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Matching and complex survey data

Several people have asked me about using propensity score matching with complex surveys, and whether/how weights, PSUs and strata should be taken into account. This paper explains how to handle these issues.

Measuring college student learning in the UNC system

The General Education Council of the UNC General Administration asked me to give a presentation on issues around measuring student learning in higher education. Slides are here.
The state has adopted an ambitious strategic plan; one of their stated strategies is “Become a national leader in the assessment of student learning gains” (p. 44).

Why use survey weights?

I just came across an old paper by Kish that does a nice job describing some of the basic issues around survey weights:
WEIGHTING: WHY, WHEN, AND HOW?

Making my code public

My New Year’s resolution for 2014 is to publicly post all of my Stata code for my projects. Why? This will force me to be more careful with my code, even though I am already somewhat anal when it comes to my code.

Replication of research: more bad news

The amount of evidence demonstrating that most published empirical studies are crap seems to be increasing. See, for example, this article from the Economist.
This is a great piece on how a student debunked a psychology study by some big guns in his field. Title: Nick Brown Smelled Bull. Funny, I smell that a lot when I read the higher ed journals.
 
 

About me

Professor and quant guy. Libertarian turned populist Republican. Trying to learn Japanese and play Spanish Baroque music on the ukulele.

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