“In the first paper, “The Forgotten Summer,” Castleman, Lindsay Page of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard, and Korynn Schooley, research and evaluation analyst for Fulton County Schools, reported the results of two different experiments, in which rising college freshmen were offered counseling over the summer of 2011. The first involved uAspire, a college access organization based in Boston, while the second concentrated on the public school system of Fulton County, Georgia, which is located in the metro-Atlanta area.
In the second, “Summer Nudging,” Castleman and Page studied the effects of “lower-cost interventions”: one in which recent high school graduates were sent personalized text messages reminding them of major tasks to be completed, and another involving peer mentoring, both over the summer of 2012. For these studies, Castleman and Page collaborated with uAspire, the Dallas Independent School District and the Philadelphia-based Mastery Charter schools.”
DFW’s “This is Water” Speech
There’s been a bit of radio silence the last week or so, as we trudge towards the end of the academic year. With that in mind, we are linking to a new video that provides striking visuals to the late, great David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College.
We think its a wonderful way to spend some Friday time-wasting.
For as much as $20,000, Worldwide Motion Picture Group compares the story structure and genre of a script with those of released movies, looking for clues to box-office success.
Our first in a series, “When Data Analysis Goes Bad”
Employment by Education Level
“But as disappointing as the recovery has been, it’s been even more disappointing for people who didn’t graduate from college. It’s been nonexistent. As you can see in the chart below, college grads are the only group that has net added jobs in the past five and a half years.”
2013 American Association of Community Colleges Convention: Highlights
(Source: youtube.com)
“As of May 2009, project leader, Shanna Smith Jaggars, has been working on the study titled “Online Courses in Community Colleges”, which explores factors that affect teaching and learning in online courses, including faculty development, faculty and student perceptions, students’ online readiness, and online instructional activities.
Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation for Education, the study interviews online students, faculty, and support staff at two community colleges, as well as observations of online courses, which were completed in spring of 2011.”
Two Massachusetts community colleges are trying a modified approach to an open online computer science course, but at different paces.
“SAN FRANCISCO – To keep up with the breakneck pace of developments in online education, higher education researchers must be nimble and sometimes make do with “dirty” and quickly gathered data. Otherwise weighty discussions about student learning might get lost in all the hype around massive open online courses and other digital innovations.
That was a takeaway Tuesday during a panel discussion here at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Participants in the session tried to define a meaningful research agenda around emerging forms of course delivery.”
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Jerry Brown wants to tie some state funding for California’s public universities to a host of new requirements, including 10% increases in the number of transfer students from community colleges and the percentage of freshmen graduating within four years.
Criminal-background checks and pre-admission screening, which many colleges conduct as part of the admissions process, are found to be ineffective.
Programs in “Data Science”
The NY Times had a recent article summarizing some of the new programs that universities are creating in response to the demand for jobs in data analysis:
Data scientists are the magicians of the Big Data era. They crunch the data, use mathematical models to analyze it and create narratives or visualizations to explain it, then suggest how to use the information to make decisions.
In the last few years, dozens of programs under a variety of names have sprung up in response to the excitement about Big Data, not to mention the six-figure salaries for some recent graduates.
In the fall, Columbia will offer new master’s and certificate programs heavy on data. The University of San Francisco will soon graduate its charter class of students with a master’s in analytics. Other institutions teaching data science include New York University, Stanford, Northwestern, George Mason, Syracuse, University of California at Irvine and Indiana University.
Before we go back and work on our resumes, we’d like to highlight this little tidbit at the beginning of the article:
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW calls data science “the sexiest job in the 21st century,”
Excuse us, we have to get ready for this evening:
Today in Researcher Nightmare Fuel
“Being a bit of a doubting Thomas on this coding error, I wouldn’t believe unless I touched the digital Excel wound myself. One of the authors was able to show me that, and here it is. You can see the Excel blue-box for formulas missing some data:
This error is needed to get the results they published, and it would go a long way to explaining why it has been impossible for others to replicate these results. If this error turns out to be an actual mistake Reinhart-Rogoff made, well, all I can hope is that future historians note that one of the core empirical points providing the intellectual foundation for the global move to austerity in the early 2010s was based on someone accidentally not updating a row formula in Excel.”
-Researchers Finally Replicated Reinhart-Rogoff, and There Are Some Serious Problems.
