Guardienne of the Tomes

IRPE Colloquium:  Predicting Graduation for First Time Full-time Freshmen at CSUCI Kristin Jordan (SOC, IRPE) & Jared Barton (ECON) 4/23/18 Where to find info See  this IRPE research brief Characteristics at admission predict graduation: HS GPA, SAT scores, high school curriculum, race/ethnicity, income, parent education. Looking at underrepresented (URM) student achievement gap, income gap (Pell grant or not), first generation college student or not.  Use info at admissions to explain past graduation rates and also to forecast and understand future graduation rates. Goals: examine which characteristics predict student success, and to decompose achievement gaps into what we can explain and what is left unexplained in understanding those gaps. Achievement gap characteristics overstated because students appear in more than one category. Achievement gap characteristics are correlated with other known (positive) predictors of graduation.   ...

You don't even have to have your finger on the pulse of academic news to have heard about the Lacour and Green research debacle. It's been bouncing around in my brain since it's related to the way we maneuver in a world of information, and it is relevant to my work as a librarian and as a researcher. In a drama-filled nerdly nutshell (with links to further reading for the details), the situation: Brief Unofficial Timeline of the Study, and Discovery of Possible Misconduct an important study on persuasion coauthored by a UCLA political science graduate student (Lacour) and a big-name political scientist at Columbia University (Green) was published in (and then retracted from) the peer-reviewed journal  Science; the large-N study indicated that attitudes about same-sex marriage could be significantly changed long-term by brief exposure to someone who was gay; because this would be huge news, it was picked up by NPR's This American Life ; because the conclusions g...

Frustrated with some data and fed up with my own inability to locate an appropriate statistical technique, I finally posted to Facebook in the hopes that a friend would commiserate with me: "Bending my brain around ILL stats and thinking about exploratory factor analysis with categorical variables, despite the issues with it. Desperately missing [my old group of Emory PoliSci nerdbuddies and profs who were excellent at stats] and brainstorming these sorts of things." Five seconds later, the prof I had tagged in the post replied, "Three words: polychoric correlation matrix." And I had four distinct reactions in rapid succession. They were as follows: First reaction : sarcasm. Well OF COURSE polychoric correlation matrix, duh. Who WOULDN'T know that? Certainly not I. Pshaw. Second reaction : confirmatory exploration. A quick Google search of that conglomeration of words, a quick scan of the Wikipedia description , and yep, this is much closer to what I ne...