Seth’s blog

Andrew Gelman’s thoughts about teaching led me to mull over what I learned last semester from teaching at Tsinghua. I taught two classes: a freshman seminar that covered a wide range of psychology research; and a class for graduate students about R.

Some things worked well:

1. In the freshman seminar, one of the assignments was to design a Mindless-Eating-type experiment. (Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink was one of the reading assignments.) One of the students designed a really good experiment in which people on different buses get different treatments. She happened to be a senior applying for graduate school and her work on that assignment helped me write a really strong letter of recommendation for her.

2. I graded the students on their comments on the reading and set the bar very high to get a full score (3 out of 3): they had to say something that interested me. A fair number managed to do this. The bar wasn’t too high.

3. I had lunch with all the students in the seminar (about 5 per week). The students seemed to like it. I certainly did.

4. There were classroom debates about which paper was the best (one week) or the worst (another week). They got everyone involved, was far less passive than listening to me talk, and gave them practice speaking English.

But there was plenty of room for improvement:

1. Students in the seminar were frustrated by the vague criterion (”interest me”). Toward the end I posted the comments that got the full score and that seemed to help.

2. In the seminar it was hard to get feedback about how well I was being understood. The best I could do was pass out slips of paper and have the students write down what percentage of what I said they understood. More immediate feedback (e.g., when I used a too-difficult word) would have been better.

3. In the R class I hoped the students would analyze their own data. This was too hard for quite a few of them. In the future I’ll give them a data set.

4. One student dropped the R class because my English was hard to understand.

5. In the seminar, some students (freshmen) complained that other (older) students, whose English was better, talked too much. They had a point and I should try calling on people randomly. I also should try to get general feedback after each class (e.g., “tell me one thing you liked and one thing you didn’t like about today’s class”).

6. In spite of my constant complaint that professors treat all of their students alike (e.g., all students get the same assignment) when they aren’t all alike — they differ substantially in what they’re good at, for example — I pretty much did the same thing.

7. I should have at least tried to learn my students’ Chinese names.

The Chinese government sets limits to the number of acceptable student suicides per year at every college. If the number is exceeded, the college is punished — perhaps by a reduction in administrator salaries. Although colleges conceal suicides from their own students, they dare not conceal them from the government. At Tsinghua (with about 12,000 students) the annual limit is six. (So far this year, there have apparently been none.) In the electrical engineering department recently, more than six students were thought to be considering suicide. Because of this, a psychology professor gave the EE majors a talk about looking at the bright side of things.

A newly-formed Tsinghua student club has a Chinese name that means Sing Your Heart. It is for students who want to volunteer to teach in poor rural areas.  The club has a special song that they sing at every meeting. They are remarkably ambitious: They want to set up a training program to train students to teach in these areas.

The School of Humanities and Social Sciences has a debate competition every year. This year’s topic is: Should the Fuwa (the Beijing Olympic mascots) have genders?

This semester at Tsinghua University — the most selective college in China — I taught a freshman seminar about recent psychology research. Three weeks ago I gave my students a choice of five articles from Psychological Science, all published in 2008. They were to read one of them and comment.

Mostly I try to teach appreciation but three weeks ago we focused on how articles could be improved. I have never tried to teach this, yet the students made some very good points. Here are some of their comments:

1. This article said that we believe women make better leaders when there is within-group conflict and that men make better leaders when there is between-group conflict. One student pointed out that Rwanda was a good example. After the genocide (within-group conflict), far more women were elected to office.

2. This article studied the effect of cleanliness on moral judgments. One experiment compared two groups: subjects in one group had recently washed their hands, subjects in the other group had not. Before the time when the handwashing happened, both groups saw unpleasant scenes from a movie. Students pointed out an important confounding not mentioned in the article: The two groups differed not only in handwashing but also in the time from movie to test (because handwashing took time). Perhaps subjects who washed their hands remembered the movie less well.

3. The name-letter effect is a tendency to favor outcomes (broadly defined) that involve the first letter of your name. This study involved Belgium workers. The authors found that workers were more likely to be employed by a company whose first letter matched the first letter of their name. The correlation was small but reliable. Two students pointed out that this might reflect the company’s choice of whom to hire rather than the employee’s choice of where to work. One student pointed out that the correlation might be due to name-place correlations across Belgium. Perhaps certain regions favor certain names for both people and companies. As you move closer to the French border, perhaps French names become more common among both people and companies.

In all of these cases, had I been the editor, I would have required the authors to change their article appropriately.

James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds described cases where averages of estimates made by non-experts did very well, sometimes out-performing experts. These three examples don’t involve numerical judgments nor averaging, but they do show non-experts (freshmen) doing better than experts (journal editors and reviewers) in certain ways. Each paper was read by about eight students.

More It isn’t easy to convey how impressed I was. The comments about Rwanda and about name localization certainly deserve a letter to the editor (if Psychological Science published them).  Both of them are sophisticated methodological comments. The Rwandan one says that after you write an experimental article, try to find out if  real-world events support your findings. That may be a helpful lesson in many cases. The name localization one suggests that psychologists who use survey data should be learning more about how to analyze survey data. Several other times my students surprised me with how good their comments were. One was during a discussion of possible reasons for the Holocaust, another was about why women in ancient China bound their feet, a third involved proposals for Mindless-Eating-type experiments.

I am teaching a seminar-like class called something like New Topics in Psychology. Most of the students are freshmen because this is the first year the psychology department has accepted undergraduates. Some unusual things happened on the first day of class:

• A graduate student volunteered to be a teaching assistant. (She was the second person to do so. A grad student in automation had volunteered a week earlier.)
• A freshman had her picture taken with me.
• I mentioned Caltech, where I was a freshman. Someone asked if Randy Pausch was a Caltech professor. (He was at Carnegie-Mellon.)
• The students did brief introductions. Many students appeared to think that one student’s Chinese name was humorous. This was briefly explained to me but I still have trouble believing it. Maybe I misunderstood.
• There was uncertainty about the length of the class. It lasted only the first two-thirds of a longer period. (The basic unit is 45 minutes class plus 5 minutes break.)
• The students were seated in the usual rectangular way. Moving from front row to back row, the students’ English appeared to get worse.
• The (first) teaching assistant advised them to not say “My English is not good” but to say “My English is on the way”.

Do medical school professors live in a different ethical world than the rest of us? Apparently. A friend of mine just entered grad school at Tsinghua. She was required to attend four different lectures about how academic dishonesty is wrong. (The last one, she said, was good; the speaker told a lot of stories.) China has a huge plagiarism problem, sure, but at least they say that plagiarism is wrong.

Whereas medical school professors haven’t managed to grasp that ghostwriting is plagiarism (taking someone’s words and ideas as yours without acknowledgment). And it happens all the time. NYU med school Professor Lila Nachtigall, as I’ve noted, considered the deed so minor she forgot that she’d done it. Apparently using a different word confuses them. A recent article in Nature reveals the befuddlement of the entire medical establishment about this. We’re not sure what to do about it, journal editors say. As Tony Soprano’s mom would say: Poor you.

What’s so nauseating about this is that ghostwriting is certainly worse than the garden-variety plagiarism that American undergraduates and the odd Harvard professor engage in.  (And at least they are embarrassed, unlike Nachtigall, when caught.) Garden-variety plagiarism is merely self-serving; you save time, get a higher grade. Whereas drug-company ghostwriting makes drugs appear better than they are. Which harms millions of sick people.

Although American universities publicly condemn plagiarism and other types of cheating, in practice they allow them. (Believe me, I know. When I tried to stop cheating in my Intro Psych class at Berkeley, the chairman of my department told me, “We’re not in that business.”) And the student cheaters — having been told by university blind-eye-turning that cheating is okay — grow up to be med school professors who do horrible things routinely. That’s my theory.

Thanks to Dave Lull.