andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-2104 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: In response to some big new push for testing schoolchildren, Mark Palko writes : The announcement of a new curriculum is invariably followed by a round of hearty round of self congratulations and talk of “keeping standards high” as if adding a slide to a PowerPoint automatically made students better informed. It doesn’t work that way. Adding a topic to the list simply means that students will be exposed to it, not that they will understand or master or retain it. Well put. In my own teaching, I often am tempted to believe that just putting a topic in a homework problem is enough to ensure that students will learn it. But it doesn’t work that way. Even if they manage to somehow struggle through and solve the problem (and many don’t, or they rely on their friends’ solutions), they won’t learn much if they don’t see the connection with everything else they know. I’m reminded of the time, several years ago, that I learned that photocopying an article and filing it was not the
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same-blog 1 1.0000002 2104 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-17-Big bad education bureaucracy does big bad things
Introduction: In response to some big new push for testing schoolchildren, Mark Palko writes : The announcement of a new curriculum is invariably followed by a round of hearty round of self congratulations and talk of “keeping standards high” as if adding a slide to a PowerPoint automatically made students better informed. It doesn’t work that way. Adding a topic to the list simply means that students will be exposed to it, not that they will understand or master or retain it. Well put. In my own teaching, I often am tempted to believe that just putting a topic in a homework problem is enough to ensure that students will learn it. But it doesn’t work that way. Even if they manage to somehow struggle through and solve the problem (and many don’t, or they rely on their friends’ solutions), they won’t learn much if they don’t see the connection with everything else they know. I’m reminded of the time, several years ago, that I learned that photocopying an article and filing it was not the
2 0.17533246 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
3 0.15252145 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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Introduction: April Galyardt writes: I’m teaching my first graduate class this semester. It’s intro stats for graduate students in the college of education. Most of the students are first year PhD students. Though, there are a number of master’s students who are primarily in-service teachers. The difficulties with teaching an undergraduate intro stats course are still present, in that mathematical preparation and phobia vary widely across the class. I’ve been enjoying the class and the students, but I’d like your take on an issue I’ve been thinking about. How do I balance teaching the standard methods, like hypothesis testing, that these future researchers have to know because they are so standard, with discussing the problems with those methods (e.g. p-value as a measure of sample size , and the decline effect , not to mention multiple testing and other common mistakes). It feels a bit like saying “Ok here’s what everybody does, but really it’s broken” and then there’s not enough time to tal
5 0.12617296 896 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-09-My homework success
Introduction: A friend writes to me: You will be amused to know that students in our Bayesian Inference paper at 4th year found solutions to exercises from your book on-line. The amazing thing was that some of them were dumb enough to copy out solutions verbatim. However, I thought you might like to know you have done well in this class! I’m happy to hear this. I worked hard on those solutions!
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Introduction: In response to some big new push for testing schoolchildren, Mark Palko writes : The announcement of a new curriculum is invariably followed by a round of hearty round of self congratulations and talk of “keeping standards high” as if adding a slide to a PowerPoint automatically made students better informed. It doesn’t work that way. Adding a topic to the list simply means that students will be exposed to it, not that they will understand or master or retain it. Well put. In my own teaching, I often am tempted to believe that just putting a topic in a homework problem is enough to ensure that students will learn it. But it doesn’t work that way. Even if they manage to somehow struggle through and solve the problem (and many don’t, or they rely on their friends’ solutions), they won’t learn much if they don’t see the connection with everything else they know. I’m reminded of the time, several years ago, that I learned that photocopying an article and filing it was not the
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Introduction: Val has reported success with the following trick: Get to the classroom a few minutes earlier and turn on soft music. Then set everything up and, the moment it’s time for class to begin, put a clicker question on the screen and turn off the music. The students quiet down and get to work right away. I’ve never liked the usual struggle with students to get them to settle down in class, as it seemed to set up a dynamic in which I was trying to get the students to focus and they were trying to goof off. Turning off the music seems like a great non-confrontational way to send the signal that class is starting.
3 0.85016733 1752 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-06-Online Education and Jazz
Introduction: Alex Tabarrok writes : There is something special, magical, and “almost sacred” about the live teaching experience. I agree that this is true for teaching at its best but it’s also irrelevant. It’s even more true that there is something special, magical and almost sacred about the live musical experience. . . . Mark Edmundson makes the analogy between teaching and music explicit: Every memorable class is a bit like a jazz composition. Quite right but every non-memorable class is also a bit like a jazz composition, namely one that was expensive, took an hour to drive to (15 minutes just to find parking) and at the end of the day wasn’t very memorable. The correct conclusion to draw from the analogy between live teaching and live music is that at their best both are great but both are also costly and inefficient ways of delivering most teaching and most musical experiences. Excellent points (and Tabarrok has additional good points that I haven’t quoted). We’re not all
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: 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
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Introduction: In response to some big new push for testing schoolchildren, Mark Palko writes : The announcement of a new curriculum is invariably followed by a round of hearty round of self congratulations and talk of “keeping standards high” as if adding a slide to a PowerPoint automatically made students better informed. It doesn’t work that way. Adding a topic to the list simply means that students will be exposed to it, not that they will understand or master or retain it. Well put. In my own teaching, I often am tempted to believe that just putting a topic in a homework problem is enough to ensure that students will learn it. But it doesn’t work that way. Even if they manage to somehow struggle through and solve the problem (and many don’t, or they rely on their friends’ solutions), they won’t learn much if they don’t see the connection with everything else they know. I’m reminded of the time, several years ago, that I learned that photocopying an article and filing it was not the
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Introduction: I always wondered what went on there . $380 x 500 people, that’s $190,000! I’ll have to remember to ask for more money next time I’m asked to speak for a commercial organization.
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Introduction: This American Life reporter Gabriel Rhodes says : This is one of the big differences between Jon and Anthony, between scientist and non-scientist. For Jon, having a year’s worth of work suddenly thrown into question is a normal day at the office. But for Anthony, that’s not normal. And it’s not OK. The time in Jon’s lab was a year of his life, where he felt like Jon kept moving the goal posts. . . . But now, Anthony wants to know, before he starts turning his life upside down again, what will count as proof enough for Jon? How many experiments? Anthony Holland: So let’s say I do three weeks of experiment, and I only concentrate on these leukemia cells. And if I can kill at least 20% every single time, every week, will that do it? Would that be enough? Or do you want to see pancreatic die, or do you want to see—I mean, what exact buttons do I have to hit? This captures a big problem with the research enterprise, as I see it. There’s this attitude that if you can reach som
Introduction: We had some interesting comments on our recent reflections on Niall Ferguson’s ill-chosen remarks in which he attributed Keynes’s economic views (I don’t actually know exactly what Keyesianism is, but I think a key part is for the government to run surpluses during economic booms and deficits during recessions) to the Keynes being gay and marrying a ballerina and talking about poetry. The general idea, I think, is that people without kids don’t care so much about the future, and this motivated Keynes’s party-all-the-time attitude, which might have worked just fine for Eddie Murphy’s girlfriend in the 1980s and in San Francisco bathhouses of the 1970s but, according to Ferguson, is not the ticket for preserving today’s American empire. Some of the more robust defenders of Ferguson may have been disappointed by his followup remarks: “I should not have suggested . . . that Keynes was indifferent to the long run because he had no children, nor that he had no children because he was g
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