When I taught my first PhD-level methods course, I invited students to submit questions about any topic in statistics or methodology. Six out of 10 students asked about the same topic: robust & clustered standard errors. It's clearly a topic they found both important and confusing. Psychologists basically never use robust standard errors. But they…
Category: Teaching
[56] TWARKing: Test-Weighting After Results are Known
On the last class of the semester I hold a “town-hall” meeting; an open discussion about how to improve the course (content, delivery, grading, etc). I follow-up with a required online poll to “vote” on proposed changes [1]. Grading in my class is old-school. Two tests, each 40%, homeworks 20% (graded mostly on a completion…
[26] What If Games Were Shorter?
The smaller your sample, the less likely your evidence is to reveal the truth. You might already know this, but most people don’t (.html), or at least they don’t appropriately apply it (.html). (See, for example, nearly every inference ever made by anyone). My experience trying to teach this concept suggests that it’s best understood…
[2] Using Personal Listening Habits to Identify Personal Music Preferences
Not everything at Data Colada is as serious as fraudulent data. This post is way less serious than that. This post is about music and teaching. As part of their final exam, my students analyze a data set. For a few years that data set has been a collection of my personal listening data from…