Bill Goffe

I’m forming an “economics education writing group” for this summer. Such groups work as a commitment device to help academics write more. We’ll meet on Wednesdays on Zoom from 9am to 1pm (eastern time). For more information, please e-mail me at bill.goffe@psu.edu .

I’m forming an “economics education writing group” for this fall. Such groups work as a commitment device to help academics write more. We’ll meet on Wednesdays on Zoom from 9am to 11am (eastern time). For more information, please e-mail me at bill.goffe@psu.edu .

@effortfuleduktr I use something similar to illustrate how repetition does not necessarily mean that a memory is formed. I ask students to put their phone face down & then draw all the icons/apps on their home screen on scratch paper. Most might get 30%. This updates @DTWillingham penny example.

Whilst my iPhone was in my pocket, I somehow erased one of my apps on the home screen…and I cannot figure out which one..and it is driving me BONKERS!

@7thgenFLMan @C_Hendrick I certainly don't follow every post by @C_Hendrick, but I don't believe that public school is mentioned often at all. As best I can see, posts are about teaching with scant mention of the level.

@BillGoffe @C_Hendrick College =/= public school

Every flipped classroom lesson: "OK did you all watch the video?" *Crickets* "Okay, let me just teach it again anyway."

@MatthewCappucci How long between each shot? Just a few seconds or something shorter still?

ROCKET LAUNCH over Washington D.C.! Look at this... the SpaceX Falcon 9 just launched from Cape Canaveral at 6:13 p.m., and we got to see it in the DMV! It was more than 150 miles above the ground, so its plume caught the sunlight. A more peaceful scene over DCA tonight:

@AllyTaft For goods, see tradingeconomics.com/united-states/… . We also export a lot of services. One source has them as our third largest customer (after Canada and Mexico).

What do we export to China outside of intellectual property?

@Wootenomics FWIW, I have read that asking for a set number of items in a summary might lead to biased results. I'm curious how it might differ if you did not ask for five?

I've since learned how to refine my prompts. Instead of just asking for a summary, I now ask ChatGPT to: ✅ Act as a pedagogy specialist working for a Center for Teaching & Learning ✅ Analyze key themes in student feedback ✅ Recommend changes to improve my courses

When I first started teaching, I carefully read every student evaluation. But once I started teaching 1,000+ students per semester, it became impossible to read them all. I wasn't physically able to find common threads & I wasn't mentally prepared for the personal attacks.

I’m forming an “economics education writing group” for this spring. Such groups work as a commitment device to help academics write more (there is extensive literature on this point). We’ll meet on Fridays on Zoom from 9am to 1pm (eastern time). We’ll start on January 17 and end on May 2. I hope that participants will attend for at least two hours; the time should enable West Coast economists to participate for this long. We’ll also have weekly readings and brief discussions on scholarly writing. For more information, please e-mail me at bill.goffe@psu.edu . #teachecon

@KelsiGHobbs Perhaps datacarpentry.org

Are there any trainings/videos I could point my new TA to for #Stata? I'd like to get them comfortable with basic data importing/cleaning, summary stats, and OLS, so that they can assist my undergrad metrics students with their labs. #EconTwitter

@astro_Pettit So very cool! Looking forward to more.

In space, you can see stars! I flew a home-made tracking device that allows time exposures required to photograph star fields. Stay tuned for more photos like this.

This is known as the "Curse of Knowledge" and is pretty well studied. Below is one nice reading on it. The author is a peer of Akerlof, Spence, and Stiglitz but after his Nobel (in physics) he worked on improving teaching. Part of what he did was look at the literature on how people learn and this reading is a small part of that. (By and large, physicists care more about teaching than economists.) aps.org/archives/publi…

@alz_zyd_ Sometimes people who are really good at something are really bad at explaining it to others because it's so obvious to them. Especially with math, they'll skip steps and not show the logic. So *especially* when you have to make it simple enough for a 6yo, less ed is more

Who do you think would be more effective at teaching a median 6-year-old math

I'm not sure that we know that much about active learning at all, to be honest. Studies (like Freeman, 2012) shows AL leads to better student outcomes, but they define it very broadly -- pretty much anything other than the instructor talking the whole class. Are some types of active learning better than others? I don't think that anyone knows. Specifically, Lombardi et al. (2021) put it this way, "Therefore, as an umbrella term, active learning is not a useful concept for advancing research on effective undergraduate STEM learning." Dancy et al. (2024) suggest "What is needed, though, are studies to better understand how to optimize active learning." Just wrapping a paper on this point, so your post struck a nerve. Me, I'm a fan of putting AL in a deliberate practice framework: Ericsson, Krampe, Tesch-Römer, 1993 and Ericsson and Pool, 2016. The make the point that it isn't so much students being active, but being given challenging specific tasks and subtasks that incrementally improve their schemas (mental constructs of facts, procedures, and concepts). Seen in this light, students can be conducting AL exercises that don't add much at all their skills or schemas.

This is just a preprint and has not undergone peer review yet, but if the headline is halfway accurate, we in higher ed have a lot of thinking to do about what we think we know about active learning. researchsquare.com/article/rs-424…

@ernietedeschi Thoughts on why these data show rising real wages for lower income groups but there are frequent anecdotal reports to the opposite? Just vibes or something else? I've long been puzzled on this point.

Two graphs--both of which I've posted before--to both punctuate this point and show how nuanced it can get. The first is a monthly version of real median household income from Motio (using the old Sentier methodology some of you may remember). Monthly real median household income is likely finally above pre-pandemic now (the 2020 blip is purely compositional), but the point stands that real household income fell over 2020 & 2021 and then struggled to take off again until last year when it started rising again in earnest. The 2nd is from @jmhorp and uses @arindube's CPS wage series plus @BLS_gov's by-quintile CPI series to inflation adjust. It shows that real wage growth (just earnings, not capital income or other components of income that would be included in the first measure) were up strongest at the bottom and up strongly across the distribution over the pandemic ... except at the very top where real wages shrank. This is of course atypical behavior for a business cycle. motioresearch.com/household-inco…

@C_Hendrick Guess we need to sunset the human race...

People using the word 'sunset' as a verb is more evidence that the human race deserves to be extinct

Despite having read this many times, I'm still inspired by this instructor's approach to teaching. In part, I'm thinking of work by @SChewPsych on how students can come to trust their instructors to be beneficent. "On the first day of class, I walk down off the stage to the middle of the auditorium and say, ‘I’m on your side. I’m not up there — I’m down here. I want you to know how important it is to me that you be successful." news.utexas.edu/2019/09/19/no-…

Penn State Economics is hiring Teaching Faculty at the Assistant or Associate Level aeaweb.org/joe/listing.ph…

@RobertTalbert @drantbradley Along the lines of what @drantbradley described? Truly curious.

@drantbradley I graduated college in 1992 *and* work in higher ed, and I still didn't have a clear idea of what the college experience was like from a student's perspective until my daughter started college last month. It's been... eye opening.

I can confidently say: if you graduated from college pre-2012ish, unless you work in higher ed, you have no idea what 2024 college student life is like. Social media, DEI initiatives (race, gender, sexuality, etc.), amenities focussed+. Your college experience no longer exists.

@dominickmatthew On the red, maybe volcanic activity on the Kamchatka Peninsula? Seems quite a stretch, but this link reports that thermal activity was visible from orbit last week. volcanodiscovery.com/shiveluch/news…

Timelapse traveling Northeast over Southeast Asia. In order of appearance: * So many lightning strikes * Colored lights from fishing boats - one of my favorite things to see at night from the ISS * Juxtaposition of city lights on the Korean Peninsula * Red lights North of mainland Japan. Does anyone know what they are?

FWIW, last March I was in the Mojave Desert (near the peak of Little Cowhole Mtn.) and did a timelapse from about 1am (moonless) to past sunrise. I went from 20 seconds, f1.8, ISO 3200, to 1/1000 seconds, f16, ISO 1600 (sun was in the frame). You might face a challenge with your rapid changes in light intensity -- I'm unsure if the software is designed for such rapid sunrises and sunsets. Here's the timelapse, which is 100% unedited, but note the smooth transition. At some point, I need to learn LRTimelapse so I can bring out the dark foreground across the timelapse. youtu.be/GPvoSmMMfxs Good luck!

We have absolutely thought about it. @astro_Pettit, myself, and others. Thank you for send this video. We are going to try it. The range of exposures is large. Off the top of my head . . . a typical night pass with a little bit of moon is 1/4s, 6400 ISO, f1.2 while a day pass is 1/2000, f9, ISO640. I need to go pick up a camera and count the clicks to find how big of an EV difference is between typical day and night. The windows will likely be a problem. We shoot through windows that have small scars from micrometeorites that hit them. With the sun at low angles it ruins the image. Don and I plan to attack it when he gets here in a few days.

A timelapse of solar arrays reflecting aurora and city lights as they align themselves for the impending sunrise. The solar array light reflections were so mind blowing that I stayed up till 1AM to shoot a few more sunrises. Luckily we get sunrises every 90 minutes. One of the techniques I have learned over the past few months to get great still photos is to setup lots of timelapses to find great lighting. With a timelapse the camera takes a RAW photo on a time interval that is typically every 0.5s and saves the image. Our camera has an option to automatically create a video from the sequence of images. We then watch the video afterwards to find what part of the of the orbit amongst thousands of individual images has the best lighting or subject matter to either go back later to the same part of an orbit and take a still image or pull the still image saved from the timelapse process. Yesterday the moon was not up during the night portions of our orbits so I knew I had a shot at getting the Milky Way core and some aurora. The timelapse was setup in a module we call МИМ2. It has a great view of the service module solar arrays. There are were so many great still shots in the timelapse series but the ”dance” the solar arrays do reflecting aurora and city lights is so cool to see with a timelapse video. A still image does not fully capture it. 1.6s, 15mm, T1.8, ISO 6400, 2s intervals. Exposure and a few items adjusted on a few hundred individual frames simultaneously before making a 15fps timelapse.