This is an excellent training opportunity:
No significant difference in educational delivery
A doc student showed me this website. It is a compilation of hundreds of studies showing no statistically significant difference in student outcomes for different modes of instruction:
False memories are terrifyingly easy to create
One of many reasons why I am skeptical about surveys that ask students about mundane events over the course of an entire academic year. Students were told about two events that happened during their teenage years. One event was true and based on information supplied by the students’ parents. The other event was fabricated, but included a smattering of true details, such as the city where they...
Repay as you earn loan programs are not looking good
According to Politico: In obscure data tables buried deep in its 2016 budget proposal, the Obama administration revealed this week that its student loan program had a $21.8 billion shortfall last year, apparently the largest ever recorded for any government credit program. The main cause of the shortfall was President Barack Obama’s recent efforts to provide relief for borrowers drowning in...
Why simple statistics can be so very misleading
Anscombe’s quartet was mentioned in a discussion on the Political Methodology listserv, as to what journalists need to know to stop looking like idiots when they report on social science research: Counter to your intuition, all four sets of data have the exact same descriptive and bivariate statistics: Property Value Mean of x in each case 9 (exact) Sample variance of x in each case 11...
Cheap educational interventions
Dynarski’s column in the NY Times is always a must-read. Here, she talks about simple and cheap ways, such as text messages, to change student outcomes. This is the real issue: Why aren’t schools, districts and states rushing to set up these measures? Maybe because the programs have no natural constituency. They are not labor- or capital-intensive, so they don’t create lots of jobs or...
Myth: 1% own half the world’s wealth
Another statistic I heard and immediately thought, must be bullshit. Here is a glimpse into Oxfam’s state of the art methodology: According to this methodology, the poorest 2 billion people in the world have a negative net wealth. Someone who has 50p but no assets or debts would be above the bottom 30 per cent of the world’s population. It doesn’t take an advanced mathematician to work out...
I am just like this guy, minus the genius and impact on the field
Myth: Students as “digital natives”
As anyone with half a brain realized as soon as they heard the concept: This article takes a critical look at three pervasive urban legends in education about the nature of learners, learning, and teaching and looks at what educational and psychological research has to say about them. The three legends can be seen as variations on one central theme, namely, that it is the learner who knows best...
Public higher ed in Maine is doomed …
They just don’t know it yet. Here’s the problem: There are 30,000 students at the universities in the system — that’s seven universities educating about as many students as some midsized public universities do on one campus. The flagship University of Maine in Orono has 11,000 students and is the largest university in the system. The smallest, the University of Maine at Machias...