As another fall semester begins, I thought I’d toss out two recent items about data.
First, an article in the New York Times describes how students are circumventing universities’ fortress-like approach to data management to get the information they need in ways that are the most useful to them. Meanwhile many universities don’t even understand what they are trying to regulate. (More on the Yale experience here.)
Second, an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education points out that attempts to tailor instruction according to data on students’ learning styles, personality types, or average ability level fail because of fundamental attribution error and the ecological fallacy.