What must everyone know and why must everyone know that? This was one of the two central questions in Dr. J.T. Dillon’s course on Curriculum and Instruction, which I thought was going to be a colossal waste of time. After all, I was going to be a statistician, why would I need a course on…
Two incidents happened lately where results I expected to be the same turned out to be different. The first one involved two Excel files sent to me from one of my favorite clients. (You’re all my favorite clients!) One of the files was an Excel file on a Mac. The other was created on a…
I’m working on the SAS Naked Mole Rat book and was writing about residual variance. It occurred to me that I just threw in a chart and assumed that people would know what residual variance was and moved right along. This reminds me of the time the rocket scientist had a sign outside of his…
Yesterday, I was at Griffith Observatory with the world’s most spoiled 13-year-old. We were there because she is in a Summer Scholars program that is designed to provide academic enrichment for high-achieving girls. Unfortunately, not being as high-achieving as we might like, she got a B- on her latest test, and given that the teacher…
Before we went to Arlington, VA to get our hands on the National Indian Education Study , my colleague, Dr. Erich Longie, hypothesized that schools that had more cultural activities would have lower academic achievement. In addition to being an old friend, Dr. Longie is president of Spirit Lake Consulting, Inc. , a published author…
Any time you add another layer of complexity you better have a damn good reason. I’m often skeptical of proponents of both Item Response Theory and multiple imputation procedures, not because either IRT or MI is a bad thing in itself but because its inclusion makes data analysis and reporting more complicated. At the National…
I’m currently at a seminar in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics. I’ve seen the notices for these a lot of times over the years, and always thought, “Well, that looks interesting” but never applied to go, primarily because although your expenses are paid, there is no stipend, so that is…
Science is boring! Math is boring! This is the whine of the world’s most spoiled 13-year-old as she does her homework, and I find it hard to argue with her because I have read her textbooks and all of them could be put to a better use as a cure for insomnia or starting a…
When the first computer lab was put into the tribal college where I was a consultant, the professor in charge of the project complained that students were spending time in the lab on Yahoo, MySpace, emailing friends on other reservations, downloading software and all sorts of non-academic activities. He asked what he should do. I…
Working on project for a new client and I was thinking about how we get work, which is a question I get asked all the time both from consultants and people interested in entering the consulting business. It may be a self-fulfilling prophecy that we have received very little work from the latest marketing innovations…