And we're back from a 3-week hiatus that was the result of a guys' trip, being busy, and being somewhat demotivated. But now we're back! Most of my job in late spring and early summer of every year involves analyzing data from standardized tests, and
Stacked bar charts aren’t good plots, and this is a hill I will die on. Even though everyone over the age of, say, 7, has seen a stacked bar chart at some point in their lives and probably intuits what they are and how to describe them, I’ll
This week's post is going to be pretty short. Over the past week, I've had interactions with two different groups of "AI-in -education experts," and they each left me feeling some combination of despair, disgust, incredulity, and anger. And so I wrote what was
I’ve mentioned in multiple posts on this blog that the primary “point” of data is to help inform decisions. There are probably occasions where it’s useful to just report out on broad compliance-y things, or where we want to explore data with no clear decision in mind in
I’ve been very much into the Acquired podcast lately. The premise of the podcast is that each episode describes a single company, usually beginning at some pivotal pre-company occurrence (the birth of the founder, the invention of some critical piece of technology that enables the company, etc) and proceeding
I recently stumbled onto a preprint research article examining the writing quality of college students before and after the introduction of ChatGPT, as well as some reporting on the same article published on the Hechinger Report. And oh boy did reading it make me feel like Will Ferrell in Zoolander.
I’m both an AI optimist and an AI skeptic. I use AI tools in my day-to-day work, mostly to help with coding, but with some other tasks as well. Google Gemini is one of the tabs I open, along with my email and calendar, as soon as I boot
Programming Note: I’m doing an intensive AI training next week, so there will be no post on 4/4. I’ll be back again the following week. Emily Oster recently published an article (post? blog?) on her website, ParentData, titled “Why We Still Need Test Score Data,” and I
I recently read The Productivity Shift (TPS) – a report from Grammarly with the basic premise that businesses should use AI to help employees communicate better, which will increase productivity. You can skim the report if you want, but it’s mostly a lengthy marketing pitch for Grammarly – a company that
One common use of statistical models is to make predictions about the future. These predictions are ubiquitous in our tech-infused lives today. Meteorologists deliver predictions about the weather to you via the apps on your phone. Your credit card company might flag a transaction as suspicious using a prediction from
I have this thesis that people in education often get frustrated with data – or they feel like data is useless – because the structure of the data they’re collecting doesn’t allow them to answer the question they want to answer. This usually happens because someone – a principal, a social
In the last two posts in this mini-series reviewing Virginia’s new school performance framework, I shared my thoughts on its mastery and growth components. I’d encourage you to check out those posts if you haven’t, but my quick summary of them is that I think the mastery