Pointing to this news article by Megan McArdle discussing a recent study of Medicaid recipients, Jonathan Falk writes: Forget the interpretation for a moment, and the political spin, but haven’t we reached an interesting point when a journalist says things like: When you do an RCT with more than 12,000 people in it, and your [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Teaching category.
Exponential increase in the number of stat majors
Joe Blitztein sent around the following graph: (The x-axis goes from 2000 to 2012 and the y=axis goes from 0 to 120.) 100 statistics majors (this combines sophomores, juniors, and seniors, but still, that’s a lot more than the 1 or 2 or 3 a year we’re used to seeing). At first I was like, [...]
Grad students: Participate in an online survey on statistics education
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:
David Brooks writes that technical knowledge—”the statistical knowledge you need to understand what market researchers do, the biological knowledge you need to grasp the basics of what nurses do”—can be “memorized by rote”
The popular New York Times columnist writes: The best part of the rise of online education is that it forces us to ask: What is a university for? . . . My own stab at an answer would be that universities are places where young people acquire two sorts of knowledge, what the philosopher Michael [...]
“Statistical Modeling: A Fresh Approach”
Ben Hansen recommended to me this book and course by Daniel Kaplan. It looks pretty good. I’ve only looked at the website, not the book itself, and I’m sure I’d find lots of places to disagree with it on details, but the general flow seemed reasonable, also I liked that there’s lots of course materials [...]
Online Education and Jazz
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 [...]
Statistics for firefighters: update
Following up on our earlier discussion, Daniel Rubenson from Ryerson University in Toronto writes: The course went really well (it was a couple of years ago now). The course was run through a partnership my department has with the Ontario Fire College. Basically, firefighters can do a certificate and sometimes a degree in public administration [...]
Workshop on science communication for graduate students
Nathan Sanders writes:
Class on computational social science this semester, Fridays, 1:00-3:40pm
Sharad Goel, Jake Hofman, and Sergei Vassilvitskii are teaching this awesome class on computational social science this semester in the applied math department at Columbia. Here’s the course info. You should take this course. These guys are amazing.
My talk last night at the visualization meetup
It went pretty well, especially considering it was an entirely new talk (even though, paradoxically, all the images were old), and even though I had a tough act to follow: I came on immediately after an excellent short presentation by Jed Dougherty on some cool information and visualization software that he and his colleagues are [...]
Textbook for data visualization?
Dave Choi writes: I’m building a course called “Exploring and visualizing data,” for Heinz college in Carnegie Mellon (public policy and information systems). Do you know any books that might be good for such a course? I’m hoping to get non-statisticians to appreciate the statistician’s point of view on this subject. I immediately thought of [...]
Statistics in a world where nothing is random
Rama Ganesan writes: I think I am having an existential crisis. I used to work with animals (rats, mice, gerbils etc.) Then I started to work in marketing research where we did have some kind of random sampling procedure. So up until a few years ago, I was sort of okay. Now I am teaching [...]
“Teaching effectiveness” as another dimension in cognitive ability
I’m not a great teacher. I can get by because I work hard and I know a lot, and for some students my classes are just great, but it’s not a natural talent of mine. I know people who are amazing teachers, and they have something that I just don’t have. I wrote that book, [...]
Feedback on my Bayesian Data Analysis class at Columbia
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 [...]
Write This Book
This post is by Phil Price. I’ve been preparing a review of a new statistics textbook aimed at students and practitioners in the “physical sciences,” as distinct from the social sciences and also distinct from people who intend to take more statistics courses. I figured that since it’s been years since I looked at an intro [...]
A graphics talk with no visuals!
So, I’m at MIT, twenty minutes into my talk on tradeoffs in information graphics to the computer scientists, when the power goes out. They had some dim backup lighting so we weren’t all sitting there in the dark, but the projector wasn’t working. So I took questions for the remaining 40 minutes. It went well, [...]
Should Harvard start admitting kids at random?
Tyler Cowen links to an article where Ron Unz provides evidence that Jews are way overrepresented at Ivy League colleges, with Asians-Americans and non-Jewish whites correspondingly underrepresented. Unz attributes this to bias and pressure in the admissions office and recommends that, instead, top colleges should switch to a system based purely academic credentials (he never [...]
How to teach methods we don’t like?
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 [...]
“On Inspiring Students and Being Human”
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 [...]
Grade inflation: why weren’t the instructors all giving all A’s already??
My upstairs colleague Blattman writes: The trend is unsurprising. Schools have every incentive to move to the highest four or five piles [grades] possible. . . . Then grade inflation will stop because . . there will be nowhere to go. . . . So why resist the new equilibrium? I don’t have any argument [...]
My upcoming talk for the data visualization meetup
Somebody asked me to speak sometime at a data visualization meetup. I think I spoke there a year or two ago but I could do it again. Last time I spoke on Infovis vs Statistical Graphics, this time I could just go thru the choices involved in a few zillion graphs I’ve published over the [...]
David Hogg on statistics
Data analysis recipes: Fitting a model to data: We go through the many considerations involved in fitting a model to data, using as an example the fit of a straight line to a set of points in a two-dimensional plane. Standard weighted least-squares fitting is only appropriate when there is a dimension along which the [...]
Coaching, teaching, and writing
I sent the following email to Thomas Basbøll: I read this: http://secondlanguage.blogspot.com/p/writing-coach.html and was reminded of this: http://andrewgelman.com/2011/10/could-i-use-a-statistics-coach/ He replied: Which reminds me of this http://secondlanguage.blogspot.com/2011/10/teacher-or-coach.html We seem to be approaching some sort of Platonic ideal in which we can conduct an entire conversation from links to our previous writings. Just like that joke about [...]
A Ph.D. thesis is not really a marathon
Thomas Basbøll writes: A blog called The Thesis Whisperer was recently pointed out to me. I [Basbøll] haven’t looked at it closely, but I’ll be reading it regularly for a while before I recommend it. I’m sure it’s a good place to go to discover that you’re not alone, especially when you’re struggling with your [...]
Value-added assessment: What went wrong?
Jacob Hartog writes the following in reaction to my post on the use of value-added modeling for teacher assessment: What I [Hartog] think has been inadequately discussed is the use of individual model specifications to assign these teacher ratings, rather than the zone of agreement across a broad swath of model specifications. For example, the [...]