andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-617 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Under the heading, “Why Preschool Shouldn’t Be Like School,” cognitive psychologist Alison Gopnik describes research showing that four-year-olds learn better if they’re encouraged to discover and show to others, rather than if they’re taught what to do. This makes sense, but it’s not clear to me why this wouldn’t apply to older kids and adults. It’s a commonplace in teaching at all levels that students learn by doing and by demonstrating what they can do. Even when a student is doing nothing but improvising from a template, we generally believe the student will learn better by explaining what’s going on, by having a mental model of the process to go along with the proverbial 10,000 hours or practice. The challenge is in the implementation, how to get students interested, motivated, and focused enough to put the effort into learning. So why the headline above? Why does Gopnik’s research support the idea that preschool should be different from school? I’m not trying to disagree
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1 Under the heading, “Why Preschool Shouldn’t Be Like School,” cognitive psychologist Alison Gopnik describes research showing that four-year-olds learn better if they’re encouraged to discover and show to others, rather than if they’re taught what to do. [sent-1, score-0.754]
2 This makes sense, but it’s not clear to me why this wouldn’t apply to older kids and adults. [sent-2, score-0.391]
3 It’s a commonplace in teaching at all levels that students learn by doing and by demonstrating what they can do. [sent-3, score-0.553]
4 Even when a student is doing nothing but improvising from a template, we generally believe the student will learn better by explaining what’s going on, by having a mental model of the process to go along with the proverbial 10,000 hours or practice. [sent-4, score-0.901]
5 The challenge is in the implementation, how to get students interested, motivated, and focused enough to put the effort into learning. [sent-5, score-0.399]
6 Why does Gopnik’s research support the idea that preschool should be different from school? [sent-7, score-0.278]
7 One more thing, which certainly isn’t Gopnik’s fault but it’s pretty funny/scary, given that it’s the 21st century and all. [sent-12, score-0.18]
8 Slate put this item in the category “Doublex: What women really think about news, politics, and culture. [sent-13, score-0.378]
9 No, that space was taken by “The eco-guide to responsible drinking. [sent-16, score-0.172]
10 ” But, sure, I guess it makes sense: kids in school . [sent-17, score-0.472]
11 that sounds like it belongs on the women’s page, along with Six recipes to get your kids to eat their vegetables, etc. [sent-20, score-0.681]
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same-blog 1 0.99999988 617 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-17-“Why Preschool Shouldn’t Be Like School”?
Introduction: Under the heading, “Why Preschool Shouldn’t Be Like School,” cognitive psychologist Alison Gopnik describes research showing that four-year-olds learn better if they’re encouraged to discover and show to others, rather than if they’re taught what to do. This makes sense, but it’s not clear to me why this wouldn’t apply to older kids and adults. It’s a commonplace in teaching at all levels that students learn by doing and by demonstrating what they can do. Even when a student is doing nothing but improvising from a template, we generally believe the student will learn better by explaining what’s going on, by having a mental model of the process to go along with the proverbial 10,000 hours or practice. The challenge is in the implementation, how to get students interested, motivated, and focused enough to put the effort into learning. So why the headline above? Why does Gopnik’s research support the idea that preschool should be different from school? I’m not trying to disagree
2 0.35101178 1529 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-11-Bayesian brains?
Introduction: Psychology researcher Alison Gopnik discusses the idea that some of the systematic problems with human reasoning can be explained by systematic flaws in the statistical models we implicitly use. I really like this idea and I’ll return to it in a bit. But first I need to discuss a minor (but, I think, ultimately crucial) disagreement I have with how Gopnik describes Bayesian inference. She writes: The Bayesian idea is simple, but it turns out to be very powerful. It’s so powerful, in fact, that computer scientists are using it to design intelligent learning machines, and more and more psychologists think that it might explain human intelligence. Bayesian inference is a way to use statistical data to evaluate hypotheses and make predictions. These might be scientific hypotheses and predictions or everyday ones. So far, so good. Next comes the problem (as I see it). Gopnik writes: Here’s a simple bit of Bayesian election thinking. In early September, the polls suddenly im
3 0.21818507 634 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-29-A.I. is Whatever We Can’t Yet Automate
Introduction: A common aphorism among artificial intelligence practitioners is that A.I. is whatever machines can’t currently do. Adam Gopnik, writing for the New Yorker , has a review called Get Smart in the most recent issue (4 April 2011). Ostensibly, the piece is a review of new books, one by Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything , and one by Stephen Baker Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything (which would explain Baker’s spate of Jeopardy!-related blog posts ). But like many such pieces in highbrow magazines, the book reviews are just a cover for staking out a philosophical position. Gopnik does a typically New Yorker job in explaining the title of this blog post. Gopnik describes his mother as “a logician, linguist, and early Fortran speaker” and goes on to add that she worked on an early machine translation project in Canada. I’m guessing she’s the Myrna Gopnik behind this 1968 COLING paper (LE
4 0.1188767 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: 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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same-blog 1 0.96929747 617 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-17-“Why Preschool Shouldn’t Be Like School”?
Introduction: Under the heading, “Why Preschool Shouldn’t Be Like School,” cognitive psychologist Alison Gopnik describes research showing that four-year-olds learn better if they’re encouraged to discover and show to others, rather than if they’re taught what to do. This makes sense, but it’s not clear to me why this wouldn’t apply to older kids and adults. It’s a commonplace in teaching at all levels that students learn by doing and by demonstrating what they can do. Even when a student is doing nothing but improvising from a template, we generally believe the student will learn better by explaining what’s going on, by having a mental model of the process to go along with the proverbial 10,000 hours or practice. The challenge is in the implementation, how to get students interested, motivated, and focused enough to put the effort into learning. So why the headline above? Why does Gopnik’s research support the idea that preschool should be different from school? I’m not trying to disagree
2 0.85327095 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
3 0.85198259 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
4 0.8508032 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
5 0.84935099 825 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-27-Grade inflation: why weren’t the instructors all giving all A’s already??
Introduction: There’s been some discussion lately about grade inflation. Here’s a graph from Stuart Rojstaczer ( link from Nathan Yau): Rojstaczer writes: In the 1930s, the average GPA at American colleges and universities was about 2.35, a number that corresponds with data compiled by W. Perry in 1943. By the 1950s, the average GPA was about 2.52. GPAs took off in the 1960s with grades at private schools rising faster than public schools, lulled in the 1970s, and began to rise again in the 1980s at a rate of about 0.10 to 0.15 increase in GPA per decade. The grade inflation that began in the 1980s has yet to end. . . . These trends may help explain why private school students are disproportionately represented in Ph.D. study in science and engineering and why they tend to dominate admission into the most prestigious professional schools. People have discussed why the grades have been going up and whether this is a bad thing. I have a slightly different take on all this. As a t
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Introduction: Sharad explains : HIV/AIDS, like many other contagious diseases, exemplifies the common view of so-called viral propagation, growing from a few initial cases to millions through close person-to-person interactions. (Ironically, not all viruses in fact exhibit “viral” transmission patterns. For example, Hepatitis A often spreads through contaminated drinking water.[1]) By analogy to such biological epidemics, the diffusion of products and ideas is conventionally assumed to occur “virally” as well, as evidenced by prevailing theoretical frameworks (e.g., the cascade and threshold models) and an obsession in the marketing world for all things social. . . . Despite hundreds of papers written about diffusion, there is surprisingly little work addressing this fundamental empirical question. In a recent study, Duncan Watts, Dan Goldstein, and I [Goel] examined the adoption patterns of several different types of products diffusing over various online platforms — including Twitter, Face
2 0.9576956 748 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-06-Why your Klout score is meaningless
Introduction: Alex Braunstein writes about Klout, a company which measures Twitter/Facebook influence: As a Ph D statistician and search quality engineer, I [Braunstein] know a lot about how to properly measure things. In the past few months I’ve become an active Twitter user and very interested in measuring the influence of individuals. Klout provides a way to measure influence on Twitter using a score also called Klout. The range is 0 to 100. Light users score below 20, regular users around 30, and celebrities start around 75. Naturally, I was intrigued by the Klout measurement, but a careful analysis led to some serious issues with the score. . . . Braunstein continues with some comparisons of different twitter-users and how their Klout scores don’t make much sense. I don’t really see the point of the Klout scores in the first place: I guess they’re supposed to be a quick measure to use in pricing advertising? Whatever, I don’t really care. What did interest me was a remark on Brauns
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Introduction: Rachel Schutt writes: The hype surrounding Big Data and Data Science is at a fever pitch with promises to solve the world’s business and social problems, large and small. How accurate or misleading is this message? How is it helping or damaging people, and which people? What opportunities exist for data nerds and entrepreneurs that examine the larger issues with a skeptical view? This Meetup focuses on mathematical, ethical, and business aspects of data from a skeptical perspective. Guest speakers will discuss the misuse of and best practices with data, common mistakes people make with data and ways to avoid them, how to deal with intentional gaming and politics surrounding mathematical modeling, and taking into account the feedback loops and wider consequences of modeling. We will take deep dives into models in the fields of Data Science, statistics, financial engineering, and economics. This is an independent forum and open to anyone sharing an interest in the larger use of
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Introduction: Ole Rogeberg sends in this: and writes: No idea if this is amusing to non-economists, but I tried my hand at the xtranormal-trend. It’s an attempt to spoof the many standard “incantations” I’ve encountered over the years from economists who don’t want to agree that rational addiction theory lacks justification for some of the claims it makes. More specifically, the claims that the theory can be used to conduct welfare analysis of alternative policies. See here (scroll to Rational Addiction) and here for background.
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