Transcript No Slide Title

I have looked quickly through your paper. I can guess
what the referees are going to say. They will complain
that you have thrown away information by using letter
grades instead of using actual exam scores. They will
complain that you have not exploited the fact that each
student wrote both a macro and a micro exam. They will
complain that the scores on the two exams are not
standardized in some way to allow you to compare them.
They will complain that in some categories there are
very few observations. They will complain that you have
dodged the possible selection bias problem rather than
argued for why it is not a problem. They will complain
that in half your data a different instructor taught micro
versus macro, rendering suspicious a comparison of
micro and macro grades.
Common Mistakes Made in
Classroom Research
Your paper has been sent to me for processing for
the JEE. In fairness to both authors and referees, it
is my policy not to send out for review papers
which appear to be such that referees would reject
them outright or require major revisions and more
extensive refereeing. Your paper falls in this
category.
What is classroom research?
Using data gathered from your students
to investigate interesting issues in
economic education.
Examples: One minute paper;
Selective grading;
Using the Web;
MC vs CR;
Seating location;
Attendance
1. Submit a clean copy
“You have sent me a version that has
tracked editorial changes marked in
red. I think you should send me a
clean version for the referees.”
“Put the Andreoni and Miller reference in the
bibliography. Your whole paper revolves
around this publication; referees will want to
know where to find it. And check that your
other references are there; if one is missed
often others are also missed.”
2. Don’t be enigmatic
“You need to provide in the abstract a
hint of what is the SRQ measure.”
3. Describe the logic of
your study clearly
“The referees had a difficult time reading
the paper. I had the same problem. I also
had great difficulty figuring out just what
is the contribution of this paper and how
you have done it. Here is what I
eventually figured out….”
4. Survey the education literature
“I don’t know of any papers in the
economic education literature that
examine this or related issues, but I find it
hard to believe that there are no such
studies in the education literature.”
5. Provide important
institutional details
“State explicitly that your university does
not use plus/minus grading.”
“What is the definition of cheating in your
school’s honor code?”
“Is it really true at your school that
students can take micro principles and
intermediate micro at the same time?”
6. Describe the context fully
“The main problem with this paper is that
there is very little information on exactly
how the control classes are different.”
“You need a better description of how
control and treatment groups were
determined. How do we know that the
control groups weren’t all night classes,
for example? Why is one control group so
small?”
“You need to say more about the character of
the courses. Was instruction based on using
graphs, or were graphs for the most part
eschewed? Did the instructor derive graphs or
just use them as pictorial aids? Were
problems analyzed by shifting curves on
graphs or via logical stories? Did the exam
questions involve graphs or could the
questions be answered without knowing the
graphical details? Were the textbooks graphoriented?”
7. Describe your data adequately
“I can’t tell how many students were in
each of the classes.”
“Readers have to guess at the meaning of
the explanatory variables listed in Table 2.
There is no clean explanation of the
auditorium variable, for example, an
important omission given that it plays a
prominent role in the empirical results.”
8. Report summary statistics for
both groups and present a
simple comparison of means
“As a prelude to presenting the regression
results I think you should a) report the
characteristics of the treatment and
control classes and discuss if they are
reasonably similar; and b) compare the
two groups’ average scores.”
“Table 1 does not show the control and
treatment figures separately, a key omission.
Using such numbers perhaps you could
argue that the students were assigned
"randomly" to the two formats, allowing a
simple comparison of average scores rather
than having to rely on regression analysis
with its attendant specification uncertainties
(illustrated dramatically by your
spectacularly different coefficient estimates
for male versus female - most referees would
conclude that the results lack credibility).”
9. Get the tables right
“Consolidate your tables. You don't need
to report both t values and standard errors;
just report the former, and put them in
parentheses under the slope estimates.
This should free up columns for other
results to be reported in the same table.”
10. Be consistent
“You say you get these measures from a
student survey but then talk about some of
them coming from actual measurements.”
“If you believe that the relationship
between effort and exam scores is given
by figure 1, why are you using a linear
functional form?”
11. Include an ability variable
“A very unusual thing about this study is
that it does not have a measure of student
ability. There is a lot of empirical evidence
that once student ability is accounted for,
nothing else is of consequence. Referees
will claim that your innovative measure is
simply proxying for the missing ability
variable.”
12. Create a Fair Comparison
“I don’t see an explanation of what the
control group did with the extra time it
had by not doing the active learning.
Presumably they spent this time working
on the issues learned in the active learning
exercises, but silence on this makes me
suspect that very little effort was made to
ensure that the comparison between the
two classes was fair in this regard.”
13. Don’t ignore important
issues
“I don’t see any discussion of the selection
bias that may arise because you do not
have data on all students.”
“You need to explain/defend why you are
ignoring possible endogeneity of SETs
and grades.”
14. Don’t try to do too much
“I find it very difficult to read this paper
because I am swamped with numbers,
most of which relate to issues other than
the main point of the paper. Narrow the
paper to focus on the results that you think
are the strongest and most interesting.”
15. Spell things out
“I can’t figure out what is the base
category. The interpretation of the
‘percentage of class time lecturing’
depends on the base category - if there is a
higher percentage of lecturing there must
be a lower percentage of something else.”
16. Use an appropriate estimator
“It looks to me as though none of the data
are at the limit, so I don’t think the Tobit
estimation procedure is relevant here.”
“Because these are class average data,
there is known heteroskedasticity; you
should correct for this.”
“It looks to me as though there is an
excessive number of zeros here, in which
case you should be testing for
overdispersion and probably using a ZIP
model rather than a Poisson model.”
17. Explain econometrics
understandably
“I have read over your revision, but
unfortunately I still don’t understand what
you are doing. One of my rules of thumb is
that if I can’t understand it I can’t expect
referees to understand it. And I certainly
can’t expect JEE readers to understand it.
You need to explain the logic of what you
are doing; the current exposition is just a
bunch of equations.”
18. Explain econometrics
judiciously
“Ordered logit is a common technique, so
you don’t need two pages of equations
describing it.”
“Although you don’t need to describe the
Hausman test, you do need to explain
what instruments you used, and to report
the test statistic and its p value.”
19. Don’t make elementary
econometric errors
“It does not make sense here to put in the
interaction term without putting in the
interacting terms separately”
“It doesn’t make sense to use a variable
measured on a Likert scale as though it
is an ordinary explanatory variable –
you need to replace it with dummies.”
“The ‘filtering’ method you describe
creates biased estimates, as is well-known.
I don't think you should use this method.”
“On p.5 you talk of doing fixed effects
estimation, but in your equations you are
putting in a dummy for school which is very
different from fixed effects which would put
in a dummy for the individual.”
“Spell out for my benefit just how you are
calculating these standard errors.”
20. Don’t automatically omit
variables with small t values
“Keep everything that theory says for sure is
relevant; only drop variables if they have
both low t values and small coefficients; use
a much higher p value than 5% (say, 30%)
to reduce type II errors. Report your full
regression results in addition to the
specification you believe is best.”
21. Don’t report irrelevant results
“Please refrain from reporting things like
the Durbin Watson statistic which is
meaningless in this context.”
22. Don’t present unreasonable
results
“Your empirical results are the most unusual
I have ever seen. I’m wondering if it is
because the four temperment dummies sum
to one and so are perfectly collinear with the
intercept except that there is a data error
which prevents the collinearity from being
perfect? I suggest you do some detective
work and sort this out.”
23. Report proper effect sizes
“How are you measuring strength of
influence last par. on p.11? The coefficient
by itself? Or the coefficient times the
standard deviation of the explanatory
variable? The latter would be much better.”
24. Don’t fall into the
significance trap
“In light of your large sample size and the
large number of specifications you run, I
think you should be using a much larger t
value before you conclude significance. I
would use at least three. More importantly, I
would couple this with a subjectivelydetermined ‘big enough to be important’
coefficient value before concluding that a
result warrants being of note.”
25. Do a sensitivity analysis
“In the spirit of sensitivity analysis I think
you should report whether your results are
qualitatively similar when different ability
measures are used as independent variables,
or different scores are used for the
dependent variable, or different functional
forms are employed.”
“With your very large sample size, I think you
have some scope for homogenizing your data by
judiciously selecting subsets of the data and
seeing if the results are qualitatively similar. For
example, try looking at white sophomores and
juniors, taking the course because it is required,
with English as a native language, who did not
have economics at another college, who have
not previously taken micro, and who don’t
attend infrequently or rarely. You can probably
get reasonably large data sets in this way, for
which specification problems are less
damaging.”
26. Beware of sample selection
“You can’t just compare the distance
education student scores with the regular
student scores, because the distance students
have chosen to be distance students, and so
may have some unobserved characteristics
that cause them to better or worse than the
regular students.”
“If the treatment group instructors were
chosen on merit, you can’t conclude that
their students did better because of the
treatment their instructors received – it
could be because their instructors were
better, as evidenced by the fact that they
were selected for the treatment.”
“There is a major dilemma here: Better
students (in unobserved ways) may choose
to attend more frequently, so we would
expect them to score better.”
“It seems to me that the fact that the
students were allowed to choose their
grading system is a fatal flaw in this study.
Better to have had an entire class forced to
have plus/minus grading, and another class
forced to have straight grading, with both
classes writing identical exams. Then you
have a clean experiment. With students
choosing their grading system you have
selection bias – your empirical results may
be reflecting the student choice, not
motivation.”
“You need to focus on the students who
ended up sitting at the front of the class
when they preferred to sit at the back of
the class. These observations can allow
you to overcome the selection bias that
otherwise plagues these data.”
27. Use sound logic
“You can’t draw the conclusions you are
drawing because the control and
experimental sections were taught by
different instructors. Worse still, you,
someone keen on the experimental
approach, taught the experimental section.
How can we conclude from these results
that students of an ordinary prof would
benefit from this approach?”
“Here is the essence of what you are
doing. You regress student grade in
intermediate theory on their principles
grade and whether they took principles at
a community college. You interpret the
negative coefficient on the community
college dummy as evidence that
community college instructors are not as
good as university instructors. I interpret it
to mean that community college
instructors are more generous with grades
than university instructors.”
“It doesn’t seem to me to be possible to
compare students’ knowledge across tests
because we have no assurance that these
tests are comparable. The poorer
performance on the economics test may be
because the economics test was a more
difficult test, not because students don’t
know their economics as well as they
know material from these other
disciplines.”
“Your results say that after controlling for
GPA the dummy for private high school
students is insignificant. But you can't
conclude that private schools are not of
value to students. Maybe going to a
private school improves a student’s
academic skills so that s/he is able to
achieve a higher GPA; by controlling for
GPA you miss this. You need to use an
ability variable that is measured prior to
going to high school.”
“It looks to me as though the exams are
different between control and treatment; if
so, how can you possibly conclude that
the difference in scores is due to the
treatment?”
What I Wish
Studies relevant to economics!
Micro before macro?
Are graphs worth it?
Is teaching velocity a good idea?
How to teach international?
Why do I do it?
Summary
Use good judgment