This post is occasioned by Ben Schmidt’s wonderful tool for exploring gender differences on words used in student evaluations on RateMyProfessor. 1. RateMyProfessor is a huge, but awful data set. Why awful? First, I’d bet that well under 1% of the students who take a course rate the professor on RateMyProfessor. For example, I went…
An academic job market story yesterday reminded me of the perils of interpreting lack of preparation with lack of worth. A philosophy candidate for a job at Nazareth College in Rochester was offered the job, made some fairly common requests, and then promptly saw the job offer rescinded. UPDATE: The candidate has revealed more details….
As I prepare my tenure portfolio, I am catching up on entering in my student evaluation data and comments into my big spreadsheet. While I don’t think student evaluations should serve as the only data by which to judge teachers, they are full of valuable information about teaching, as long as you are willing to…
It seems a requirement that any conversation about higher education in America must begin and end with costs and economic outcomes. Along the way, our economic analysts nod to the power of knowledge (economic research shows it improves career prospects!), or the value of an educated citizenry (it produces more innovation, which of course produces…
I’m putting some finishing touches on my syllabi here the night before classes start, and I thought I would share with my blog readers a one-page statement of my teaching philosophy that I put on each of my syllabi. Anyone do anything similar? Please share in the comments. A note about my teaching philosophy I…
Welcome new readers! One of the themes of this blog is how I apply my perspective as a college professor or a cognitive psychologist to a variety of different circumstances, like kindergarten, or feminism, or googling, or school reform. This post is in that spirit, about my experience as a summer camp chess coach. One…
At the beginning of every college class, I hand out a syllabus. What is the purpose of this document? What is in it? How do I plan it? How do I design it? I thought it might be useful or interesting to some of my readers to go through my thought process on philosophy and…
There is a predictable uproar about the latest installment, in Forbes this time, of our national conversation entitled: Golly Aren’t Academics Living Lazy Leisurely Lives (GAALLLL, for short). I don’t have much to say but I want to remind people that this is a fairly old debate. I really don’t think it changes much each…
As a parent and a human being, I am horrified and terrified by the events of last week in Newtown, Connecticut. I have hugged my kids, I have sat and cried upon reading notes sent by six year old best friends. But as a psychologist, I can’t help but read the discussion around this event…
Like many interested in how we apply basic cognitive science to education, I was interested in the recent finding that many teachers still endorse many myths and misconceptions about neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Here is the original paper, and an excellent op-ed by Chris Chabris and Dan Simons in the Wall Street Journal. One interesting…
