introduction: Interesting discussion here by Mark Palko on the difficulty of comparing charter schools to regular schools, even if the slots in the charter schools have been assigned by lottery. Beyond the direct importance of the topic, I found the discussion interesting because I always face a challenge in my own teaching to assign the right amount of homework, given that if I assign too much, students will simply rebel and not do it. To get back to the school-choice issue . . . Mark discussed selection effects: if a charter school is popular, it can require parents to sign a contract agreeing they will supervise their students to do lots of homework. Mark points out that there is a selection issue here, that the sort of parents who would sign that form are different from parents in general. But it seems to me there’s one more twist: These charter schools are popular, right? So that would imply that there is some reservoir of parents who would like to sign the form but don’t have the opp
2 0.866651 606 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-10-It’s no fun being graded on a curve
Introduction: Mark Palko points to a news article by Michael Winerip on teacher assessment: No one at the Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies works harder than Stacey Isaacson, a seventh-grade English and social studies teacher. She is out the door of her Queens home by 6:15 a.m., takes the E train into Manhattan and is standing out front when the school doors are unlocked, at 7. Nights, she leaves her classroom at 5:30. . . . Her principal, Megan Adams, has given her terrific reviews during the two and a half years Ms. Isaacson has been a teacher. . . . The Lab School has selective admissions, and Ms. Isaacson’s students have excelled. Her first year teaching, 65 of 66 scored proficient on the state language arts test, meaning they got 3′s or 4′s; only one scored below grade level with a 2. More than two dozen students from her first two years teaching have gone on to . . . the city’s most competitive high schools. . . . You would think the Department of Education would want to r
3 0.82811034 1803 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-14-Why girls do better in school
Introduction: Wayne Folta writes, “In light of your recent blog post on women in higher education, here’s one I just read about on a techie website regarding elementary education”: Why do girls get better grades in elementary school than boys—even when they perform worse on standardized tests? New research . . . suggests that it’s because of their classroom behavior, which may lead teachers to assign girls higher grades than their male counterparts. . . . The study, co-authored by [Christopher] Cornwell and David Mustard at UGA and Jessica Van Parys at Columbia, analyzed data on more than 5,800 students from kindergarten through fifth grade. It examined students’ performance on standardized tests in three categories—reading, math and science-linking test scores to teachers’ assessments of their students’ progress, both academically and more broadly. The data show, for the first time, that gender disparities in teacher grades start early and uniformly favor girls. In every subject area, bo
4 0.81431562 93 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-17-My proposal for making college admissions fairer
Introduction: After reading the Rewarding Strivers book , I had some thoughts about how to make the college admissions system more fair to students from varying socioeconomic backgrounds. Instead of boosting up the disadvantaged students, why not pull down the advantaged students? Here’s the idea. Disadvantaged students are defined typically not by a bad thing that they have, but rather by good things that they don’t have: financial resources, a high-quality education, and so forth. In contrast, advantaged students get all sorts of freebies. So here are my suggestions: 1. All high school grades on a 4-point scale (A=4, B=3, etc). No more of this 5-points-for-an-A-in-an-AP course, which gives the ridiculous outcomes of kids graduating with a 4.3 average, not so fair to kids in schools that don’t offer a lot of AP classes. 2. Subtract points for taking the SAT multiple times. A simple rule would be: You can use your highest SAT score, but you lose 50 points for every other time
Introduction: Howard Wainer writes : When we focus only on the differences between groups, we too easily lose track of the big picture. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the current public discussions of the size of the gap in test scores that is observed between racial groups. It has been noted that in New Jersey the gap between the average scores of white and black students on the well-developed scale of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has shrunk by only about 25 percent over the past two decades. The conclusion drawn was that even though the change is in the right direction, it is far too slow. But focusing on the difference blinds us to what has been a remarkable success in education over the past 20 years. Although the direction and size of student improvements are considered across many subject areas and many age groups, I will describe just one — 4th grade mathematics. . . . there have been steep gains for both racial groups over this period (somewhat steeper g
6 0.78070062 825 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-27-Grade inflation: why weren’t the instructors all giving all A’s already??
7 0.7782135 529 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-21-“City Opens Inquiry on Grading Practices at a Top-Scoring Bronx School”
8 0.76515597 1620 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-12-“Teaching effectiveness” as another dimension in cognitive ability
9 0.75571305 261 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-07-The $900 kindergarten teacher
10 0.75458258 1353 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-30-Question 20 of my final exam for Design and Analysis of Sample Surveys
11 0.74917495 1507 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-22-Grade inflation: why weren’t the instructors all giving all A’s already??
12 0.73198968 462 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-10-Who’s holding the pen?, The split screen, and other ideas for one-on-one instruction
13 0.72394758 71 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-07-Pay for an A?
14 0.72184265 533 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-23-The scalarization of America
15 0.72085011 326 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-07-Peer pressure, selection, and educational reform
16 0.71294594 1688 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-22-That claim that students whose parents pay for more of college get worse grades
17 0.69329423 1350 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-28-Value-added assessment: What went wrong?
18 0.69183457 617 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-17-“Why Preschool Shouldn’t Be Like School”?
19 0.69074422 992 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-05-Deadwood in the math curriculum
20 0.69038618 95 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-17-“Rewarding Strivers: Helping Low-Income Students Succeed in College”
topicId topicWeight
[(2, 0.074), (3, 0.112), (16, 0.093), (24, 0.129), (27, 0.03), (34, 0.052), (42, 0.044), (53, 0.02), (72, 0.024), (95, 0.023), (99, 0.267)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.95605278 542 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-28-Homework and treatment levels
Introduction: Interesting discussion here by Mark Palko on the difficulty of comparing charter schools to regular schools, even if the slots in the charter schools have been assigned by lottery. Beyond the direct importance of the topic, I found the discussion interesting because I always face a challenge in my own teaching to assign the right amount of homework, given that if I assign too much, students will simply rebel and not do it. To get back to the school-choice issue . . . Mark discussed selection effects: if a charter school is popular, it can require parents to sign a contract agreeing they will supervise their students to do lots of homework. Mark points out that there is a selection issue here, that the sort of parents who would sign that form are different from parents in general. But it seems to me there’s one more twist: These charter schools are popular, right? So that would imply that there is some reservoir of parents who would like to sign the form but don’t have the opp
2 0.91787457 1717 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-10-Psychology can be improved by adding some economics
Introduction: On this blog I’ve occasionally written about the problems that arise when economists act as amateur psychologists. But the problem can go the other way, too. For example, consider this blog by Berit Brogaard and Kristian Marlow ( link from Abbas Raza). Brogaard and Marlow give several amusing stories about ripoffs (a restaurant that scams customers into buying expensive bottles of wine, a hairdresser that sucks customers into unnecessary treatments, a ghostwriter who takes thousands of dollars in payments and doesn’t do the job, etc.). Then they ask, “How did it happen? Why did you act in this impulsive way? Why didn’t you learn your lesson the first time around? Do you have some kind of brain damage?” They continue with some discussion of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the anterior insula, etc etc etc., and then conclude with the following advice: Is there anything we can do to avoid these moments of crazy decision-making? Yes but only by intentionally turning on our
3 0.91084576 594 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-28-Behavioral economics doesn’t seem to have much to say about marriage
Introduction: This was just bizarre. It’s an interview with Colin Camerer, a professor of finance and economics at Caltech, The topic is Camerer’s marriage, but what’s weird is that he doesn’t say anything specific about his wife at all. All we get are witticisms of the sub-Henny-Youngman level, for example, in response to the question, “Any free riding in your household?”, Camerer says: No. Here’s why: I am one of the world’s leading experts on psychology, the brain and strategic game theory. But my wife is a woman. So it’s a tie. Also some schoolyard evolutionary biology (“men signaling that they will help you raise your baby after conception, and women signaling fidelity” blah blah blah) and advice for husbands in “upper-class marriages with assets.” (No advice to the wives, but maybe that’s a good thing.) And here are his insights on love and marriage: Marriage is like hot slow-burning embers compared to the flashy flames of love. After the babies, the married brain has better thin
4 0.9088521 1083 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-26-The quals and the quants
Introduction: After I recently criticized Gregg Easterbrook for assigning Obama an implausible 90+% chance of beating Mitt Romney, some commenters thought I was being too critical, that I should cut Easterbrook some slack because he just was speaking metaphorically. In other words, Easterbrook is a “qual.” He uses numbers in his writing because that’s what everyone is supposed to do nowadays, but he doesn’t intend those numbers to be meant literally. Similarly, he presumably didn’t really mean it when he wrote that Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren “couldn’t be more different — personally or politically.” And he had no problem typing that Obama’s approval rating was 23% because, to him, “23%” is just another word for “low.” He’s a qual, that’s all. Similarly, when Samantha Power was just being a qual when she wrote the meaningful-sounding but actually empty statement, “Since 1968, with the single exception of the election of George W. Bush in 2000, Americans have chosen Republican pres
5 0.90726191 1171 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-16-“False-positive psychology”
Introduction: Everybody’s talkin bout this paper by Joseph Simmons, Leif Nelson and Uri Simonsohn, who write : Despite empirical psychologists’ nominal endorsement of a low rate of false-positive findings (≤ .05), flexibility in data collection, analysis, and reporting dramatically increases actual false-positive rates. In many cases, a researcher is more likely to falsely find evidence that an effect exists than to correctly find evidence that it does not. We [Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn] present computer simulations and a pair of actual experiments that demonstrate how unacceptably easy it is to accumulate (and report) statistically significant evidence for a false hypothesis. Second, we suggest a simple, low-cost, and straightforwardly effective disclosure-based solution to this problem. The solution involves six concrete requirements for authors and four guidelines for reviewers, all of which impose a minimal burden on the publication process. Whatever you think about these recommend
6 0.90469146 498 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-02-Theoretical vs applied statistics
7 0.90030521 1254 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-09-In the future, everyone will publish everything.
9 0.89885807 2065 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-17-Cool dynamic demographic maps provide beautiful illustration of Chris Rock effect
10 0.89755744 760 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-12-How To Party Your Way Into a Multi-Million Dollar Facebook Job
12 0.89448011 1723 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-15-Wacky priors can work well?
14 0.89326721 1936 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-13-Economic policy does not occur in a political vacuum
15 0.89274991 135 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-09-Rasmussen sez: “108% of Respondents Say . . .”
16 0.89268249 2288 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-10-Small multiples of lineplots > maps (ok, not always, but yes in this case)
17 0.89246941 492 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-30-That puzzle-solving feeling
18 0.89163119 2341 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-20-plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
19 0.89157903 1223 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-20-A kaleidoscope of responses to Dubner’s criticisms of our criticisms of Freaknomics
20 0.89111972 384 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-31-Two stories about the election that I don’t believe