This is the third post in a brief series that contextualizes AI in education within prominent theories and phenomena of educational psychology. The previous posts discussed Flow Theory and Expectancy-...

Earlier this year, I wrote a series of brief white papers at work that attempt to contextualize AI in education through several foundational, well-studied phenomena of educational psychology. The goal...

After quite a long hiatus, we’re back! My goal is to write more regularly, but, you know, we’ll see. When I was younger, I used to regularly watch Alton Brown’s Good Eats with my family. And, as any ...

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Within the past week or so, I’ve encountered two people who have purposefully distinguished between being “data driven” and “data informed.” First, Rick Saporta differentiates these two approaches in ...

Provides Bluey-inspired color palettes and ggplot2 scales.

Programming note: I’m back after a long summer hiatus. I honestly just kind of lost motivation to do weekly posts. So, moving forward, I’m not going to promise weekly posts. I’ll shoot for a 1 or 2 ti...

I recently read this article on the Ludicity blog about the narrative fallacy, and it got me thinking about how this applies to education. Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, the narrative ...

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 wh...

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 thin...

ALT: a man and a woman are dancing in front of a sign that says fast lake spartans chess team

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...

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 publi...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 q...

TidyTuesday visuals and code. Contribute to ekholme/TidyTuesday development by creating an account on GitHub.

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 i...

In my last post, I wrote about the mastery component of Virginia’s new school performance framework. I’m more or less optimistic about that component of the framework in that it’s straightforward to c...

The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) recently – within the past year or so – completely revamped their school performance and accreditation system. I’m not going to describe all of the changes ...

I mentioned in last week’s post that people often think of quantitative data as objectively true. Not always, but often. And I'll grant that there is something compelling about seeing some phenomenon ...

ALT: a man with a beard is looking at a screen with mathematical equations on it and the words `` overthinking it '' .

Documentation is like sleep. It’s unsexy. It’s boring. It feels like it gets in the way of doing more. It eats up time that you could be using to do something else, something more productive. And yet...

Student addresses are an interesting, and largely untapped, data point. They’re mostly seen as something that a school district's transportation department needs for creating bus routes...and that’s p...

The bad habits of data over-collection run deep.

Back in high school, I ran track and cross country. Every Sunday, my teammates and I would meet somewhere to do our long runs, which typically ranged anywhere from 6 to 15 miles, depending on where we...

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A quick tech note on Netlify’s managed authentication solution