Teaching, learning, grades, and student evaluations.

Chad has posted an interesting discussion of a study of students’ academic performance and how it is correlated to their evaluations of the faculty teaching them. The study in question is Carrell, S., & West, J. (2010). Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors Journal of Political Economy, 118 (3), 409-432 (DOI 10.1086/653808) . Go read Chad’s post for a detailed discussion of the methodology of the study, since it will likely answer your questions about my quick overview here. After the overview, I’m going to offer a few more thoughts on the explanations the study authors propose for their findings.
The study, done with data from the U.S. Air Force Academy (where there is a large-ish set of courses all students are required to take, to which students are assigned at random, and which are evaluated on the basis of common exams in which faculty are not necessarily grading their own students, etc.), found that:

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The blogger’s hypothetical imperatives.

In the midst of the ongoing conversation about managing career and housework and who knows what else (happening here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and likely some places I’ve missed), ScientistMother wondered about one of the blogospheric voices that wasn’t taking an active role in the discussion. She mused in a comment at Isis’s blog:

Do we ever get a post from DrugMonkey about how he does it? He has kids and a wife (who I think is a scientist) but he rarely talks about balance issues. I’m sure its been an issue. Until the MEN start talking about its not going to change.

When DrugMonkey demurred, she followed up with a post at her own blog:

You have stated on your blog that you believe that gender equality in science is a good thing. Yet you rarely talk about some of the balancing issues or the parental issues. I have the link up that shows you think its important. Yet outside of that post originally done 2 years ago, you don’t talk about fatherhood or balancing fatherhood and partnerhood with science.

In the discussion in the comments following her post, ScientistMother quotes from the post from the DrugMonkey vault she has in mind:

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The work-life balance minefield.

That all said, as a woman in science, it is sometimes disheartening to almost never hear an article suggest that a woman in science discuss household duties with her partner and split them evenly. The author of your article makes the statement that women bear the burden of household labor, but until scientists begin to tell other scientists that this isn’t right, women are going to continue to leave academic science for fear of not being able to “balance” work and family.

You can be right and be practical at the same time. These need not be mutually exclusive. I also think that you need not choose between achieving tenure and advocating for social justice. And, until you stop choosing, the pipeline is going to continue to leak like a sieve.

–Isis the Scientist, “A Response on Men, Women, Housework, and Science”

I feel compelled to add, as I have written in many blog-post comments over the last few days, that I deeply respect the value and autonomy of individual relationships — and this, too, is an important part of this calculation. Asking a woman to do more because she is a woman is never fair. But personal relationships are not appropriate places for philosophers or career advisers to lurk. It’s up to each couple — not me, not feminist critics, not tradition — to negotiate housekeeping, childcare, or other domestic responsibilities, and the other aspects of personal relationships. The goal is for those choices to be freely made and not coerced. So men, and women: It’s up to you and your partner to set the terms, but please make sure those decisions are made as freely as can be achieved.

–Jim Austin, “A Special Message for Men: Do Your Share”

While a robust internet discussion about careers and home-life and gendered division of labor has been going on, I have been sitting on the sidelines. (And baking cupcakes and making other necessary preparations for the joint birthday party we hosted for the Free-Ride offspring this past weekend. Plus wondering if this is the year that the social judgment will be spoken aloud, whether by someone outside the family or by one of the sprogs: “How is it that you can make them share a party like that rather than giving each of them a distinct birthday party close to their actual month and day of birth?” How indeed.)

It’s not that I don’t know something about trying to combine a career with family and obligations outside that career (although balance is not the right word to describe that kind of task). But it is hard to speak of these experiences without someone feeling as if my “is” is intended to have the force of an “ought”.

And that jump is pretty hard not to make, given that one thing that girls and women in American society are socialized to do pretty darn reliably is to judge other girls and women (and, of course, to judge themselves as girls or women). Is there a downside to a particular option? We will find it, even if it is just hypothetical. (And laboring under the burden of hypothetical downsides can be its very own downside.) We can speak about what works for us individually, but do so with the awareness that it might stop working, at which point we have to figure out some other option.

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IGERT meeting: some general thoughts.

About three weeks ago, I was in Washington, D.C. for the NSF IGERT 2010 Project Meeting. I was invited to speak on a panel on Digital Science (with co-panelists Chris Impey, Moshe Pritzker, and Jean-Claude Bradley, who blogged about it), and later in the meeting I helped to facilitate some discussions of ethics case studies.
I’ll have more to say about our panel in the next post, but first I wanted to share some broad observations about the meeting.
IGERT stands for “Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship”, and the program is described thusly:

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Friday frivolity: what’s that in my office?

This week I had one of those rare moments between work projects to pause and take a look around. I mean that literally — I actually took a look around in my office and noticed that I have accumulated some stuff in it that one might not be able to count on finding in your typical faculty office.
For example:

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Friday Sprog Blogging: the axolotl.

Dr. Free-Ride: What was it we were going to talk about today?
Elder offspring: The axolotl.
Dr. Free-Ride: Can you please spell that?
Elder offspring: A-X-O-L-O- … wait. A-X-O-T-O-L. Wait! A-X-O-L-O-T-O-L. I think.
Dr. Free-Ride: Hmm. I shall do some checking on the spelling. And what is it?
Elder offspring: It’s a salamander that has achieved eternal youth!

axolotl-small.jpg

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Shrinking budgets + skyrocketing subscription fees = UC boycott of NPG.

Economic recovery has not yet made its presence felt at public universities in California. (Indeed, at least in the California State University system, all things budgetary are going to be significantly worse in the next academic year, not better.)
This means it’s not a great time for purveyors of electronic journals to present academic libraries in public university systems with big increases in subscription prices. Yet Nature Publishing Group has, apparently, done just that by some 400%. And, as noted by Christina Pikas and Dorothea Salo and Jennifer Howard in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the University of California system has decided that what NPG is offering is not worth the asking price.
Which means a system-wide boycott of NPG journals is being organized, as outlined in this letter (PDF) from the executive director of the California Digital Library, the chair of the University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication, and the convener of the University Librarians Council.
Interestingly, the boycott goes further than just encouraging UC libraries to drop their costly subscriptions to NPG journals. From the letter:

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John Tierney thinks he’s being daring.

The title of John Tierney’s recent column in the New York Times, “Daring to Discuss Women’s Potential in Science”, suggests that Tierney thinks there’s something dangerous about even raising the subject:

The House of Representatives has passed what I like to think of as Larry’s Law. The official title of this legislation is “Fulfilling the potential of women in academic science and engineering,” but nothing did more to empower its advocates than the controversy over a speech by Lawrence H. Summers when he was president of Harvard.
This proposed law, if passed by the Senate, would require the White House science adviser to oversee regular “workshops to enhance gender equity.” At the workshops, to be attended by researchers who receive federal money and by the heads of science and engineering departments at universities, participants would be given before-and-after “attitudinal surveys” and would take part in “interactive discussions or other activities that increase the awareness of the existence of gender bias.”
I’m all in favor of women fulfilling their potential in science, but I feel compelled, at the risk of being shipped off to one of these workshops, to ask a couple of questions:
1) Would it be safe during the “interactive discussions” for someone to mention the new evidence supporting Dr. Summers’s controversial hypothesis about differences in the sexes’ aptitude for math and science?
2) How could these workshops reconcile the “existence of gender bias” with careful studies that show that female scientists fare as well as, if not better than, their male counterparts in receiving academic promotions and research grants?

I’m not up for a detailed reply to Tierney today, nor a serious look at the literature he mentions (or at the literature he doesn’t mention). Maybe I’ll be able to double back for that once I clear some of the more pressing items from my to-do list. But I would like to throw out a few observations that are relevant to the discussion.

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