Recommended reads #106
The case against using Turnitin in your own classroom.
When teaching for understanding is pitted against teaching for doing well on the test.
Stop the presses!!! Here is a shocking new finding: A new meta-analysis shows that student evaluations of teacher performance are unrelated to student learning.
A rebuttal of the previous paper, “No, student evaluations aren’t worthless.”
Stop pretending you’re not rich.
On a related note, here’s a job in the Chronicle of Higher Ed that, I imagine, will raise your eyebrows, not so much for the job itself, but for the fact it was in the Chronicle.
Here’s a stellar trio of posts about equity and inclusion:
-Equity and excellence are mutually conducive
-So you want to do something for diversity?
-The theater of faculty diversification.
This piece about how the Dutch are dealing with rising sea levels is fascinating.
This review/preview of How To Tame a Fox makes me want to pick up this book.
Here’s a cutesy story about liberal arts colleges, in Nature.
America made [Paulina Porizkova] a feminist.
Michelle Tong started a wiki about running a mouse lab at a small liberal arts college. She’s asking folks with this experience to contribute. I imagine she might be interested in hearing from folks who are outside R1s but not at SLACs, too.
The guy who started and shuttered Beall’s List of predatory publishers, who wages a chronic monomaniacal diatribe against open access publishing, just wrote a barnburning and factually challenged opinion piece, which to his disappointment (I presume) you can read without having to pay a subscription. Meanwhile, here’s a thoughtful piece from 2015 that discusses issues of predatory publishers with the nuance the issue requires.
A trashy satirized piece shaming students about reports of dead family members was published in the Chronicle of Higher Ed this week. A superb response came from Tenure, She Wrote. (I have one coming out in the Chronicle early next week, though it’s not as good as the one by Acclimatrix, which I just linked to.) And also, this week oddly enough this site had its busiest day ever, resulting from traffic to a 2014 piece about ‘the dead grandmother problem.’ (Which if you haven’t seen it yet, I think it’s one of my better pieces on this site.)
Gina Baucom asked folks on twitter what the crappiest thing they ever heard said about a woman academic. The response was overwhelming. It’s worth looking at some of them.
This looks like a very handy resource if you’re running GLMMs and want to understand how they work.
More good visuals and explainers for teaching and understanding stats
A paper about data fabrication in randomized control trials. And a blog post that puts it in perspective.
In defense of cultural appropriation
Please stop talking trash about administrators
I just learned that the owners of Leica optics ran a Schindler’s List-eque “freedom train” in the late 1930s, saving hundreds of people from the Holocaust.
Kith.
What’s the divide in the US? (Is it ever so simple?) If you’re looking to split the country in half, then one way to do it is using who says home, and who doesn’t.
Some guy goes on NPR and pretends he’s a pioneer in applying active learning to humanities classrooms.
We are still in. Governments within the US doing what our federal government is failing to do.
The DEB blog explains what makes a successful CAREER proposal. Which has a 10% funding rate.
A professor at Montana State got non-renewed before he came up for tenure, and it may or may not have something to do with having the proper import permits for field collected samples at the university, and he’s lawyered up and it’s in the news. (As with nearly all these personnel matters, it’s presumably about university politics.)
That story from some weeks ago, about the dean at a university in Connecticut who got fired for posting some unclassy review on Yelp, has now made it to the New York Times. (I reluctantly admit I’ve read some of her reviews, and one comically recurring theme is that she claims a superior knowledge about how rice should be cooked on account of her ethncity).
Apparently, there’s an army ant queen out there who is hanging on to sperm from 96 different males.
Have a nice weekend.