Sins of presentation: False precision and Just-So Stories of heterogeneity
Most real-world studies of education are messy. Even when you can run a quasi-experimental or even pure randomized controlled trial, life can interfere with research designs. How one handles that messiness is an important factor in how I tend to read studies and evaluate them. That may not be fair, but an attempt to hide […]
Short non-review of Helen Sword’s “Stylish Academic Writing”
Despite the recommendation of a friend, I will not purchase this book. Shortly into the first chapter of the sample I downloaded, I found the following constipation: The seeds for this book were sown [trite trope] when, [let’s interrupt this clause with] several years ago, I was invited to teach a course on higher education pedagogy […]
The three stages of defending bad research
It’s been 11 days since the NCTQ report on teacher ed (see my comment from earlier this week), and we’re already into the third stage of defending bad research. It’s great research, and the conclusions are essential to understand and spread. It’s flawed research, but we should give it some credibility since it tracks with […]
The reports of machismo are greatly exaggerated (NCTQ)
A week has passed since the National Council for Teacher Quality (NCTQ) released its report on teacher education programs across the country. Historians joke that current events become a focus of our thoughts after about 30 years or so, but that’s not true. We can start to see the broader issues of the NCTQ report […]
Sharknado of the status quo
By Sherman Dorn on July 10, 2013
Warning: this is the last evening of a weeklong vacation. My sense of humor is thus a little warped. Paul Bruno correctly observes this evening that bad sports metaphors are rife in education policy discussions, and he urges us to avoid them: But what purpose do most of these analogies serve? Are education issues really […]
Posted in Education policy, Random comments | 1 Response