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Infant mortality and choice of a base
If I have 10 kids in my class and two failed last year and one failed this year, I can say two equivalent things: 50% less students failed my course this year 10% more of my students passed. The odd thing is most students refuse when looking at such figures to believe they are equivalent Continue reading
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Tutoring at Scale Sighting
From The Chronicle, Tenured Professor Departs Stanford U., Hoping to Teach 500,000 Students at Online Start-Up: Eventually, the 200 students taking the course in person dwindled to a group of 30. Meanwhile, the course’s popularity exploded online, drawing students from around the world. The experience taught the professor that he could craft a course with Continue reading
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Are we winning or losing the “War on Cancer”?
If your answer was that war is the wrong metaphor, you win the prize, I suppose. Still, I found this exercise from a medical stats textbook rather interesting: 17.1. A major controversy has occurred about apparent contradictions in biostatistical data as researchers try to convince Congress to allocate more funds for intramural and extramural investigations Continue reading
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The Numbers Game
We often talk of social statistics, especially those that seem as straightforward as age, as if a bureaucrat were poised with a clipboard, peering through every window, counting; or, better still, had some machine to do it for them. The unsurprising truth is that, for many of the statistics we take for granted, there is Continue reading
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Keynes, Anti-Semite? Really?
Pardon the intrusion — but I find this interesting. There’s a diary entry of Keynes being circulated around that supposedly proves Keynes was an anti-Semite. This is meant to be a brilliant rebuttal to Paul Krugman’s “Keynes was Right” column on how Keynes’s theoretical model of macroeconomics has been vindicated. In some ways it doesn’t Continue reading
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Klout wins for this year’s stupidest bar chart
Check it out here: http://blog.infoadvisors.com/index.php/2011/12/22/stupidest-bar-chart-of-2011-congrats-klout/ I’m not sure how you trust a company who claims to have some super-secret statistical insight when they put out things like this. Continue reading
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A Herd Immunity to Nonsense
Mark Pagel on the internet and our cultural evolution: A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we’ve seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What’s happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we’re being domesticated by these great big societal Continue reading
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Cognitive Bias and Education as a Public Good
A strange but true exhortation from Dan Kahneman, the guy who, with Amos Tversky, basically invented the field of cognitive bias. After forty years of looking into the weird world of bias he says the only effective way to get around your own biases is to create a society of people skilled enough to correct Continue reading
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Evidence-Based and the Marginal Cost of Zero
If you can conceive of a solution to a problem that has a marginal cost of zero due to cheap replication and economies of scale, then that’s good. If you’re doing that by going into the digital space, where cost of experimentation is low, even better. Many elements of education are best seen through the Continue reading
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Semantic Mapping vs. Pictorial Cues
From A Theory-Based Meta-Analysis of Research on Instruction by RJ Marzano: The next two techniques displayed in Table 7.2 employed the information processing function of idea representation. Techniques that provided students with metacognitive strategies for using visual memory had an effect size of 1.04, indicating a percentile gain of 35 points. Presumably, these strategies help students Continue reading
Hapgood 