

A 'Moneyball' Approach to College - lmcglone
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Moneyball-Approach-to/130062/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

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zackzackzack
If this happened in one of my classes I would walk out. I like the data
oriented approach to learning, but the whole tone seems to be that education
flows from professors to students. "It's the professors fault that students
aren't learning, it's the administrations fault that students aren't learning,
it's not the students fault that they aren't passing our tests". Education is
something that comes from within a student.

If the students don't want to learn something, they aren't going to learn it.
Period. They might cram for a test so they won't piss of their parents by
seemingly pissing away their money, but that doesn't mean they will have
actually gained anything from the classroom experience.

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scott_s
I'm not sure you read the whole thing, because I did not get that vibe at all.

I see them trying two different things: using data in class to get the
students to engage with and learn from each other; and using data in aggregate
to predict how well students will do.

I don't see how your objection applies to getting students to engage with each
other, so I'm going to skip it. I think you're objecting to the second thing.
But I don't see it as "it's our fault the students are failing," I see it as
"this student is in danger of failing, so we should help them." Blame is
irrelevant. In small courses, professors already know who is in danger of not
doing well. I think they're targeting larger class sizes where the professor
is unable to look at a student and immediately recall their past performance.

You're correct that an unmotivated student will not learn. But even motivated
students need help sometimes. Some students have not yet _learned how to
learn_.

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zackzackzack
I suppose the core of my objection is the focus on technology being the
solution to the problem of students not learning. It feels like it is really
easy to fall into the trap of "Students who clicked 5 times instead of 4 when
navigating to the back button were found to have performed marginally better
within the 5th percentile, but significantly better overall."

The tools are all there and I agree that some good will come out of it. But
without a motivation to learn something, I don't see these technologies as
being a solution. More of an amplifier of a solution than anything else. Start
ups focused around creating technology to measure students seem like a good
way to make the above "quadruple click back button for success" scenario play
out somehow.

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scott_s
Look at it this way: colleges can't control a student's internal motivation.
But they can control how they structure class time, and how they intervene
with troubled students. So they're focusing on what they can control instead
of what they can't.

Although, I think that well-timed intervention can help students with
motivation problems. Students tend to lose motivation when they're struggling
and don't know how to improve.

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teyc
Very true. Much is already known about the rites/rituals/practices of
successful students. It is a matter of giving timely feedback to encourage
students to stay on course.

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jamesaguilar
Ah, I was hoping that this article would be talking about ways for students to
choose colleges more optimally. :(

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dpeck
Probably not exactly what you're looking for but there are some "long term pay
off" rankings that are updated every now and then. The most recent I could
find was from smartmoney.com with story at
[http://www.smartmoney.com/borrow/student-loans/colleges-
that...](http://www.smartmoney.com/borrow/student-loans/colleges-that-pay-
off/) and a(n annoying multipage) slide show with the top 5 in each category,
Public, Private, Lib Arts, is here [http://www.smartmoney.com/borrow/student-
loans/colleges-that...](http://www.smartmoney.com/borrow/student-
loans/colleges-that-pay-off/)

Of course more variables would be needed and how to weigh them would be
different for each student, but from a Moneyball approach payback would
probably be one of the strongest factors.

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Maven911
I think a bigger problem is that there should be more standardized
transparency in selecting a major: there should be data on failure rates based
on high school gpa levels, salary information, % of jobs that were directly
related to the field of study - all in the hopes to empower students to make
more informed decisions

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pjscott
_But can you change a student's trajectory? The college has experimented with
various intervention strategies, so far with mixed results. For example, early
data showed students in general-education courses who log in on Day 1 of class
succeed 21 percent more often than those who don't. So Rio Salado blasted
welcome e-mails to students the night before courses began, encouraging them
to log in._

That sounds dubious -- she's taking an indicator of class engagement, and
hoping to improve class engagement by changing it. But hey, you never know
what may help people. She should send out those emails to half the class, with
the other half as a control group.

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melipone
As an online education teacher, I have noticed that classes with different age
groups perform better. I have no way of influencing this outcome however.

