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First-time taker! Shorter than I expected. Hope I did the digity thing right...
Minerva Project: the future of higher education?
Right now, the inaugural class of Minerva Schools at KGI (part of the Claremont Colleges) is finishing up its first semester of college. I use the word "college" here loosely: there are no lecture halls, no libraries, no fraternities, no old stone buildings, no sports fields, no tenure... Furthermore, Minerva operates for profit (which may raise eyebrows), but appeals to a decidedly different demographic than DeVry etc; billed as the first "online Ivy", it relies on a proprietary online platform to apply pedagogical best practices. Has anyone heard of this before?
The Minerva Project's instructional innovations are what's really exciting. There are no lectures. There are no introductory classes. (There are MOOCs for that! "Do your freshman year at home.") Students meet for seminar-based online classes which are designed to inculcate "habits of mind"; professors use a live, interactive video platform to teach classes, which tracks students' progress and can individualize instruction. The seminars are active and intense; to quote from a recent (Sept. 2014) Atlantic article,
"The subject of the class ...was inductive reasoning. [The professor] began by polling us on our understanding of the reading, a Nature article about the sudden depletion of North Atlantic cod in the early 1990s. He asked us which of four possible interpretations of the article was the most accurate. In an ordinary undergraduate seminar, this might have been an occasion for timid silence... But the Minerva class extended no refuge for the timid, nor privilege for the garrulous. Within seconds, every student had to provide an answer, and [the professor] displayed our choices so that we could be called upon to defend them. [The professor] led the class like a benevolent dictator, subjecting us to pop quizzes, cold calls, and pedagogical tactics that during an in-the-flesh seminar would have taken precious minutes of class time to arrange."
It sounds to me like Minerva is actually making a solid effort to apply evidence-based instructional techniques that are rarely ever given a chance. There are boatloads of sound, reproducible experiments that tell us how people learn and what teachers can do to improve learning, but in practice they are almost wholly ignored. To take just one example, spaced repetition and the testing effect are built into the seminar platform: students have a pop quiz at the beginning of each class and another one at a random moment later in the class. Terrific! And since it's all computer-based, the software can keep track of student responses and represent the material at optimal intervals.
Also, much more emphasis is put on articulating positions and defending arguments, which is known to result in deeper processing of material. In general though, I really like how you are called out and held to account for your answers (again, from the Atlantic article:
...it was exhausting: a continuous period of forced engagement, with no relief in the form of time when my attention could flag or I could doodle in a notebook undetected. Instead, my focus was directed relentlessly by the platform, and because it looked like my professor and fellow edu-nauts were staring at me, I was reluctant to ever let my gaze stray from the screen... I felt my attention snapped back to the narrow issue at hand, because I had to answer a quiz question or articulate a position. I was forced, in effect, to learn.
Their approach to admissions is also interesting. The Founding Class had a 2.8% acceptance rate (a ton were enticed to apply on promise of a full scholarship) and features students from ~14 countries. In the application process, no consideration is given to diversity, balance of gender, or national origin, and SAT/ACT scores are not accepted: applicants must complete a battery of proprietary computer-based quizzes, essentially an in-house IQ test. If they perform well enough, they are invited for an interview, during which they must compose a short essay to ensure an authentic writing sample (i.e., no ghostwriters). After all is said and done, the top 30 applicants get in.
Anyway, I am a student and researcher in the field of educational psychology so this may not be as exciting to others. I'm surprised that I hadn't heard of it before though, and I'm really curious to see what comes of it!
Re: how to design experiments:
Look into statistics. Most experiments have a statistical or hidden statistical basis.
See my suggestions above for calculus.
I've got a recommendation for experimental design/general inference:
Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Generalized Causal Inference, by Shadish, Cook, and Campbell (2001)
Admittedly, this is the only textbook I've ever used that was expressly for experimental design, but I really do think it is superb. Does anyone else have comparison texts for this kind of thing? The validity typology alone is heroic; statistical conclusion validity, internal validity, construct validity, and external validity are each covered in great detail, as are common threats to each of these types of validity.
In response to
The Best Textbooks on Every Subject
Subject: Animal Behavior (Ethology)
Recommendation: Animal Behavior: An Evolutionary Approach (6th Edition, 1997) Author: John Alcock
This is an excellent, well organized, engagingly written textbook. It may be a tiny bit denser than the comparison texts I give below, but I found it to be far and away the most rewarding of the three (I've just read the three). The natural examples he gives to illustrate the many behaviors are perfectly curated for the book. Also, he uses Tinbergen's four questions to frame these discussions, which ensured a rich description of each behavior. The author gives a cogent defense of sociobiology in the last chapter, which was icing on the cake.
Other #1: Principles of Animal Behavior (1st Edition, 2003) Author: Lee Alan Dugatkin
This was one I had to read for a class; it's a bit shorter than Alcock, and maybe it has been improved upon since this inaugural edition, but I found the fluff-to-substance ratio to be concerningly high. It was much more basic than Alcock, perhaps better suited for a high school audience. The chapters were written like works of fiction and the author maintained this style throughout, which I found distracting (though others may like it). Bottom line: If you have had a decent college level class in biology, you would definitely be better off going straight to an older edition of Alcock.
Other #2: Animal Behavior: An Evolutionary Approach (9th Edition, 2009) Author: John Alcock
I read through this edition too (I think there's a 10th out now) while writing my undergraduate thesis to make sure I hadn't missed any important updates in the field (I hadn't). The new edition had ~100 fewer pages; it was long on pictures (quite a few more than its predecessor) and short on content. It's been several years now and I can't remember exactly the ways in which it differed, but “watered down” comes to mind. I would highly recommend picking up an older edition unless this one is specifically required.
In response to
Welcome to Less Wrong! (6th thread, July 2013)
Hello!
Actually, I am no stranger to this site; I have been a sporadic fly-on-the-wall here since early 2011, when I found out about you guys through gwern's personal webpage (to which my interest in nootropics, n-backing, and spaced repetition had led me). I've made several desultory stabs at the sequences; I think I've read most of them twice over, but some I've abandoned and some I've never touched. I started HPMoR reluctantly, found I couldn't put it down, and finished it in a single sitting. Lately I've been pretty swamped with work, but I've been trying to follow along with the Superintelligence reading group. Though I've been content to lurk, I am now extremely keen to take a more active role in the discussions!
Blurb: I am a 25 year-old doctoral student and researcher in the Learning Sciences with an academic background in Statistics and Biology (mostly behavioral neuroscience). I am dedicated to making learning as powerful and efficient as possible through psychological, biological, and technological cross-pollination. Only an optimally educated humanity will be equipped to solve the problems of the future (and indeed, those of the present)! Though my research contributions have been mainly on projects not my own, I am ultimately interested in psychometrics, human-computer interaction, intelligent tutoring systems/cognitive tutors, and redesigning classroom instruction to reflect the state of the art in cognitive science.
For a while I was deeply wary of technology---the recklessness of our innovation and the potential it had to change human beings irreparably if it didn't eliminate them completely. I had just discovered Heidegger's Question Concerning Technology, Bill Joy's Wired essay, Kaczynski's manifesto... sundry warnings of an impending techno-dystopia. But I came to reevaluate my fears: the proper course of action is not to rage against the machine. Our future is a technological one whether we like it or not (spoiler: we like it), and despite my initial resistance I have come to embrace technology and the changes to humanity it will increasingly entail; not only has it greatly improved life on Earth (at least for humans), but it can be continually leveraged to this end (for all forms of life). However, I feel that emerging technologies should be pursued with much greater care than they are currently, and anticipation of the many longterm side-effects of such development requires that the people of the world (or their devices) be informed/thoughtful enough to do so (cf. differential intellectual progress). Any attempt at a such a wholesale societal improvement program requires better education, and my hope is to help speed things along on this front.
Gah, I really meant to keep this shorter, but I still have so much to say about myself! Best to quit now before I bring up my precocious childhood or my pious vegetarianism! Here's to many great discussions! I look forward to meeting you all!
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If it's true that they provide a superior educational experience, it seems like it might provide a bit of evidence about signaling vs human capital explanations for education. But personally my prediction is that graduates will get jobs and it will be mainly due to signaling effects.
I've been jumping around reading Caplan's posts on your link in my free time today and I've found him very convincing. However, I know very little about economics. Could you recommend a good overview article on signalling/ability bias/human capital in higher education? I am sincerely quite interested in this stuff.