andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1268 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: While visiting the education school at the University of Pennsylvania a couple months ago, I had a long conversation with Bob Boruch, a prominent researcher in the field of evidence-based education. We shared Fred Mosteller stories and talked about a lot of other things too. Boruch sent me an article about teaching randomized controlled trials to education students, which gave me the following idea which connects to my longstanding embarrassment (and subject of my next column on ethics, forthcoming in Chance magazine) about the lack of systematic measurement, sampling, or experimentation in our own teaching efforts. Anyway, here’s my idea for experimentation in statistics teaching, an idea that I think could work particularly well in classes with education students. Each class could, as part of the course, design an educational experiment to be performed on next year’s class. Easier said than done, I know, but perhaps ed school students would be particularly motivated to do t
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Introduction: While visiting the education school at the University of Pennsylvania a couple months ago, I had a long conversation with Bob Boruch, a prominent researcher in the field of evidence-based education. We shared Fred Mosteller stories and talked about a lot of other things too. Boruch sent me an article about teaching randomized controlled trials to education students, which gave me the following idea which connects to my longstanding embarrassment (and subject of my next column on ethics, forthcoming in Chance magazine) about the lack of systematic measurement, sampling, or experimentation in our own teaching efforts. Anyway, here’s my idea for experimentation in statistics teaching, an idea that I think could work particularly well in classes with education students. Each class could, as part of the course, design an educational experiment to be performed on next year’s class. Easier said than done, I know, but perhaps ed school students would be particularly motivated to do t
2 0.41641438 1264 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-14-Learning from failure
Introduction: I was talking with education researcher Bob Boruch about my frustrations in teaching, the idea that as statisticians we tell people to do formal experimentation but in our own teaching practice we typically just try different things without even measuring outcomes, let alone performing any formal evaluation. Boruch showed me this article with Alan Ruby about learning from failure. Unfortunately I’ve forgotten all my other thoughts from our conversation but I’m posting the article here.
3 0.15751977 709 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-13-D. Kahneman serves up a wacky counterfactual
Introduction: I followed a link from Tyler Cowen to this bit by Daniel Kahneman: Education is an important determinant of income — one of the most important — but it is less important than most people think. If everyone had the same education, the inequality of income would be reduced by less than 10%. When you focus on education you neglect the myriad other factors that determine income. The differences of income among people who have the same education are huge. I think I know what he’s saying–if you regress income on education and other factors, and then you take education out of the model, R-squared decreases by 10%. Or something like that. Not necessarily R-squared, maybe you fit the big model, then get predictions for everyone putting in the mean value for education and look at the sd of incomes or the Gini index or whatever. Or something else along those lines. My problem is with the counterfactual: “If everyone had the same education . . .” I have a couple problems with this
4 0.13159066 1813 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-19-Grad students: Participate in an online survey on statistics education
Introduction: Joan Garfield, a leading researcher in statistics education, is conducting a survey of graduate students who teach or assist with the teaching of statistics. She writes: We want to invite them to take a short survey that will enable us to collect some baseline data that we may use in a grant proposal we are developing. The project would provide summer workshops and ongoing support for graduate students who will be teaching or assisting with teaching introductory statistics classes. If the grant is funded, we would invite up to 40 students from around the country who are entering graduate programs in statistics to participate in a three-year training and support program. The goal of this program is to help these students become expert and flexible teachers of statistics, and to support them as they move through their teaching experiences as graduate students. Here’s the the online survey . Garfield writes, “Your responses are completely voluntary and anonymous. Results w
5 0.12930728 1517 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-01-“On Inspiring Students and Being Human”
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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same-blog 1 0.98736823 1268 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-18-Experimenting on your intro stat course, as a way of teaching experimentation in your intro stat course (and also to improve the course itself)
Introduction: While visiting the education school at the University of Pennsylvania a couple months ago, I had a long conversation with Bob Boruch, a prominent researcher in the field of evidence-based education. We shared Fred Mosteller stories and talked about a lot of other things too. Boruch sent me an article about teaching randomized controlled trials to education students, which gave me the following idea which connects to my longstanding embarrassment (and subject of my next column on ethics, forthcoming in Chance magazine) about the lack of systematic measurement, sampling, or experimentation in our own teaching efforts. Anyway, here’s my idea for experimentation in statistics teaching, an idea that I think could work particularly well in classes with education students. Each class could, as part of the course, design an educational experiment to be performed on next year’s class. Easier said than done, I know, but perhaps ed school students would be particularly motivated to do t
2 0.84196556 956 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-13-Hey, you! Don’t take that class!
Introduction: Back when I taught at Berkeley, I once asked a Ph.D. student how he’d decided to work with me. He said that a couple of the tenured professors had advised him not to take my class, and that this advice had got him curious: What about Bayesian statistics is so dangerous that it can scare these otherwise unflappable stat professors. Overall, my senior colleagues’ advice to students to avoid my course probably decreased my enrollment, but the students who did decide to attend surely had better character than the ones who followed directions. (Or, at least I’d like to think that.) I was reminded of that incident recently when reading a news article by Marc Tracy: A U.S. Department of Education committee is investigating whether a Columbia University department head “steered” a Jewish student away from taking a class on the Mideast taught by Professor Joseph Massad due to the perception that she would be “uncomfortable” because of the professor’s pro-Palestinian tilt . . . “Ba
3 0.82988387 1028 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-26-Tenure lets you handle students who cheat
Introduction: The other day, a friend of mine who is an untenured professor (not in statistics or political science) was telling me about a class where many of the students seemed to be resubmitting papers that they had already written for previous classes. (The supposition was based on internal evidence of the topics of the submitted papers.) It would be possible to check this and then kick the cheating students out of the program—but why do it? It would be a lot of work, also some of the students who are caught might complain, then word would get around that my friend is a troublemaker. And nobody likes a troublemaker. Once my friend has tenure it would be possible to do the right thing. But . . . here’s the hitch: most college instructors do not have tenure, and one result, I suspect, is a decline in ethical standards. This is something I hadn’t thought of in our earlier discussion of job security for teachers: tenure gives you the freedom to kick out cheating students.
4 0.82305491 1864 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-20-Evaluating Columbia University’s Frontiers of Science course
Introduction: Frontiers of Science is a course offered as part of Columbia University’s Core Curriculum. The course is controversial, with some people praising its overview of several areas of science, and others feeling that a more traditional set of introductory science courses would do the job better. Last month, the faculty in charge of the course wrote the following public letter : The United States is in the midst of a debate over the value of a traditional college education. Why enroll in a place like Columbia College when you can obtain an undergraduate degree for $10,000 or learn everything from Massive Open Online Courses? In more parochial terms, what is the value added by approaches such as Columbia’s Core Curriculum? Recently students in our Core Course, Frontiers of Science (FoS), provided a partial answer. The FoS faculty designed a survey to gauge the scientific skills and knowledge of the Class of 2016 both before and after taking FoS. In an assembly held during orientati
Introduction: Joe Blitzstein and Xiao-Li Meng write : An e ffectively designed examination process goes far beyond revealing students’ knowledge or skills. It also serves as a great teaching and learning tool, incentivizing the students to think more deeply and to connect the dots at a higher level. This extends throughout the entire process: pre-exam preparation, the exam itself, and the post-exam period (the aftermath or, more appropriately, afterstat of the exam). As in the publication process, the first submission is essential but still just one piece in the dialogue. Viewing the entire exam process as an extended dialogue between students and faculty, we discuss ideas for making this dialogue induce more inspiration than perspiration, and thereby making it a memorable deep-learning triumph rather than a wish-to-forget test-taking trauma. We illustrate such a dialogue through a recently introduced course in the Harvard Statistics Department, Stat 399: Problem Solving in Statistics, and tw
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same-blog 1 0.95511633 1268 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-18-Experimenting on your intro stat course, as a way of teaching experimentation in your intro stat course (and also to improve the course itself)
Introduction: While visiting the education school at the University of Pennsylvania a couple months ago, I had a long conversation with Bob Boruch, a prominent researcher in the field of evidence-based education. We shared Fred Mosteller stories and talked about a lot of other things too. Boruch sent me an article about teaching randomized controlled trials to education students, which gave me the following idea which connects to my longstanding embarrassment (and subject of my next column on ethics, forthcoming in Chance magazine) about the lack of systematic measurement, sampling, or experimentation in our own teaching efforts. Anyway, here’s my idea for experimentation in statistics teaching, an idea that I think could work particularly well in classes with education students. Each class could, as part of the course, design an educational experiment to be performed on next year’s class. Easier said than done, I know, but perhaps ed school students would be particularly motivated to do t
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Introduction: Interesting mini-memoir from John Podhoretz about the Upper West Side, in his words, “the most affluent shtetl the world has ever seen.” The only part I can’t quite follow is his offhand remark, “It is an expensive place to live, but then it always was.” I always thought that, before 1985 or so, the Upper West Side wasn’t so upscale. People at Columbia tell all sorts of stories about how things used to be in the bad old days. I have one other comment. Before giving it, let me emphasize that enjoyed reading Podhoretz’s article and, by making the comment below, I’m not trying to shoot Podhoretz down; rather, I’m trying to help out by pointing out a habit in his writing that might be getting in the way of his larger messages. Podhoretz writes the following about slum clearance: Over the course of the next four years, 20 houses on the block would be demolished and replaced with a high school named for Louis Brandeis and a relocated elementary school. Of the 35 brownstones t
3 0.92778087 633 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-28-“The New Tyranny: Carbon Monoxide Detectors?”
Introduction: This story reminds me that, when I was in grad school, the state of Massachusetts instituted a seat-belt law which became a big controversy. A local talk show host made it his pet project to shoot down the law, and he succeeded! There was a ballot initiative and the voters repealed the seat belt law. A few years later the law returned (it was somehow tied in with Federal highway funding, I think, the same way they managed to get all the states to up the drinking age to 21), and, oddly enough, nobody seemed to care the second time around. It’s funny how something can be a big political issue one year and nothing the next. I have no deep insights on the matter, but it’s worth remembering that these sorts of panics are nothing new. Recall E.S. Turner’s classic book, Roads to Ruin. I think there’s a research project in here, to understand what gets an issue to be a big deal and how it is that some controversies just fade away.
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Introduction: This blog has roughly a month’s worth of items waiting to be posted. I post about once a day, sometimes rescheduling posts to make room for something topical. Anyway, it struck me that I know what’s coming up, but you don’t. So, here’s what we have for you during the next few days: Mon: More on US health care overkill Tues: My talks in Bristol this Wed and London this Thurs Wed: How to think about “identifiability” in Bayesian inference? Thurs: Stopping rules and Bayesian analysis Fri: The popularity of certain baby names is falling off the clifffffffffffff Plus anything our cobloggers might choose to post during these days. And, if Woody Allen or Ed Wegman or anyone else newsworthy asks us to publish an op-ed for them, we’ll consider it. Enjoy.
5 0.9151029 1404 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-03-Counting gays
Introduction: Gary Gates writes : In a recent study, the author of this article estimated that the self- identified lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community makes up 3.8 percent of the American population. The author’s estimate was far lower than many scholars and activists had contended, and it included a relatively high proportion of persons self-identifying as bisexuals. This article responds to two of the central criticisms that arose in the controversy that followed. First, in response to claims that his estimate did not account for people who are in the closet, the author describes how demographers might measure the size of the closet. Second, in response to those who either ignored the reported large incidence of bisexuality or misconstrued the meaning of that incidence, the Author considers how varying frameworks for conceptualizing sexual orientation might alter the ratio of lesbian or gay individuals to bisexuals. This article goes on to offer observations about the ch
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