4 ms·

Your point wasn't completely absurd in the beginning, but now you're wilfully misunderstanding the arguments. It seems you're hedging some sort of grudge agains

Your point wasn't completely absurd in the beginning, but now you're wilfully misunderstanding the arguments. It seems you're hedging some sort of grudge against educators?

threatofrain 10y ago
Asking for a statement of relationship between proposed intervention and proposed outcome is not even near absurd. Pedagogical researchers in policy do this all the time. For example, Fiona Phelps has researched into gaze aversion in multiple contexts, one of which is pedagogical, and in there she proposes an intervention for educators, and she discusses outcomes. She is interested in making a causal link between intervention and outcome. It should also be noted that the causal model she discusses is simple, discussable, falsifiable, affirmable, has few factors and few measurement instances. Discussing simple causal models is standard professionalism in pedagogical policy literature... or any other empirical field involved in policy. Is it that scary to say that a Pyret or Python intervention should have a relationship to CS graduation rates, upper division performance, GPA, or some other stated policy outcome? Not stating your intervention outcomes allows you to go statistical fishing. One can say the same thing about iPads in schools. It's not wrong to ask what outcome variables the school intends to affect with an iPad intervention. Maybe the effect is there, but we can't begin discussion unless the proposed intervention is willing to state its predicted outcomes. Why are you <not> pushing for a discussion of outcomes?
- skrishnamurthi 10y ago
  Since you keep coming back to Python: I already responded to you, I believe, on a comparison to Python. In case not, here it is again. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13189513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13189513 Lots of educational outcomes (e.g., just about everything in the Bootstrap project [http://www.bootstrapworld.org/] http://www.bootstrapworld.org/]) are linked to these differences, but since most people here are hackers, not educators, I'm sticking to the technical issues that lead to those differences.

Your point wasn't completely absurd in the beginning, but now you're wilfully misunderstanding the arguments. It seems you're hedging some sort of grudge against educators?

threatofrain 10y ago

Asking for a statement of relationship between proposed intervention and proposed outcome is not even near absurd. Pedagogical researchers in policy do this all the time. For example, Fiona Phelps has researched into gaze aversion in multiple contexts, one of which is pedagogical, and in there she proposes an intervention for educators, and she discusses outcomes. She is interested in making a causal link between intervention and outcome. It should also be noted that the causal model she discusses is simple, discussable, falsifiable, affirmable, has few factors and few measurement instances. Discussing simple causal models is standard professionalism in pedagogical policy literature... or any other empirical field involved in policy. Is it that scary to say that a Pyret or Python intervention should have a relationship to CS graduation rates, upper division performance, GPA, or some other stated policy outcome? Not stating your intervention outcomes allows you to go statistical fishing. One can say the same thing about iPads in schools. It's not wrong to ask what outcome variables the school intends to affect with an iPad intervention. Maybe the effect is there, but we can't begin discussion unless the proposed intervention is willing to state its predicted outcomes. Why are you <not> pushing for a discussion of outcomes?

skrishnamurthi 10y ago
Since you keep coming back to Python: I already responded to you, I believe, on a comparison to Python. In case not, here it is again. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13189513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13189513 Lots of educational outcomes (e.g., just about everything in the Bootstrap project [http://www.bootstrapworld.org/] http://www.bootstrapworld.org/]) are linked to these differences, but since most people here are hackers, not educators, I'm sticking to the technical issues that lead to those differences.