Where is humorous satire when we need it?

The Cuban Missile Crisis was in 1962.  Dr. Strangelove came out in 1964.  The Internet and the 24-hour news cycle has sped everything up.

In his column today Roger Cohen weaves a fictitious, but plausible, and definitely not funny, story about how World War III might start, updating the Assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand to match contemporary events in the Ukraine.  After reading the piece, I desperately wanted a Kubrick-like alternative to put me at ease.  Doesn't it seem there should be something in that vein in tomorrow's paper?  If you can make fun of it then it's not so scary.

On a different note, you might think it's in the NY Times long-run interest to try to lure current college students and recent grads who get their news from The Daily Show and Colbert to read their newspaper on occasion.  What is in the paper now to attract this audience?   Most of the TV humor on these show is burlesque-like.  On that level the Times can't compete.  Instead, might the written form offer up wit with pith?  At present Gail Collins is the only columnist to venture into this terrain.  I love her writing for that.  But her style reminds one of Bob and Ray.  Maybe these potential readers require a bit more edge.  Where are the latter day Mort Sahls and Dick Gregorys?  Would some of the up and comers in this vogue be willing to deliver their material in written form?  And would the Times be willing to publish it if they were?

Then there is the geriatric set, which I am to soon enter.  (Sixty is the new seventy.)  They have their own tsoris.  They don't need the news to pile it on.  But Soaps, Oprah, and Dr. Phil are not the answer.  The Onion appeals to a younger crowd.  Might not Larry Doyle or someone else of his ilk be the ticket? There is a need to fill here.

To borrow from Gail Collins, "Come on people!"

Instinct and Tâtonnement

For my non-economist readers who are likely unfamiliar with the term Tâtonnement, I learned it in the second quarter of graduate school while studying microeconomics.  Léon Walras, the father of General Equilibrium theory, used it to explain the process by which his fictitious auctioneer would arrive at equilibrium prices.  I was taught that it meant "groping."  Google Translate says it means "grope."  I prefer the gerund to the noun in this case as the latter refers to a single instance while the former conveys the sense of an ongoing process.

I am using it in my title to give a nod to my economics training while referring to what I go through in writing my blog posts.  To make this explicit for the reader here, though I don't actually do this in a conscious way while writing, there are three fundamental questions I'm asking, each borrowed from the modeling in economics:  What are the axioms?  What is the model?  What theorems result?  (What conclusions can be drawn?)  These are posed simultaneously, not sequentially.  The art is in finding something that works or at least seems to upon initial inspection.  The writing itself then becomes a more detailed inspection and elaboration of the argument.  It is what I was trained to do and what I continue to do all these years later, in spite of having stopped doing formal economic modeling long ago.  There is, of course, a second reason for using the French term rather than the English gerund.  Try substituting the the latter for the former in my title and see what mental picture that creates.  It is not what I have in mind, at least not in the crass way that such a title would suggest.

On Friday David Brooks had a column, The Deepest Self, that challenged me.  I no longer read Brooks' column on a regular basis.  I don't like the way he argues - too preachy - and some of his maintained assumptions seem wrong to me.  But sometimes he hits on themes that I think are important.  This column was one of those times.  It is about the tension between our primitive nature, with its evolutionary basis, and our capacity to rise above the mire via our creativity.  This paragraph was my favorite from the piece.  It is where I agree with Brooks.

In fact, while we are animals, we have much higher opportunities. While we start with and are influenced by evolutionary forces, people also have the chance to make themselves deep in a way not explicable in strictly evolutionary terms. 

The rest of his treatment of the subject I found less satisfactory.  Rather than take him on, point by point, I will simply use this as a launch point for my own inquiry.  I want to do this at the individual level, where I will take a personal perspective to address the issues.  Perhaps this should be done at the social level too.  I may do that in a subsequent post.

On Friday morning I was getting geared up to watch (on TV) the Illini play Michigan in the quarterfinals of the Big Ten basketball tournament.  While in the past I've been a rabid fan, making it to Rupp Arena to see the Illini play Kentucky in the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament in 1984, going to all three sites the Illini played in during their run to the Final Four in 1989, more recently some of that has cooled.  Part of that is simply that sitting in the seats at the Assembly Hall (I know it is now called the Scott Trade Center, but until the renovation is complete I will call it the Assembly Hall) is physically uncomfortable for me now.  My joints much prefer sitting on the couch in front of the TV.  The other part is that I became a fly-by-night fan the past few years in response to the team's mid season swoons.  As the team headed into its tailspin during the Big Ten season, I would start watching games but then turn them off after I got disgusted with the performance.  After several losses in a row I stopped watching altogether, though I would keep track of the score on the ESPN scoreboard.

However, as the team seemed to be on an uptick I started to watch again.  The game at Iowa, the season finale, was great viewing.  The game with Indiana on Thursday in the first round of the Big Ten tournament was not quite as climactic as the Iowas game, but it was quite intense through much of it and very enjoyable to watch.  I was therefore looking forward to the game with Michigan, in spite of the thrashing they had given us ten days earlier.  There is the added bit that my brother works at Michigan and he had been a bit obnoxious about the first game in email.  The sibling rivalry is not close to what it was when we shared a room growing up, but it isn't entirely absent either.

Being a sports fan has a libidinous aspect.  It conjures up an image of Romans at the Coliseum, watching the gladiators fight to the death.  I first heard it put this way by Mort Kamien, who had been my professor in the first quarter of microeconomics in graduate school (partial equilibrium, not general equilibrium) and then again in the third quarter in a course on dynamic optimization co-taught with Nancy Schwartz.  But I didn't hear it from him until ten or fifteen years later when he came to Champaign to give a talk.  He mentioned it beforehand while we were schmoozing and reminiscing.  And he put it in quite a disparaging way.  Real academics may tolerate big time sports at their universities, understanding that it part of the way these institutions remain viable, but they don't become fans themselves.  That would detract from their research, which should command their total focus.  It is that attitude, implicit in the Brooks piece, which I want to take on here.

The game with Michigan was as good as it gets.  During the first half Michigan seemed the better team, but Illinois kept it close.  At the start of the second half Michigan went on a run and threatened to break the game open.  Our coach decide to on defense play a two-three zone and it eventually put Michigan into a funk.  On offense, he told the team to take the ball to the rim and avoid the outside shot.  We started to click that way, got their starting center into foul trouble, and the momentum had clearly swung our way.  We closed the gap and eventually took a small lead.  They were more skilled.  We were tougher.  It seemed as if toughness would have its day.  I'm sure everybody in the arena felt that same thing. Michigan did make a bit of a comeback and with under four seconds left they had a one-point lead.  But we were able to drive the ball to the rim with our toughest player, Tracy Abrams, getting the last shot off.  It was his favorite shot, a little floater.  It missed.  That was the ballgame.

I had intended to write this piece on Friday, after the game concluded.  But I was down in the dumps then and needed a whole day to recover, then a good part of another day to reconcile that immediate experience with what I want to say on the subject raised in Brooks' column.  Earlier this morning I did a Google search on sports fans and the libido.  In the middle of the page I found a link to this page, which seems to confirm the hypothesis on the biological front.  Being an intense fan, even one who watches at home like I do, but who claps and yells encouragement to the team as if at the arena, has an arousing effect.  It tends to raise testosterone levels. (Presumably the studies referred to focused on male fans.)  The piece then argues that can be either good or bad, making the point that a little bit of that might be beneficial, but there can be too much of a good thing.  In other words, being a sports fan is something of a roller coaster.  Sometimes the ride is great.  Other times it can be overwhelming.

My experience writing, particularly writing this blog, has changed over the years.  When I started, in 2005, I had such a backlog of issues that were weighing on my mind that most of the posts simply flowed out.   After a year or so, there was the occasional struggle, such as this post on The Virtual University Dilemma, but that was because at the time I held a position of responsibility for the Campus and I was writing on a then politically sensitive topic.  My University was then contemplating a venture with a online Global Campus, something that eventually failed.  Later as I moved to the College of Business and then retired, this particular reason to pull my punches lessened substantially.  But I strive to not be overly repetitive, to produce some value add for my readers, and for myself to feel I've gotten something of substance out of the effort.  Sometimes meeting those goals is quite a challenge.  Then I struggle for that reason.  And when I struggle the emotional aspect that accompanies the writing is very similar to what it's like being a sports fan.  Being stuck on a writing issue is very much like watching the team when it falls behind.  There is disappointment, maybe anger.  When after quite a while, a possible way out emerges, there is an emotional boost.  If it pans out, whether that comes in a quick AHA or a more deliberate checking of the possibilities, there is elation.  Though the activity is intellectual at its core, the libido is present, big time.

So the message I want to give here is that trying to repress the libido so as to spend more time thinking deep thoughts is folly.  It is part and parcel of the activity.  It will be present any time the participant cares deeply about the outcome, regardless of what the activity is.  There is a related question, of the role recreational diversion plays in creative activity, such as writing, if one sees the libido expressed in both.

To this I would respond that the goal is some semblance of balance.  It is impossible to stop the roller coaster entirely, but one doesn't want to go off the deep end with any frequency, if at all. The derivative benefit, then, from the recreational diversion in that it gives more experience with expression of the libido and therefore a better understanding of oneself over time.  With that there is the knowledge gained about when self-discipline is called for, as Brooks argues and when self-comfort is more appropriate, something Brooks implicitly frowns on.   There is the further benefit that if one attempts writing on a regular basis then one needs fallow periods as well, sometimes during the writing activity as a way for ideas to percolate, other times in between efforts so as to come to the next project fresh and eager.  Recreational diversion serve those functions well.

Early high touch intellectual experiences for students

One of the peculiarities of any student information system, as an instructor sees the data in it, is the profile information available about each student.  Major and year in school (freshman, sophomore, etc.) might seem like obvious things to include and in my experience they are.  I wish they also included prior courses taken and grades in those courses, as it would give a better picture of the student's preparation as well as provide an indicator of the student's grade expectation.  But that information is FERPA protected, so instructors can't see it.  Academic Advisors can see it.  This sort of difference in access to profile information can't possibly be in the law itself.  Instead, I believe it results from institutional policy, the mindset of which seems to say that instructors don't advise and they are to teach students irrespective of their prior preparation.  It is the student's call whether they are prepared for the class or not.

I am making a thing of this, though I am resigned to the fact that the situation will not change, just to emphasize what I say next.  The student's home address is available to instructors in our SIS.  I have no idea why.  In principle, this allows the instructor to know which students are from the Chicago suburbs, which are from the city itself, which are from downstate, and which are from out of state.  In general, I ignore this information, but for a student who has come to my attention, for good or bad, I will sometimes look at it to see if it correlates with what I have observed.  For example, suppose I have an out-of-class meeting scheduled with a student who then blows it off.  If I find the kid is from a well-to-do suburb that fact helps to complete the picture to explain what's going on.  At an entirely different level, the home address information provides a reasonably good indicator of what the student's family is paying in tuition. 

That different students pay different tuition rates for what seems to be the same service amounts to price discrimination, though one must be careful in thinking about this.  Are there really cost differentials in serving the different students that explains the difference in tuition rates?  For example, the difference in tuition rates between in state and out of state students can be partly explained by the former receiving a subsidy from tax revenues while the latter do not.  The price discrimination piece is only that part of the out of state tuition which can't be explained by the lack of subsidy.  My sense is that such price discrimination has increased over time as part and parcel of the rise in tuition more broadly and the influx of international students at the undergraduate level.  It is one way the university has remained financially afloat as the tax revenue dollars have not kept pace with the rest of university expenditure. 

Price discrimination often comes with quality variation as part of the deal.  One might feel it anathema that quality variation in the education supplied be based on the home address of the student.  Yet there is other type of price discrimination with associated quality variation at the university where most people hardly raise an eyebrow.  One example is differential tuition rates across colleges, with some colleges requiring a tuition surcharge over the base tuition while Liberal Arts and Sciences, in particular, does not.  The colleges with a surcharge typically have better facilities, better ancillary services, a higher expected wage upon graduation, and perhaps other quality enhancements.  They also have higher average standardized test scores of the entering students, which suggests these quality "rewards" are merit based rather than tuition based.  I will return to the issue of merit rewards below.

Perhaps surprisingly to most people, until they think about a bit, price discrimination happens even under apparently uniform pricing, because of quality variation in delivery.  Upperclassman typically are in smaller classes and are more likely taught by tenure track faculty.  Freshmen are more apt to be in large classes, now frequently taught by adjunct instructors, and have graduate students as TAs.  Indeed, when I first started at Illinois there was a tuition differential by class rank.  Seniors paid more than freshman.  At some point they got rid of that differential, the consequence being that we now have flat tuition for all four ranks (though it does vary by the year a student starts) but with quality generally rising as the student gets further along in her studies.  For the same reasons, there is a kind of price discrimination in favor of students from well off suburban high schools and against students from poor rural and inner city schools.  The suburban kids typically get to take a lot of AP classes and if they score well enough on the AP exam then get to bypass that particular large lecture class.  They also are apt to graduate earlier and therefore pay less tuition overall.

Let me turn to non-tuition based variation in educational quality that the institution embraces.  One of these is via the various Honors programs - there are programs at both the campus level and the college level - which are targeted at the very high performers among the students.  So Honors programs fall into the merit reward category.  In the previous decade I taught three times in the Campus Honors Program.  Small seminar classes with very bright and engaged students are a joy to teach, but there is a reason why most of the rest of our course offerings are not taught in a small seminar.  Then, even with the very limited number of CHP offerings, the model was for faculty to teach a CHP class is to do so as an overload and earn a modest stipend from that.  Further, because the size of the program is quite small, there is the question of where the line is drawn for admission to the program and if there are quite meritorious students who don't get in because space is limited.  The last time I taught a CHP class, in fall 2009, I queried the class on this point.  The consensus was that in their regular classes there were some students who did just as well as they did but were not in Honors.  For illustration, though I'm making up these numbers, if CHP includes the top 2% of the class, then perhaps the top 10% of the class is meritorious. Additionally,  there is some measurement error in properly coming up with rankings like these, so who gets in can be a bit arbitrary.

Then there are non-tuition based interventions targeted at disadvantaged students.  I participated in one of these for I-Promise students, as a mentor.   All mentors volunteer, but as far as I know volunteer mentoring is not generally available to students.  In this particular case the idea of the mentoring is to focus on the first year the student is on campus.  If the student can get over the hump of that first year, then the student is apt to get through.  The I-Promise kids are academically talented, but from low income families.  The mentoring is aimed at helping the students negotiate through some issues that most other students won't confront at all or, if they do confront them, then they have other buffers to manage the issues.  That rationalizes the program as is.   But one might reasonably ask whether students from reasonably well off families might benefit from mentoring too, thinking that there are more dimensions to student performance than not dropping out of school.  If so, why don't we try to do something in this arena?

There is another way instructional quality varies from student to student and, indeed, such variation happens within an individual class, at least in my class.  Of course, some of the instruction is pushing stuff at the students and in that sense the effort is uniform.  But another part of the instruction is reciprocation for something that the student initiated.  Students who initiate a lot get more and better reciprocation.   Passive students who initiate hardly or not at all don't get as much of my time.  Such initiation can happen in many different forms.  One is by asking questions during class.  Another is by asking questions online outside of class.  A third is by attending office hours on a regular basis.  A fourth is by making an unusually good contribution in completing course work.  Still another comes from completing assignments early and getting noticed for that.  Maybe sitting in the front row is a form of initiation.  (Surely sitting in the back is the opposite, though my classroom last semester was pretty small.)

If all student behavior were rational, if it were understood that initiation by the student would bring out some reciprocation by the instructor, if that reciprocation were perceived by the students as higher quality of instruction, and if the students wanted higher quality of instruction as long as it didn't impact their pocketbook, then one should expect the total capacity of the instructor to reciprocate to get used up and that the students would compete for that bit of reciprocation which is directed at themselves.

This has not been my recent teaching experience.  Based on what I have observed in the past three years at least one and possibly all of those conditionals don't hold true, as a general matter.  In contrast, a handful of students do act in accord with the model described in the previous paragraph.  They have been socialized into acting responsibly about their own education.  The system works for them.  It doesn't work so well for the others, the majority of students.  What should be done about it?

High touch, face to face interaction with a credible peer, is the answer.   You don't have to take my word on this.  Atul Gawande has a really excellent essay on the diffusion of innovation from last summer called Slow Ideas, which makes this essential point.  His context is different from what we're considering here.  Gawande is concerned with proper infant care by mothers in developing countries.  The mother is unaware of healthful approaches and often does things that are harmful to the baby, but the mother does this out of ignorance, not out of anger. If the mother understood a better approach, she'd embrace it.  One would think the analogous thing should be true for our undergraduates.

In anticipation of Gawande, really in borrowing results from 1990s about technology innovation in high enrollment courses, where to me the most interesting single capability the technology enabled was to put undergrads who had taken the course before in a role of responsibility in assisting students currently taking the course, I wrote a series of blog posts back in 2005 entitled Inward Looking Service Learning (there are 7 posts and if all of them read they should be read chronologically, though they are displayed in reverse chronological order at the link) which sketched how a solution scalable to our campus might be attained.  I still subscribe to the thesis, though the particular mechanism in those posts, the focus was on the study group and peer-mentors would interact with current students in that setting, might not be as effective as one-on-one interaction.  However, one-on-one interaction would be much harder to manage at scale.  In other words, there needs to be a lot of experimenting on the right way to do this.

Nearly nine years after those INSL posts, however, nobody seems to be embracing the idea.  There are a handful of dedicated instructors who subscribe to peer mentoring in their own teaching, finding the approach via their own research, not though my blog.  But the peer mentoring idea is not diffusing at all beyond that, slowly or otherwise.  And in its current usage peer mentoring is about teaching a particular class better.  It isn't (yet) about socializing students to become more active about their own learning in all the classes they take.   Higher ups and people in the learning technology field alike don't seem to be thinking of the issue this way. 

The suggestions below are meant as ways to raise awareness of what early high touch approaches might accomplish.  One of the issues here is that doing anything novel that otherwise doesn't reduce obligations from elsewhere can only be done on a volunteer basis, or possibly on an overload basis if some non-recurrent dollars can be found to support experiments in this area.

1. Find a group of willing instructors who teach high enrollment courses that are taken primarily by first-year students and do such teaching on a regular basis.  The disciplines of these courses can vary.  Have these instructors form a discussion group based on the following.  Each instructor will have a high touch discussion section that they will run - say with 5 students or 10 students at most.  Have the students opt into the high touch section, with the understanding ahead of time that they will have some intensive interaction with the course instructor.  Let the experiences in teaching these sections be the basis of the discussions the instructors have with one another.  Because of the selection bias from how students opt into these sections, avoid trying to compare performance of the students in the high touch section with the rest of the students in the course.  The focus should be on whether the students in the high touch section seem to grow over the semester and also on whether the instructors get some insight into their own teaching as a consequence of these interactions.  
2. Do something similar with Teaching Assistants.  In addition to their other sections, let them have one that is high touch (here I'd suggest no more than 5 students in that section).  Have each TA in some course do this and then have the TAs interact about this experiences in the high touch sections in a similar manner to how the instructors interact in the discussion group. 
3. In both of the above this would be new and the fear is that the participants would revert to the old way of doing things - they'd lecture to the few students who are there or if not that then totally dominate the conversation when in one-on-one discussion with students.  This can be anticipated.  I am not sure what prior preparation would best discourage it, but perhaps some modeling of peer mentoring by current practitioners should be made available to the participants ahead of time so they have some mental model ahead of time of what effective practice looks like.  
4. There needs to be several neutral observers who can both write about what happens in these experiments and communicate to the powers that be about whether it is worthwhile to do (fund) additional rounds of experimentation.  These observers should also engage in focus groups with the students.  The students, perhaps more than the instructors, might be better able to suggest changes in practice that would encourage them to improve their learning strategies, this in spite of the selection bias mentioned above, because the students will have perspective about the consequences of taking other courses where the high touch approach is not embraced.  Anyone who confronts the scaling of such a high touch approach will have to reckon with the fact that students who participate early on will mainly be operating in the traditional environment and that might overwhelm high touch interventions which would be effective if they were more prevalent.

Let me close with some acknowledgements.  I had lunch with Joe Hinchliffe on Tuesday and with Burks Oakley on Wednesday and both of them made comments during the conversation that pointed to an embrace of a high touch approach.  So I thank them for that and hope to get a few more folks on the bandwagon soon.  If anyone out there would like to chat about this further - face to face or virtually, I'd be delighted to do so. 

Assessing student writing - my take

In today's NY Times the Room for Debate series features essays on the topic, Can Writing Be Assessed?  I normally eschew Room for Debate.  Each essay is such a quick hitter that there is barely time to make a point before it is done.  There is not much depth generated this way, especially since the various authors are not responding to one another.  They simply offer up their own take on the subject.

Nevertheless, the subject matter interested me so I read the essays at the link above.  There were some reasonable points made, but I thought the treatment inadequate in sum.  So I will cover here the issues as I see them, both for assessment of writing on a standardized exam, like the SAT, and assessment of writing during regular instruction, as well as the relationship between the two.

Let me begin with what we mean when we use the word "assess."  The following is taken directly from Dictionary.com.

as·sess
[uh-ses] Show IPA
verb (used with object)
1.to estimate officially the value of (property, income, etc.) as a basis for taxation.
2.to fix or determine the amount of (damages, a tax, a fine, etc.): The hurricane damage was assessed at six million dollars.
3.to impose a tax or other charge on.
4.to estimate or judge the value, character, etc., of; evaluate: to assess one's efforts.

Definition #4 seems most apropos.  I like the use of the word estimate in the definition.  It suggests some lack of precision, such as that different people assessing the same work might come to somewhat different conclusions.   It also suggests that some variation across works may nonetheless produce the same assessment.  I will concentrate on this second issue here and ask whether variation in the works is a good or bad thing.

Let me start with a very mundane example to get the ball rolling and take the issue outside of the school setting so as not to make it too difficult to consider.  When somebody has a life event, Facebook friends will often post something to that person's Wall.  My experience with reading these is that there is very little meat to these postings and most say essentially the same thing.   I'm going to assume most of my readers will have observed something quite similar.  I want to note that as a writer of such Wall posts, I treat a birthday quite differently than I treat a death of a loved one, though most other people don't make this sort of distinction.  My general view is that the writer's job is to make a novel contribution rather than echo what everyone else has said.  If I know the person well enough that I'm confident they won't think ill of me for trying, I will deliberately attempt to differentiate my message from the rest of the crowd, with a pun, a stab at something clever, or just being silly.  On more solemn occasions, this sort of playfulness doesn't seem appropriate, and here the message is simply showing support, so is much more alike the other posts.

This, then, is the first issue with assessing writing.  Is variation across writing pieces produced by different students desired or not?  I have never queried my Facebook friends on this so I don't know the answer, but let me suggest there are two possible ways to consider the birthday messages.  One is that most other people think that too is a time to show support and that is what they are doing with their posts.  I disagree with that, but surely it is one possible explanation for what is observed.  This brings to mind a recent piece in Slate, Inside the Box: People don't actually like creativity.  A different possible explanation is that most people would prefer to generate a witty, original post, especially if they could do so in the time it takes to write the post that they end up with, but they don't practice doing such writing so view it out of reach.

It would be absurd, of course, to assign letter grades to posts in Facebook on somebody else's wall  (or on one's own wall, for that matter).  But let's note that if we took this counter factual as the norm, then two different grading schemes would emerge and which is the right one depends on whether variation is perceived as a good or bad thing.  If it is bad then on those birthday posts most everyone else gets an A, while I get a B or C.  That I do generate such variation signals I believe the other grading scheme to be the better one, in this case.

Now let me elevate from the mundane to newspaper writing and note that as a reader with straight news you'd expect little variation from one reporter to the next writing the piece, with what variation is observed explained perhaps by variation in the legwork done to generate the story or by modest stylistic differences from one reporter to the next that the editor will tolerate as it adds flavor to the piece.  In contrast, you'd expect much more variation from reading Op-Ed pieces, such as the essays in this Room for Debate discussion on assessing student writing.  Each essay reflects the author's worldview, which in turn depends on the author's prior thinking and relevant experience.  This makes the writing much more idiosyncratic, a good thing if you like to read Op-Ed, as I do.

Presumably we'd like students to be able to write in both ways, as a neutral observer and as one who has a considered opinion on the matter.  I have not reviewed sample writing questions from the SAT in preparing to write this piece, so I could be wrong here, but I suspect there is bias in the testing in favor of the neutral observer type of writing.  This is particularly problematic for the teaching of writing, since the book report is an early form that students produce in elementary school, and in the conclusion the student is to say whether she liked the book or not, presumably with a sentence or two of justification as to why.  To be a neutral observer and yet care about what is being observed takes sophistication and a lot of practice.  What I suspect happens all too often is that the student is tasked with being a neutral observer but has only extrinsic motivation, provided by the assessment itself.  That is not a good way to teach.

Let me turn to the next issue, suggested in the previous paragraph, which relates the assessment of writing to the assessment of reading.  The SAT and other standardized tests treat these as separate assessments.  This means it is possible for a student to do well on one and poorly on the other.  Abstracting from English as a second language issues, and possible other explanations that can rationalize such a negative correlation, how is one to make sense of somebody who seems to be a good writer but a poor reader or vice versa?  To me, there should be a strong positive correlation between the two.  And even if on occasion one finds a student writes well but reads poorly, shouldn't reading and writing be assessed holistically rather than separately?

This amounts to asking the following.  Is it intellectually the same thing to give an interpretation and a conclusion of what a reading passage says, writing up both the interpretation and conclusion, as it is selecting one answer in a multiple choice question, where each answer proffered provides an interpretation and conclusion?  I don't know but this is what I surmise.  Writing up the answer there is far less doubt about what the student is thinking - as long as the student is comfortable expressing herself in writing.  With the multiple choice question, the student's thinking is masked.  For right answers we can't tell whether the student knew it or got lucky while for wrong answers we can't tell whether the student thought it was the right answer or merely guessed.   (I should add here that asking the student to explain aloud the interpretation and conclusion from the reading passage is similar if not identical to getting such an explanation in writing and may be preferred to writing for on the spot diagnosis of any fundamental misunderstandings.)  I am quite fearful that there are many good test takers who nevertheless can't provide good written explanations of what they've read.

This gets me to the final point.  One larger goal for K-12 education is that students learn to read and write for themselves, meaning the students find these activities engaging so participate in them willingly.  This means the student will do these activities in and outside the school setting.  It also means the student will engage in these activities to promote her own personal growth.  The standardized testing might be neutral on this front if it weren't so heavily emphasized.  But with it's emphasis, we likely are getting perverse negative reactions - these activities become for school only, so students plateau far too early in their skills as both readers and as writers.

One wonders whether school might provide a different sort of assessment that is not test prep, with weekly reading and writing projects, for which the primary goal is that students do them.  Feedback would be important to encourage student involvement and suggest ways for improvement.  But letter (or numerical) grades could quite possibly be counterproductive, producing the same sort of reaction that the standardized tests produce.  The focus would be on student motivation for the doing.  There is an approach now to keep students in lock step in their reading.  That would have to be discarded in favor of an individualized approach. The latter would be much better to sustain student interest.

It seems to me we could do much better this way.  But then, what I find obvious doesn't seem to have as much appeal for the crowd. 

Getting Testy About the SAT - Wrongs of Passage

Though the author of the piece linked below was an English major, while I was a math guy in high school, I pretty much agree with her assessment of the SAT.  Let me add a bit from my perch.

On the test itself, the math side is less about memorization than the verbal portion of the exam.  There is reasoning through algebra and geometry problems, and the beloved word problems, each of which need to be translated into an algebra or geometry problem to obtain a solution.  I wish that had been the entire test when I took it, but for some reason the authors felt it necessary to have one or two questions about Roman numerals.  I know them through 100 and understand the schema for representation, but confuse M and D, always have.  It seemed to me silly to have a question about that then and I haven't changed my mind about it since.  Then there were also questions of the type: 1, 4, 9, 16, what is the next number in the sequence?  These are pattern recognition questions.  There is an intellectual issue with these sort of questions - more than one pattern can be found to explain the sequence so far.  In the above, for example, the pattern might be odd, even, odd, even, with the numbers increasing, rather than each number having to be a perfect square (the latter being what the SAT would say is the "right" answer).  So the math test is not without criticism, but it's weakness are probably less severe than the weakness of the verbal exam.

On the consequences of the exam for the self-esteem of the student, the author appears entirely okay on grades in school, both as measure and motivator.  I am less okay on that as I believe it does quite a bit of damage to kids who don't rise above all that grading and figure out to learn for learning's sake.  (See my post College without Grades.)  Given that the grading system itself creates a lot of stress on the students, much needless in my view, what does the SAT contribute to make the problem worse?  Here, I believe the real issue happens when the grades as signal give a different message than what the SAT scores as signal provide.  In particular, students with a high GPA at a reasonably good school but who perform in a mediocre way on the SAT take a real blow to the ego.  No good comes of that.  That exam score, known to teachers and classmates alike, becomes that student's personal Mark of Cain.

There is then the issue of whether the SAT predicts college performance.  I will cite a few bits of different sorts of evidence.  First, for a couple of years I was on the Campus Honors Program Advisory Committee and one part of that was to review the applications of students to the program to determine who will get in.  Many of the applications I reviewed (not a great number in total with each an interest in economics or business) were from students who had perfect standardized test scores, whether SAT or ACT or both.  Students also had a variety of extra curricular activities which, to my non-discerning eyes, distinguished them from one another not at all.  What was left as a differentiator were the rather short essays.  (The U of I doesn't seem to require letters of recommendation or those weren't included in the packets we reviewed.)  I should add here that students don't apply for CHP - the applications are singled out based on other factors (the high standardized test scores and/or the geography of where the application is from).  So the kids may not have put in much effort into writing the essays.  Alternatively, insufficient guidelines were provided to inform them about what would please me as a reader.  With those caveats, I was totally underwhelmed by the writing, with very few exceptions to the rule.  So on the one hand you had these great test scores while on the other hand you had these mediocre essays.  What should be concluded from that?

Next, before I attended the Frye Leadership Institute in June 2003, we attendees were asked to read The Gatekeepers by Jacques Steinberg, which is an in depth look at the admission practices at Wesleyan University.  One gets the impression from reading that book that places like Wesleyan really do sort through a wide variety of information about each potential student.  Given that, perhaps the standardized test scores at such a place provide little value add to the overall picture of the student.  But what about places like Illinois, where the volume of applications has to be more than an order of magnitude greater than what it is at Wesleyan, and where such in depth looking at students doesn't happen.  (Most students who apply to Illinois do not have an interview with an admissions officer.)  Could Illinois have a reasonable admissions process if there were no standardized testing?

Then I'd like to talk specifically about performance on the math part of the test.  When I was a graduate student my adviser told me that the math part of the GRE (very similar to the math part of the SAT) was a good predictor of performance in Econ graduate school (which is very demanding about the math).  Much more recently, I was told something similar about the math score on the ACT as a predictor of performance in General Chemistry.  But my sense of things is that these predictions are not linear.  Outlier good performance on the standardized test (in my recollection of the scoring scale, here I mean above 700 as a score on the Math SAT) does predict quite well good performance in mathy-type courses.  But there is some threshold below which the standardized test performance doesn't predict well at all.  I say this based on my own teaching.  All the students I teach had to have reasonably good standardized test scores to get admitted to the university, but many of the students I've had over the years don't know analytic geometry and can't reason through fairly elementary deductions, even after the math facts have been explained to them.  Somehow there is a way to "fake it" on the standardized test, get a tolerably good score on the math part, yet remain largely math phobic.  If that is right, the scores of such students don't differentiate them from their counterparts, who also are uncomfortable with the math but score less well on the standardized tests. 

Finally, there is the issue of wholesale cheating on the tests, particularly with international students.  For public universities like Illinois, this is a big deal as international students are apt to pay the full out-of-state tuition and thus provide a surplus to the university beyond the cost of their own education.  Revenue strapped public universities then might want to admit more such students, irrespective of how those students will perform once admitted, but they don't want to see a decline in ratings from doing do, hence maintain stern standardized test cutoffs for admission for international students, thereby providing a strong impetus for the wholesale cheating.  The entire situation is ethically murky, at best.  

As long as there are highly selective universities, because a degree from one is perceived as a lifelong advantage, gaming of the system will be the norm.  The SAT is part of that system.  It is easy enough to criticize as an object in itself.  But maybe we should instead be talking about the entire system and ask what can be done for the system to function better and be more humane.  The author of the piece linked below is right that we shouldn't freak out the students.  The SAT does that.  And the rest of the system does it too.  We should be talking about it a lot more. 

Save Us From the SAT - NYTimes.com via kwout

Animated Graphs in Excel Tutorial

The screen capture movie below probably should be watched at full screen for best results.  It is a bit long (sorry about that) but that is to go through the full thing.  I would expect somebody trying to do this on their own to take an hour or two the first time through.  That is after the Developer Toolbar has been added to the Ribbon.  (I'm not sure of the best help resource for Excel for the Mac, but here is the search page.)

Managing Information Overload - Filtering or Sifting

Have you ever experienced having a certain belief for years and years, only to discover that you actually were practicing something quite different the entire time but just didn't realize it?  Consider this question about your own behavior.  Which email messages do you ignore, likewise which Facebook posts do you ignore?  (Feel free to extend this question to other platforms.  Email and Facebook were chosen here mainly for illustration.)  Now ask a different question, not quite the obverse.  For which messages that provide links do you not only read the message but also follow up by clicking on the link and reading what is there in its entirety?

For years and years I had thought these as two different sides of the same coin and I labeled the entire process filtering.  My idea then was that I had the mental equivalent of a safe senders list and if I got a message from someone not on the list I wouldn't look at it but if I got one from somebody on the list I would follow it in its entirety.  It turns out, that's not true.

The first part is true.  Solicitations, particularly from vendors but really any sort of solicitation whatsoever, are ignored.  I sometimes look for clues to identify these messages.  For example, some emails are still addressed to me @uiuc.edu instead of @illinois.edu.  I can't remember when we switched domains, but it was years ago now.  And some still think of me as Assistant CIO even though I quit that job in 2006.  I understand that once in a database your address might very well be there forever without getting updated, but for that very reason it makes sense to ignore these messages.  One related topic that I find intriguing is that the same senders don't seem to get the (implicit) message from me giving them the cold shoulder.  The emails keep coming - so much for data analytics and smart use of the technology.  In any event, this act of ignoring messages is properly called filtering.

The second part is not true as originally stated.  If I read everything posted by my friends and followed all the links they post as well, there wouldn't be enough time in the day to do anything else and quite possibly on some days not enough time to do even that.  I suspect other people I know are more connected than I am, so the possibility for being overwhelmed by the volume of correspondence that gets through the initial filter is pretty good.  It's what people do next to address the issue which is the interesting part.

Email is a little different than Facebook in this regard.  One question is whether there is a need to reply to email.  In Facebook, one can Like without offering a comment.  The other obvious difference is who sees the response.  Many responses are displays of empathy and the question for me is whether those responses emerge from some heartfelt feeling or if instead they come from a sense of social obligation.  In an email it is either the former or no response at all.  In Facebook, I confess, sometimes the social obligation feels strong and that frequently motivates my use of the Like button.

I now want to abstract entirely from those sort of messages and consider other ones, messages that are informational and not personal, but come from a friend.  Before I do that, however, let's consider briefly such informational messages that come from news digests, such as The Chronicle's Academe Today or the Inside Higher Ed's news digest, or from a periodical like Scientific American.  How do you choose which of those links to follow, if any?

For me, the process is quite different from filtering.  I am looking for something that will "grab me."  This process of search I call sifting.  I'm not sure whether I can describe the type of piece that will draw me in, but I am certain I have a sense of taste about these things and trust my sense of taste for making the decision.  There are certain topics I care about and others that I'm quite willing to ignore.  There may be still other topics that I haven't considered before at all.  If the post title strikes my funny bone, I'll have a look.  Otherwise, I won't.  I have the wish for uplift from what I read and if not that then to gain perspective on something I've perhaps considered but not fully.  I confess that I often shut down over things that are otherwise interesting but also seem to be quite depressing on first impression.  And I shut down over what seems to be blather, or clearly wrong, or on a different subject than I had first thought, so is actually a piece I would have ignored at first had I understood the topic.

I am not proud about shutting down while reading something.  It cuts against the grain of how I learned to read when I was a kid, where I pretty much read everything I started to completion, as long as it wasn't way over my head.  I don't do that anymore.  And it may be that sometimes I don't give a piece a fair chance, meaning I shut down too soon.

My ideal is to identify good reads, quickly, and then read those to completion.  My reality is that whether a piece is a good read or not is often not known till I'm well into it.  Further, the initial draw might be be quite other than the gist of the piece, meaning there is a "marketing" aspect that the writer goes through to get me as reader willing to initiate.  In this I suppose I'm no different from any other reader.  I fall for the marketing from time to time.  For example, a couple of weeks ago The Atlantic featured a piece called The Dark Power of Fraternities.  It begins with a vivid description of a truly juvenile act of self-destruction, something compelling to read in itself for the sheer idiocy of the behavior.  I enjoyed reading those first paragraphs so I read through the rest.  The rest isn't so much about the fact that college students looking for fun will do some stupid and terrible things as it is about how the adult world manages this (or fails to manage this).  The real subject matter of the piece is also interesting to consider, but it wasn't a topic on my radar and I wouldn't have read this piece straight away had that been how the author marketed it. 

How does this sifting change when it is a friend who has written the snippet and posted the link?  I have some friends who are very close, where I will at least follow the link and read a bit, no matter what the topic is and I will feel obligated to post some response in this case.  On the blood is thicker than water continuum, deep friendship is closer to the blood end of the spectrum.  Following up on links is then a bow to friendship more than anything else.

I have only a handful of very close friends.  There are many others who are more at arms length.  Particularly when these other friends post to Facebook, there is little to no obligation to respond.  Instead what matters for whether I will follow their links is their reputation with me for posting interesting things.  In turn, that reputation depends on how much overlap there is between their interests and mine, how judicious they seem to be in selecting items to post, and to the extent that I've followed their links before and have some memory of that, imperfect though that memory may be, my track record from having done so.

I should also add here that my reading and search behavior has changed substantially since I've retired.  Where before it was necessary for me to have some sense of the pulse of learning technology as a field, I really don't care about that any longer and staying current with everyone else is far less of a motive than it used to be.  What I do care about is identifying stuff that I can explore at my own pace and in some depth, with a feeling of reward from having done so.  When I do sift, that's what I'm looking for. 

I sometimes ask myself whether I could be a student again and if I were how I would go about my studies.  Mostly I think I couldn't.  I'd be too impatient and too opinionated.  If I were confronted with an assigned reading list, I almost surely would sift through it rather than read it exhaustively. Only if my prior readings had climbed over my personal bar would I continue reading through the entire list.

This notwithstanding, as an instructor I don't expect to confront myself as a student in this way.  I don't expect students to read everything I assign, where here the word "expect" means "predict," but for some reason I still wish that to be true.  I also don't explicitly teach students to sift through information this way.

But now I'm wondering whether I should.  It seems an important life skill. 

Guest Post at WAC@Illinois

I was asked to write a guest post for the Writing Across the Curriculum Blog and it is now available.  A snip is below.

I am grateful to Andrea Olinger, who edited the post and made the final product better.  I like to think of myself as an easy going guy, but it turns out that I defend my own prose as if it's a death match.  I'm also so used to simply have my way by posting to this blog that I've kind of forgotten what it is like to negotiate text with an editor. It's a good thing to go through now and then, though I'm thankful I no longer have to live in the world of publish or perish.

Making connections via mental puttering: Lessons from teaching with blogs | WAC@Illinois via kwout

Newton's Third Law Applies to Politics

By coincidence, I watched the second half of 42 last night; it was on HBO and I caught an earlier showing.  For whatever reason, it seemed oddly applicable to to the situation in Arizona, this part, in particular.

At the time Robinson broke into the majors, Philadelphia was managed by Ben Chapman, who had a reputation as a racist.  In a very poignant scene in the movie, the Dodgers are playing the Phillies and Chapman is shouting every possible invective against Robinson, in an attempt to rattle him, knowing full well that Robinson was under marching orders from Branch Rickey not to retaliate.  The players in the Dodgers dugout can hear this invective and for a while they sit idly by, not knowing what to do about it.  Eventually, Eddie Stanky can't take it any more and goes face to face with Chapman, calling him gutless (in so many words). 

In a later seen in Branch Rickey's office, one of his employees is complaining to Rickey about Chapman.  Rickey smiles and says Chapman has done them an enormous favor.  By being so outlandish with his vitriol, Chapman created a backlash - sympathy on behalf of Robinson.  There was an either-or choice and if you couldn't be for Chapman, which no reasonable person could, then you had to be for Robinson.  Editorials in the press that railed against the racism in major league baseball helped, of course.  But it was the overt and highly visible nature of Chapman's barbs that did the trick.

Consider this when reading the Gail Collins piece linked below and from which the following paragraph has been excerpted. 

What do you think this whole scene means? True, Arizona is a rather strange state. But you don’t generally see a Legislature go out of its way to tick off its own moneyed power structure. And you hardly ever see a business establishment howling this loud about something that doesn’t involve tax hikes.
The State of Arizona

There remains the question whether the religious homophobes behind the legislation that Governor Brewer vetoed will ever change their point of view.  In the movie 42, Chapman is ultimately ordered by management to take a picture with Robinson, to demonstrate that there are no hard feelings.  Robinson says in response to being asked to take this picture that Chapman hasn't changed at all.  Indeed he hadn't.  He was simply swallowing some crow to keep his job.

But if you go to the link above to the piece in The Atlantic about Chapman, it appears that he really did soften in his later years and was genuinely conciliatory.  Might some homophobe religious types who are not themselves politicians do likewise, not because it is popular, but because it's time and because, in a phrase I wouldn't otherwise use, we are all God's children?

It is a relief that the Arizona bill wasn't passed.  But that fact shouldn't be treated as a victory, as Collins seems to do at the end of her piece (though probably that was tongue in cheek).  Real victory will happen only when some of the Ben Chapman types experience a personal awakening and a change of heart. 

Negative Real Interest Rates

Let me begin with a brief warning to my readers.  I woke up in the middle of the night coughing my head off and it took quite a while to get that calmed down.  So I am sleep deprived and crabby as a result, the perfect time to write about the dismal science.

I was taught in grad school that the real interest rate was determined by the difference between the nominal interest rate and the rate of inflation.  So, for example, on my current mortgage, which has a fixed rate of 3.125%, if the inflation rate is now 1.6% then the real rate 1.525%.  So the folks lending me the funds are getting a positive return, though not a very big one.  In contrast, on my so-called interest bearing checking account, where the nominal rate is something like .0025%  (I made that figure up but I saw the real figure in the fall and this is the right order of magnitude), the real rate is negative.  Put a different way, the typical term structure curve has interest rates increasing with the term.  Nowadays, short rates are negative while long rates are still positive.

I needed to get that textbook stuff out of the way first, so I can talk about what this post is really about.  A different way to reckon the real interest rate is that it should move directly with the growth rate of the economy.  I want to argue that in a sensible way of thinking about things, the economy is shrinking.  Published statistics about GDP growth say it has been growing, albeit slowly.  Again you have to net out the inflation rate, and if you do that, then the growth has been minimal, but the published statistics wouldn't support a hypothesis of shrinkage, in and of themselves. 

To get to where I'm headed we need to talk about imputations.  Back in grad school, we talked about imputations mainly due to non-market activity that was productive but not counted in GDP. This was primarily child care and housework, but really any non-market work fits here.  There are also capital gains and losses on non-market traded assets, such as public roads, public infrastructure, and public lands.  I'll get back to this one in a bit. 

At the time we didn't talk about imputations for market transactions for security, or maintenance of private capital, or the investment of public capital that itself doesn't produce economic benefits, each of which arises because the society is getting less healthy.  Before I get to examples, the argument is that if these expenditures grow no faster than the economy overall then it is no big deal, but if they grow faster than GDP, then the rest of GDP, which is what provides a benefit, is growing slower than the measured statistics indicate. 

Now for the examples.  On the security front, consider that most every college campus around the country now has an early warning security system, the purchase of which was triggered by the horrible shooting at Virgina Tech some years ago.  There may have been other reasons to get such a system which is productive, accidents do happen and warning people when there are accidents that create a public hazard is a productive thing to do.  But these systems were not procured for that reason.  They were obtained to reduce the consequence if and when gun violence hits a campus.  They make sense as a purchase if there is a rational perception that gun violence is possible and/or that it is on the rise.  Gun violence is clearly a big negative.   Economic activity aimed at reducing its consequence, while rational, clearly doesn't make us any better off as compared to the case where there is no gun violence to begin with.  In this sense, the possibility of gun violence is an economic shrinking factor. 

The next example, regarding the maintenance of private capital, has to do with my current fixation - potholes.  It doesn't take a genius to forecast that there will be many more wheel alignments performed this spring as cars are brought in for regular maintenance and the car service guys inform the car owners that their vehicles would benefit from wheel alignment work as well.  From a GDP measurement point of view, this additional service work for wheel alignment will boost measured GDP, but of course there is no increase in welfare as compared to the case where the roads are in decent repair so no wheel alignment work is necessary.  Potholes are in this sense an economic shrinking factor.  But now there is a second effect - the roads themselves are capital assets, held by the public, and there has been a substantial capital loss.  That adds to the shrinking. 

Let me get to the last example.  I had originally thought about border security investments to deter illegal immigration, but that one is politically charged, so I thought I'd make the point on something far less polarizing - public investments to prevent flood control, such as the new levee system in New Orleans, and whatever public investments emerge in the NYC-New Jersey shore area in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, to lessen the impact of flooding from future storms.  The perceived greater likelihood of future storms is a shrinking factor. 

If you are a Keynesian, as I am, you might argue that in our current macro economy where aggregate demand remains weak, what I've referred to here as shrinking factors actual serve as fiscal stimulus, because they do generate current economic activity.  To me the issue of stimulus or shrinking factor gets resolved by understanding how they are financed.  If they are financed by current savers, who continue to spend as before but save less as a consequence, the fiscal stimulus argument would be right.  If they are financed by those who save little, then they crowd out other spending on consumption, ergo shrinking. 

I leave it to the reader to figure out which of these makes the most sense as interpretation.  My opinion is that the average Joe is being made worse off.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

I don't have a NGLC grant from the Gates Foundation.  I probably never will.  My poor luck.  But it does afford one advantage.  It is far easier to be critical of what they are doing. 

Here is a case in point.  I have started to read the book, Blended Learning: Research Perspectives, Volume 2, edited by Picciano, Dziuban, and Graham.  My purpose is to see if I can identify interesting points from this book to use for Blended Learning research at the Business School at Illinois.  But I'm readily distracted as I was not part of the data collection effort and still haven't seen the data to which this earlier research might speak.   

I am on chapter 3, written by Patsy Moskal and Thomas Cavanagh.  It is about a large scale project to take the blended learning approach pioneered at University of Central Florida and transfer it to other AACSU member institutions that are participating in the project.  In concept this seems like both a sensible thing to do and an interesting thing to evaluate.

Moskal and Cavanagh do a reasonable job at creating a profile for typical students at such institutions.  Most are non-traditional - they have a family, are working, and are older.  Many are low income.  Many are the first in their families to attend college.  Moskal and Cavanagh also provide some data about the completion rate to degree.  It is low. These students face enormous challenges.

So far so good, but now the problem that raised the hairs on the back of my neck.  Near the beginning of the chapter the authors provide some information about the economic benefits from having a college degree.  They quote directly from a Gates Foundation document (page three top of the middle column):

In 2008, the average wage for adults 25 and older with a four-year degree was $60,954, compared to $33,618 for those with only a high school diploma and $24,686 for those with no high school diploma. 

The problem with this, a big one in my view, is that the quote pertains to the entire U.S. population, not just the population of students profiled by Moskal and Cavanagh. It likely substantially overstates the gains to a degree for the profiled students. 

In today's New York Times there is an editorial Making College Pay.  Whether you agree with it's conclusions or not, it is far better in talking about the data, for example by making a clear distinction between the average sort of statistics, reported above, and the picture for recent grads, where the employment situation is far grimmer. 

So the question emerges while reading Moskal and Cavanagh, are there data about the employment of grads from AACSU member institutions?  If so, why isn't that reported in lieu of the Gates stuff or in addition to it?

And if no good data of this sort exists, why include the quote from the Gates Foundation materials?  I can guess at the answer to that question, but not in a way to come to a benign conclusion.   Someone needs to tell the Gates Foundation and participants alike that including quotes like that tends to discredit the results. 

Is it really necessary to do this to get such projects going? 

College without Grades

Most doctoral students at or around the time they are working on their dissertations will come to an odd reckoning.  Where grades had mattered a lot for much of their careers as students until that point, once having crossed this threshold grades mattered no longer.  What counted thereafter was the quality of the dissertation itself, the letters that would support the student in the job search, and the student's ability to discuss various issues in the field, whether those issues were related to the dissertation or not.  Grades certainly mattered in getting to that point.  But, having arrived at the dissertation stage, prior grades gave no additional information that anyone else cared about.  The shock of this is like having a pile of currency only to see it go through a massive devaluation.  For me it helped confirm a prior held view - grades were never that important in the first place. 

Alas, it was not the view I started with.  I first became aware of grades sixteen years earlier, fall of 1963, when I was in fourth grade.  The experience was quite painful.  We got report cards in second and third grade too, but they just didn't matter to me then, which is as it should be.  (In first grade I was in a different school and don't have a report card from that in the family memorabilia.)  Report cards from P.S. 203 had a specific format.  There were three marking periods.  There were a variety of categories for which grades were assigned - linguistic ability, oral expression, etc.  The grading scale within each category was excellent, good, fair, and unsatisfactory.  There was also space for the teacher to write a sentence or two to complement the information in the assigned grade.  The student was supposed to show the report card to his parents and get it signed and dated by one of them, as means of confirmation that they had read it.  The clear intent of the process was as a means of communication from teacher to the student and the student's family.

Clear intent or not, the benefit from such communication can get subverted when it is used for other purposes.  In this case I was walking home from school with a classmate.  I should add that I thought I was the better student.  For some reason that I don't recall, it occurred to us to look at our report cards while on the way home and compare our results.  This was for the first marking period.  My report card had all goods.  His had a mixture of goods and excellents.  I must have shed a tear or two then and there, though I'd have wanted to hide those feelings from him.  When I got home and was by myself I was really sobbing, feeling a horrible injustice had been done.  My parents must have made this particular pain go away, but the memory remains strong all these years later.

With a lot of hindsight and observing some similarities between me and my own kids when they were in school, I can tell a different sort of story.  I was young to be a fourth grader, perhaps a half year or so younger than most of my classmates, which is a pretty big difference percentage-wise at that age.  I was also sloppy, particularly about penmanship, and showed a lack of care in my reading, often jumping to unwarranted conclusions.  Some of these shortcomings I simply didn't notice, while with others I was aware of the issue but discounted its importance.  The teacher almost surely gave a correct and unbiased evaluation of my performance, but I saw it otherwise.  Yet I don't think I would have been bothered at all by what was in the report card itself had I remained ignorant of the grades my classmates received.

Each student and his family need feedback from the teacher about how the student is doing, that can be helpful if there needs to be modifications in going about how homework is done or in regard to what outside reading the student is doing.  Learning, however, is not fundamentally a competition.  Comparisons with other students do more harm by creating stigma than good by creating a spur toward high level performance.  Kids at the fourth grade level (really any level) should want to learn for itself.  Neither the pace of that learning nor the current proficiency matter as much as that consistent progress is being made.  That's what the feedback should address.

I am fortunate in that I didn't have too many experiences of grades as stigma thereafter - I did have a temporary slump in grades in tenth grade when I had some serious emotional problems.  Otherwise, my grades were exceptionally high.  As a consequence I avoided the stigmatization, though I experienced some embarrassing moments when those grades got publicized.

One of those was the sports award banquet when I was a senior in high school.  Krafty and I played first doubles on the tennis team that year and we were a pretty good team, with a winning record, 5-3, if I recall correctly.  And it should have been 6-2, but we "lost" to Newtown High School because one player on their team made a bunch of bad calls, all in his own favor. If memory serves, his teammate was embarrassed about this.  We complained but were told that students needed to resolve these issues themselves.   Getting back to the banquet, Krafty and I both earned varsity letters that year.  But I was also awarded the Wingate Medal, in essence a second athlete-scholar award, because in addition to tennis I had this very high GPA.  When Mr. Rosenbaum, one of the gym teachers and the coach of the tennis team, read off my name as the Wingate award winner, for which I needed to go to the front of the room to receive the award, he also asked me to tell the audience what my GPA was.  This was completely unnecessary.  And as a fundamentally shy kid I didn't want to show the crowd that I was an outlier.  But there was no real alternative so I duly reported my GPA, 95.6.  (We were graded on a 100-point scale rather than the 4-point or 5-point scales that seem to be be popular now.) 

Note that I still recall my GPA, as I do many other factoids about grades that were drilled into me at the time.  For example, my class rank was 5, in a graduating class of more than 1150.  And I knew the ranks of the four students who were above me, though not the ranks of the students who were behind me.  The same sort of peer comparisons that I made in fourth grade were still with me - reinforced to a great extent by the information that the school provided - even if these things were pretty much nonsense.  There were a bunch of intelligent, creative, and accomplished kids in my high school class.  How they were ranked matter not a wit once they left the nest, but it buttressed quite a bit of stereotypical thinking while they were still there.

* * * * *

A grade, letter or number, is a rather coarse instrument of evaluation.  It's primary redeeming feature is that it is readily communicated.  Some people will claim the benefits exceed that, particularly that grades can be averaged across courses.  But most people who make such a claim are likely ignorant of the Index Number Problem and the strict conditions needed to be satisfied to produce a suitable index number as specified by the Composite Commodity Theorem.  GPA, used as a way to ordinally rank students is really not up to the task, even when those students have taken the same classes from the same instructors and offered at the same times, conditions that almost never hold.  Yet it has become a totem to which which the vast majority of undergraduates bow.  This is a problem.

One could move much closer to the system I remarked about for doctoral education at the undergraduate level.  Written evaluation of coursework could be used instead of grades.  These would be far more nuanced and not so readily converted into rankings across students.  Senior projects could become mandatory and serve as the primary credential for  the job market.

Of course, that it is possible doesn't mean it is desirable.  Generating more nuanced evaluation would be time consuming for instructors, no doubt.  And having people in the market evaluate student projects would place similar such demands on the evaluators.  So I don't want to deny that there would be a cost in doing so.  But I believe there would be a substantial benefit as well.

I started college at MIT before transferring to Cornell in the middle of my sophomore year.  As a freshman, MIT didn't have grades, but instead had the sort of written evaluations I mentioned above, which were delivered both at mid semester and end of term, with the student also providing written response to the mid semester evaluation.  It was a more humane approach.

MIT didn't go to this approach simply as an act of kindness.  It had a serious problem - a high suicide rate among students.  The no grades for freshman policy was part of the institution's response to that problem.  Further, it was said that MIT students were sufficiently motivated to not need grades during that first year.

I can't really speak to the motivation issue across the student populace.  I know in my cohort we played an awful lot of cards - either hearts or bridge - so I certainly wouldn't classify us as workaholics at the time.  But it is also true that in high school I was never that challenged and could do the work very quickly.  While I did begin to be challenged in somc of the classes at MIT that first year, it was not till I was a sophomore that I found myself in the deep water and perhaps in over my head, without knowing how to put in sufficient time to figure things out on my own - I only learned to do that as a junior while at Cornell.  But when I struggled as a sophomore, we had grades.

I see these issues now from a different vantage.  The Illinois Econ majors, the majority of of the students I teach are in this category, are as a group probably not as capable as the students I knew at MIT, but many report being under enormous pressure about grades, much more so than when my generation were college students.  Does that pressure have any positive benefit?  From where I sit, the answer is no.  It increases the students' mercenary tendencies and thereby diminishes their learning.  And while some stress is healthy, for many of the students it appears the anxiety is very great indeed.  This is precisely the situation for which MIT decided to eliminate freshman grades.  Why ignore the problem just because the suicide rate isn't what it was like at MIT then?  Aren't there enough other indicators to know this is a serious issue?

One big difference between now and then is that then regular faculty taught freshmen and if not that then they taught upper level undergraduate courses. That is considerably rarer now.  And surely any change in grade policy would have to be debated, voted on, and approved by the faculty.  But out of sight shouldn't mean out of mind.  And as we have already installed expensive early warning systems to alert the campus community of an upset student on a rampage, maybe we should also consider making the academic environment more humane to students.  Getting rid of grades should be part of the discussion. 

Penser à haute voix

What is current thinking about IQ measurement?  Does it make sense conceptually?  In my primitive conception, each of us is the product of nature and nurture, perhaps via some complex form of mixing of the two.  IQ tries to parse out the nature piece.  But, of course, it does more than that.  It then tries to rank the nature piece, along a single dimension.  Howard Gardner's stuff allows for multi-dimensionality of the nature piece, but still seems to believe that it can be parsed from the nurture component.  What if no such parsing makes sense?

The work of Anders Ericsson and his colleagues casts doubt on parsing intelligence, finding instead that seemingly very bright people had the right sort of prior deliberate practice and it is this practice, nurture if you will, that best explains their superior performance on the various intelligence tests.  Nature then fits into this story in two possible ways.  The first regards motivation.  Not everybody will take the training required for high performance.  It may be boring, or painful, or personally demeaning.  Liking the training may be something that is not teachable.  It may be inherent (or absent).   The other way is in the productivity of the training, particularly early on.  Seeing good results from the deliberate practice can create a positive feedback loop.  Someone who can observe personal growth based on their own efforts is more willing to make personal growth a goal.  In contrast, if at first it is tough sledding, then the lack of reward can become discouraging.

There are late bloomers.  Understanding how they catch on would be very helpful.    Reading the post at the link, one gets the impression that a genetic explanation works, at least in part.  Our various expressions of intelligence are a consequence of multiple genes working in concert to produce the desired effect.  Many of these genes take time to develop, in themselves and in their interactions with other genes.  The timing of gene development varies from individual to individual.

But what of the other part?  Suppose a person has been deliberately practicing with an approach that in fact does not promote personal growth, at least after a fashion.  Then the person will have plateaued and yet been habituated to this non nurturing form of practice.  I believe memorization to be in this category - it works well in elementary school and is necessary then ("i" before "e" except after "c"....).  It become less and less effective thereafter, yet many students cling to it nevertheless. 

It seems to me that THE QUESTION is for people who have engaged in a non nurturing form of deliberate practice for an extended period of time, what can be done to get them to embrace more nurturing forms thereafter?  In one shape or another this seems to be the core issue about undergraduate education, at least at universities like Illinois.  Who else is framing the issue this way?

The scary part of this is that since the students 18 or older are treated as adults, the responsibility on making this sort of change rests with primarily with themselves.  Yet, in my observation, most don't see the necessity in doing so.  And the "grades culture" is so intensive and provides a lot of reinforcement of the view that things are fine as long as the GPA is okay.  So methods that might encourage a different form of deliberate practice either need to shock students into an awareness that things are not okay or must move entirely outside the grade culture so that sort of feedback is not part of what encourages other approaches. 

The current fascination with MOOCs does neither of these things, as near as I can determine.  That fascination is there because of the cost issue.  I'm not saying the cost issue is unimportant.  But it seems to me it is secondary and should not block efforts at finding answers to THE QUESTION.  Unfortunately,  that's exactly what seems to be happening. 

The end of the tunnel

My wife had previously given me a warning.
The countertop guys would come this morning.

While there near eight instead of nine,
Having been so alerted it was totally fine.

And the decorator confirmed we were on the brink
Of getting installed our new kitchen sink.

So tonight among my various wishes
Let it be me who does the dinner dishes.

Creativity in a Jiff

I've mostly steered clear of the education of my own children, but in one area I made a concerted effort.  I encouraged them to pun.  If other parents try this, know it means tolerating a lot of groaners, for years on end, perhaps a decade or more. Now both boys are in college and they are able to produce some decent ones, in context and on the fly.

A few weeks ago after the third or fourth day of our house being renovated, feeling like a total prisoner because big plastic sheets blocked entrance to the kitchen area, I poured myself a stiff martini, only to spill half of it as I tried to make my way through the blockade.  I started cursing pretty loudly.  My younger son asked me what's wrong.  I told him what happened.  He replied, "I guess that drink's on the house."  Voilà.  

So while I believe that creativity can be taught, or at least strongly encouraged, I am suspicious that it can be learned quickly, say in one semester.  Take the deceptively simple looking suggestion from the paragraph below, rephrase a problem as a question.  What's not in the paragraph, nor elsewhere in the piece, is how much time must be spent prior to the reframing activity, simply to get familiar with what is going on.  Most students don't know to do that.  It's extraordinarily time consuming, but also extraordinarily valuable because in that early investigation the person will learn what is at issue, while beforehand the person has at best a vague idea. 

It's well and good to talk about failure.  But people don't seem to talk about playing with something as a way to get familiar with it.  Absent that, I'm skeptical that any good can come from formal education aimed to advance creativity. 

Creativity Becomes an Academic Discipline - NYTimes.com via kwout

The over programmed honors student

If you talk to experienced professionals at the university, as I do on occasion, and ask them, "how are you doing?" you'll almost certainly get the response, "very busy."  If they are also good friends, they will then lament, "It's overwhelming; I have no time for myself."  Unfortunately, this seems to be the new normal.  In accord with bringing current activities in line with revenues, the university reduced its staffing by about 10% to adjust to the new budget realities.  When I ask my friends whether they've reduced activities accordingly, they answer emphatically, "No!"

I have no direct way of determining whether this is true regarding professional work outside of Higher Ed, but I surmise it to be the case.  It gives one explanation for the high unemployment rate.  Why should a company hire more people when it can work its existing staff to the bone?

An argument can be made, one I don't like but one I should acknowledge, that if a college education has as its main purposes to prepare students for the world of work, then students should learn to keep a lot of balls in the air while juggling (metaphorically), as doing so is a necessary readying activity for the next stage in their lives.

The main argument against, both in work and in learning while in college, is a mismeasurement of productivity, where breadth counts for all and depth counts for naught.  This is not the way to maximize the product of the two.  It may seem that way however, when overt measures of breadth are readily apparent while such measures of depth are lacking.  Then it is easy enough to get caught up in what can be counted - lines on a résumé, if you will. I like to give a bastardized version of Shakespeare to describe the situation.

Learning, learning everywhere
But not a pause to think.  

The issue is exacerbated by grade inflation, which causes what statisticians refer to as a "right censoring" problem.  In other words, if a student performed so well in a class that a grade of A++++ should be earned, but the maximal grade possible to record is only an A, then there is no extrinsic incentive in place to reward such exceptional performance.  A time constrained student will then modulate her own effort down to the performance standard, so as to juggle more balls where the student can then do likewise.

The above is a non-issue for average students or below average students.  For them the incentives to get the right (for them) balance between depth and breadth are in place.  But for very good students, honors students in particular, the right censoring issue can have a profound effect.

The question then is why doesn't intrinsic motivation right the ship?  Of course, sometimes it does.  But quite often it does not.  I really don't know the answer to that but I'm going to indulge some speculation on this score below.

First and foremost, all of us develop our wants and desires from prior experience that we enjoyed greatly.  We would like to replicate that sense of enjoyment and look to those activities that seem to have a reasonable chance of producing such a consequence as a place to invest our efforts.  Under this view, the intrinsically motivated student acts because, fortunately for her, she had formative experiences that opened her eyes to taking a more explorative and creative way to direct her own learning.  Such a student then gets to reap the rewards from her early success.  The ball jugglers in the crowd, in contrast, are absent such a foundation and pursue the résumé in lieu of that. 

Second, many of the high achievers have what I think of pejoratively as Amy Chua parenting.  In the parents' conception, school and achievement are about deferred gratification and it is the parents' obligation to push the child hard toward high achievement.  The child, out of respect for the parents and a desire to honor their wishes, conforms her behavior to that standard and represses intellectual desires toward self-expression that fall outside of the parents' conception of what school should be about.  The problem here may be mainly that the nature of the parenting is defined exclusively by the culture and not at all by the aptitudes and personality of the child.  In particular, the parenting is essentially the same for a student who is only average or slightly above as compared to the very good student, who is confronting the right censoring problem.  For the latter, the parenting blithely ignores the need for the student to learn to direct her own creative efforts, because the near-term consequence from doing that are very hard to measure.  So those early formative experiences, mentioned in the previous paragraph, are less likely to happen.  The parenting actually blocks them.

Third, the student has no good role model, whether parent, or teacher, or classmate, or friend outside of school, who places value in what I've elsewhere called Encouraging the mind to putter.  Such a role model would not push back explicitly on the over programming.  The role model would simply provide much positive reinforcement for an alternative way for the student to spend her time, in a kind of intellectual play that leads to exploration, done just for the heck of it.  With the role model the student can engage in the most elemental form of learning - imitation.  Absent the role model, the student has to invent the intellectual play on her own.  Many are unable to do so.

Ultimately, even if it is hard to measure near term, what honors students should want from college is to grow as much as they can.   A deep experience produces growth.  If an individual shallow experience does not, why should one believe that many shallow experiences will do otherwise?  We are getting this wrong, far too often in my view. 

I know this is at best wishful thinking, but maybe if we woke up about this in Higher Ed, employers might do likewise in how they are tasking their better employees.