andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1890 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: This is just a local Columbia thing, so I’m posting Sunday night when nobody will read it . . . Samantha Cooney reports in the Spectator (Columbia’s student newspaper): Frontiers of Science may be in for an overhaul. After a year reviewing the course, the Educational Policy and Planning Committee has issued a report detailing its findings and outlining potential ways to make the oft-maligned course more effective. The EPPC’s report, a copy of which was obtained by Spectator, suggests eliminating the lecture portion of the course in favor of small seminars with a standardized curriculum, mirroring other courses in the Core Curriculum. This seems reasonable to me. It sounds like the seminar portion of the class has been much more successful than the lectures. Once the lectures are removed entirely, perhaps it will allow the students to focus on learning during the seminar periods. Also, I appreciate that Cooney did a good job quoting me. As I wrote last month , I respe
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1 This is just a local Columbia thing, so I’m posting Sunday night when nobody will read it . [sent-1, score-0.178]
2 After a year reviewing the course, the Educational Policy and Planning Committee has issued a report detailing its findings and outlining potential ways to make the oft-maligned course more effective. [sent-5, score-0.781]
3 The EPPC’s report, a copy of which was obtained by Spectator, suggests eliminating the lecture portion of the course in favor of small seminars with a standardized curriculum, mirroring other courses in the Core Curriculum. [sent-6, score-1.407]
4 It sounds like the seminar portion of the class has been much more successful than the lectures. [sent-8, score-0.588]
5 Once the lectures are removed entirely, perhaps it will allow the students to focus on learning during the seminar periods. [sent-9, score-0.388]
6 Also, I appreciate that Cooney did a good job quoting me. [sent-10, score-0.108]
7 As I wrote last month , I respect that the organizers of the course did a pre-test, post-test evaluation, but I’m exhausted by all the hype and happytalk around that evaluation in particular and the course more generally. [sent-11, score-1.258]
8 I’m not the world’s greatest teacher so I have a lot of sympathy for organizers of courses that don’t go quite as planned, but I wish they’d be a bit more forthright in admitting their errors—especially for a class that is required of most of the undergraduates. [sent-12, score-0.997]
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same-blog 1 1.0000004 1890 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-09-Frontiers of Science update
Introduction: This is just a local Columbia thing, so I’m posting Sunday night when nobody will read it . . . Samantha Cooney reports in the Spectator (Columbia’s student newspaper): Frontiers of Science may be in for an overhaul. After a year reviewing the course, the Educational Policy and Planning Committee has issued a report detailing its findings and outlining potential ways to make the oft-maligned course more effective. The EPPC’s report, a copy of which was obtained by Spectator, suggests eliminating the lecture portion of the course in favor of small seminars with a standardized curriculum, mirroring other courses in the Core Curriculum. This seems reasonable to me. It sounds like the seminar portion of the class has been much more successful than the lectures. Once the lectures are removed entirely, perhaps it will allow the students to focus on learning during the seminar periods. Also, I appreciate that Cooney did a good job quoting me. As I wrote last month , I respe
2 0.15101339 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
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Introduction: Columbia College has for many years had a Core Curriculum, in which students read classics such as Plato (in translation) etc. A few years ago they created a Science core course. There was always some confusion about this idea: On one hand, how much would college freshmen really learn about science by reading the classic writings of Galileo, Laplace, Darwin, Einstein, etc.? And they certainly wouldn’t get much out by puzzling over the latest issues of Nature, Cell, and Physical Review Letters. On the other hand, what’s the point of having them read Dawkins, Gould, or even Brian Greene? These sorts of popularizations give you a sense of modern science (even to the extent of conveying some of the debates in these fields), but reading them might not give the same intellectual engagement that you’d get from wrestling with the Bible or Shakespeare. I have a different idea. What about structuring the entire course around computer programming and simulation? Start with a few weeks t
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Introduction: Eoin Lawless wrote me: I’ve been reading your blog (and John Kruschke ‘s) for several months now, as a result of starting to learn Bayesian methods from Doing Bayesian Data Analysis [I love the title of that book! --- ed.]. More recently I completed a Coursera course on Data Science. I found learning through the medium of a online course to be an amazing experience. It does not replace books, but learning new material at the same time as other people and discussing it in the forums is very motivational. Additionally it is much easier to work through exercises and projects when there is a deadline and some element of competition than to plow through the end of chapter exercises in a book. This is especially true, I believe, when the learning is for a long term goal, rather than to be used immediately in work, for example. My question: you are obviously evangelical about the benefits that Bayesian statistics brings, have you ever considered producing a Coursera (or similar) cour
5 0.10594444 1039 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-02-I just flew in from the econ seminar, and boy are my arms tired
Introduction: I’ve heard all sorts of scare stories of what it’s like to speak in an academic economics seminar: they’re rude, they interrupt constantly, they don’t let you get through three slides in an hour, etc. But whenever I’ve actually spoke in an economics department, the people have been polite and well-behaved, really it’s been like any other seminar. I mentioned this to some people awhile ago and they said that the nasty-economist thing only happens in the top departments. I’d spoken at Columbia (which, if not at the very top, is still respectable), but that was in the political economy seminar and I’m a political scientist, so maybe they were nice to me because I’m local. And the other econ departments where I’d spoken were in Europe (maybe they’re nicer there) or at non-elite institutions in the U.S. So I called my friend at Harvard econ, told him my story, and asked if I could speak there. He duly booked me for the Harvard-MIT econometrics seminar. I spoke at the seminar,
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Introduction: This is just a local Columbia thing, so I’m posting Sunday night when nobody will read it . . . Samantha Cooney reports in the Spectator (Columbia’s student newspaper): Frontiers of Science may be in for an overhaul. After a year reviewing the course, the Educational Policy and Planning Committee has issued a report detailing its findings and outlining potential ways to make the oft-maligned course more effective. The EPPC’s report, a copy of which was obtained by Spectator, suggests eliminating the lecture portion of the course in favor of small seminars with a standardized curriculum, mirroring other courses in the Core Curriculum. This seems reasonable to me. It sounds like the seminar portion of the class has been much more successful than the lectures. Once the lectures are removed entirely, perhaps it will allow the students to focus on learning during the seminar periods. Also, I appreciate that Cooney did a good job quoting me. As I wrote last month , I respe
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Introduction: Now that September has arrived, it’s time for us to think teaching. Here’s something from Andrew Heckler and Eleanor Sayre. Heckler writes: The article describes a project studying the performance of university level students taking an intro physics course. Every week for ten weeks we took 1/10th of the students (randomly selected only once) and gave them the same set of questions relevant to the course. This allowed us to plot the evolution of average performance in the class during the quarter. We can then determine when learning occurs: For example, do they learn the material in a relevant lecture or lab or homework? Since we had about 350 students taking the course, we could get some reasonable stats. In particular, you might be interested in Figure 10 (page 774) which shows student performance day-by-day on a particular question. The performance does not change directly after lecture, but rather only when the homework was due. [emphasis added] We could not find any oth
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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: This is just a local Columbia thing, so I’m posting Sunday night when nobody will read it . . . Samantha Cooney reports in the Spectator (Columbia’s student newspaper): Frontiers of Science may be in for an overhaul. After a year reviewing the course, the Educational Policy and Planning Committee has issued a report detailing its findings and outlining potential ways to make the oft-maligned course more effective. The EPPC’s report, a copy of which was obtained by Spectator, suggests eliminating the lecture portion of the course in favor of small seminars with a standardized curriculum, mirroring other courses in the Core Curriculum. This seems reasonable to me. It sounds like the seminar portion of the class has been much more successful than the lectures. Once the lectures are removed entirely, perhaps it will allow the students to focus on learning during the seminar periods. Also, I appreciate that Cooney did a good job quoting me. As I wrote last month , I respe
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Introduction: Commenters here are occasionally bothered that I spend so much time attacking frauds and plagiarists. See, for example, here and here . Why go on and on about these losers, given that there are more important problems in the world such as war, pestilence, hunger, and graphs where the y-axis doesn’t go all the way down to zero? Part of the story is that I do research for a living so I resent people who devalue research through misattribution or fraud, in the same way that rich people don’t like counterfeiters. What really bugs me, though, is when cheaters get caught and still don’t admit it. People like Hauser, Wegman, Fischer, and Weick get under my skin because they have the chutzpah to just deny deny deny. The grainy time-stamped videotape with their hand in the cookie jar is right there, and they’ll still talk around the problem. Makes me want to scream. This happens all the time . All. Over. The. Place. Everybody makes mistakes, and just about everybody does thing
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Introduction: I was curious so I ordered a used copy. It was pretty good. It fit in my pocket and I read it on the plane. It was written in a bland, spare manner, not worth reading for any direct insights it would give into human nature, but the plot moved along. And the background material was interesting in the window it gave into the society of the 1950s. It was fun to read a book of pulp fiction that didn’t have any dead bodies in it. I wonder what Jenny Davidson would think of it.
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Introduction: Jason Rosenfeld, who has the amazing title of “Manager of Basketball Analytics” at the Charlotte Bobcats, announces the following jobs : Basketball Operations: Statistics Basketball Operations Systems Developer – Charlotte Bobcats (Charlotte, NC) POSITION OVERVIEW The Basketball Operations System Developer will collect and import data to our database, check data, and field requests from the Basketball Operations staff. This position will be instrumental in molding and improving our database to assist the staff in player personnel and coaching efforts. ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES • Respond to data and database requests from the front office. • Build user-friendly software tools for use by the basketball operations staff. • Accumulate data from various sources to input and organize into our system to assist the basketball operations staff with decisions. • Check and clean data for accuracy and import to our database. • Provide ideas and play a key ro
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