Perhaps you have watched the Socrata videos on how to do data visualization with government data sets and it is still not working for you. Here is a step by step example of answering a simple question. Is the prevalence of alcohol use among youth higher in rural states than urban ones? You can…
I wouldn’t normally consider Excel for analysis, but there are four reasons I’ll be using it sometimes for the next class I’m teaching. First of all, we start out with some pretty basic statistics, I’m not even sure I’d call them statistics, and Excel is good for that kind of stuff. Second, Excel now has…
Working on some fun things using SAS Studio, so, expect a number of short posts over the next few days. Last time, I talked about the utilities and how easy it is to import an Excel file. Now let’s say maybe you are not aUnix person and you have no idea how exactly to code…
It’s been about a year since I last looked at SAS Studio much – OKAY, LISTEN UP PEOPLE In my previous life, I taught for years at a small liberal arts college, with under 2,000 students. I also taught at a tribal community college with less than 500 students. In neither of those situations did…
I have several ideas for blog posts I haven’t written. One is for this blog on simple statistics that answer useful questions. Three others are for my 7 Generation Games blog, on various features and functions in Javascript. I haven’t written any of them. Instead, I wrote an annual report that was due for one…
Well, it’s been a minute. In fact, it’s been over two weeks. I started this blog NINE YEARS AGO. That is pretty amazing. According to some guy named Patrick, who cited ‘research’ the average blog lasts only 100 days. Actually, when I backtracked this statistic, I came to an Atlantic article that said the average…
I’ve hardly blogged, answered emails or talked to anyone these past few months. We just received funding for two games and I have been working night and day, crisscrossing the country recording voices, demonstrating prototypes, contracting for art and animation, reviewing designs and fixing bugs. Ah, the bugs. We have arrived at the level of…
Where we left off, the reliability was unacceptably low for our measure to assess students knowledge of multiplication, division and other third and fourth grade math standards. We were sad. One person, whose picture I have replaced with the mother from our game, Spirit Lake, so she can remain anonymous, said to me: But there…
Last post I wrote a little about local norms versus national norms and gave the example of how the best-performing student in the area can still be below grade level. Today, I want to talk a little about tests. As I mentioned previously, when we conducted the pretest prior to student playing our game, Spirit…
I hate the concept of those books with titles like “something or other for dummies” or “idiot’s guide to whatever” because of the implication that if you don’t know microbiology or how to create a bonsai tree of take out your own appendix you must be a moron. I once had a student ask me…