Posts

Jason Kerwin, a development economist at the University of Minnesota, wrote an interesting blog post some time back in which he argued that nothing scales. Kerwin’s point was that we (i.

I’ve been spending a fair bit of time digging through the literature on the cognitive science of learning and one consistent result from the literature is that taking notes (ideally good notes) is really helpful for making sure that you learn and remember something.

I have been a light user of Stan and RStan for some time and while there are a lot of things I really like about the language (such as the awesome community you can turn to for support and ShinyStan for inspecting Stan output) there are also a few things that I find frustrating.

A while back, I was involved in an education RCT that had pretty high (40% or so) attrition. What’s worse, the remaining treatment and control students appeared to be quite different from each other.

Most articles on international education start out with a well-worn two-part lede: first, developing countries are facing a “learning crisis;” second, there is a mountain of evidence demonstrating the long-term effects of education on everything from personal (and country-level) incomes to health.

Educationists and economists agree that teachers are extremely important. Studies from around the world show that there is huge variance in teacher effectiveness (Hanushek and Rivkin 2006). (Unfortunately, that same research shows that there are few observable differences between effective and ineffective teachers which means that improving the teacher workforce is not just a matter of screening for the right candidates.

For as long as high stakes exams have existed, people have hated them. The system of imperial examinations used to select the mandarins of ancient Chinese dynasties (and the first high-stakes exams) is credited with building an empire.

I’ve spent the past year or so reading a lot of research on education in India. There is obviously a lot of amazing research out there, but there are also a lot of areas where there is far less evidence than I originally expected.

There’s a really bad dad joke about European technical standards which goes something like “We love standards; that’s why we create so many of them.” (I told you it was bad.

Learning outcomes surveys typically use a school-based sampling strategy – i.e. they randomly select schools and then conduct assessments of all or some portion of students at each selected school.