Causation cadge
Note: this post is a sort of mental marker, as I am partway thinking through a particular issue and do not want to lose my place. One of my colleagues, Micki Chi, has divided causal modeling into two sorts, the type with narrative structures and the type without, which she calls emergent and has some evidence […]
Is the College Board trolling high schools?
This week, we had a round of news stories about how average SAT scores are at their lowest level in years. In an example of particularly weak reporting, the Washington Post‘s Nick Anderson wrote, The steady decline in SAT scores and generally stagnant results from high schools on federal tests and other measures reflect a troubling shortcoming […]
Mistakes in brief
So there’s this in response to this, which commented on this, which itself was a response to a whole lot of 10-year retrospectives on Katrina, some of which are full of motivated reasoning and some of which combine a pretty good empirical base and caution about drawing policy conclusions. ((At first glance, there is far […]
The arcane art of writing review letters for tenure/promotion
A colleague recently asked me how to write external review letters. These are letters written by nationally-known scholars who are asked to provide an independent outsider view of a faculty member who is up for tenure and/or promotion in rank. My first thought: Thank goodness there still are tenure-track positions, so view this as a […]
After a year at ASU…
Yesterday was the first day of classes at Arizona State, and the start of my second year here. For the most part, my job has been as expected, with the bonus surprise of an incredible supporting group of staff and academic professionals. In addition to orienting myself to a large college as quickly as I […]