Yikes…It’s Been Awile

Apparently our last blog post was in August. Dang. Where did five months go? Blog guilt would be killing me, but I swear it was just yesterday that Mine posted.

I will give a bit of review of some of the books that I read this semester related to statistics. Most recently, I finished Hands-On Matrix Algebra Using R: Active and Motivated Learning with Applications. This was a fairly readable book for those looking to understand a bit of matrix algebra. The emphasis is definitely in economics, but their are some statistics examples as well. I am not as sure where the “motivated learning” part comes in, but the examples are practical and the writing is pretty coherent.

The two books that I read that I am most excited about are Model Based Inference in the Life Sciences: A Primer on Evidence and The Psychology of Computer Programming. The latter, written in the 70’s, explored psychological aspects of computer programming, especially in industry, and on increasing productivity. Weinberg (the author) stated his purpose in the book was to study “computer programming as a human activity.” This was compelling on many levels to me, not the least of which is to better understand how students learn statistics when using software such as R.

Reading this book, along with participating in a student-led computing club in our department has sparked some interest to begin reading the literature related to these ideas this spring semester (feel free to join us…maybe we will document our conversations as we go). I am very interested in how instructor’s choose software to teach with (see concerns raised about using R in Harwell (2014). Not so fast my friend: The rush to R and the need for rigorous evaluation of data analysis and software in education. Education Research Quarterly.) I have also thought long and hard about not only what influences the choice of software to use in teaching (I do use R), but also about subsequent choices related to that decision (e.g., if R is adopted, which R packages will be introduced to students). All of these choices probably have some impact on student learning and also on students’ future practice (what you learn in graduate school is what you ultimately end up doing).

The Model Based Inference book was a shorter, readable version of Burnham and Anderson’s (2003) Springer volume on multimodel inference and information theory. I was introduced to these ideas when I taught out of Jeff Long’s, Longitudinal Data Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences Using R. They remained with me for several years and after reading Anderson’s book, I am going to teach some of these ideas in our advanced methods course this spring.

Anyway…just some short thoughts to leave you with. Happy Holidays.