I remember how it was -- JR
Combatting Academic Hucksters in the Sciences
I can see the temptation to this. I got a whole lot of papers published precisely because I had ideas new to the discipline. My conclusions tended in a conservative direction so were generally unpopular but the fact that I had something new to say got them published. So in the absence of new confirmable ideas, it must be tempting to make stuff up
If recent reports are to be believed, academic crimes are on the rise. In a world with shrinking enrollments and many underemployed professionals with PhDs, the temptations to cheat and lie to get published are intense. We are in an academic world in which an article in the Journal of Last Resort is often, somewhat sadly in my judgment, worth more than a slew of teaching awards and a devoted following of students.
A recent (July 18) article in Nature by Richard Van Noorden suggests that some observers believe “at least one-quarter of clinical trials might be problematic or even entirely made up.” Writing in the Guardian on Aug. 6, Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus argue, “There’s far more scientific fraud than anyone wants to admit” and add that “the academic world still seems determined to look the other way.”
My own analysis of the “success rate” for grant applications to the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation is consistent with this: for every grant application accepted, typically two to four others are rejected. For some scientists, rejection literally means job loss or, minimally, a significant income reduction.
This issue received new levels of prominence recently, leading to the resignation of the president of Stanford University. Long-time president Marc Tessier-Lavigne, himself a prominent research scientist, resigned after an outside review of his work concluded that it did not meet standards of “scientific rigor and process” and he failed to correct the record when notified of the problems.
The problem extends far beyond the hard sciences. I think of my own decades as a researcher in economics and some of the issues associated with asserting that some relationship is a “truth” or “economic law” that others can replicate and ultimately teach both students and the broader public. In the hard sciences, strict laboratory controls make it possible to rather precisely replicate the work of other researchers, but in the social sciences, which operate outside a controlled laboratory environment, many things are constantly changing, making “proving” a relationship difficult if not impossible.
From my own research, I see how easy it is for researchers trying to proclaim a novel idea worthy of publication or promoting a congenial ideological position to be manipulating the results. Let me give a hypothetical but quite plausible example.
Suppose I believe that lowering state and local income taxes increases the rate of economic growth, measured by changing personal income per capita. Suppose I gather some different data sets and use econometric testing of 25 models. Some of the models include some seven to eight additional variables besides the income tax measure of special interest (e.g., spending on education, the number of heating degree days in a year, or the proportion of the population working in manufacturing). Some of the models use time series data (looking at data relationships over time), others use cross-sectional data (comparing different states within one geographic area, such as the United States, or even different nations).
Suppose I get 24 sets of results showing the expected negative relationship between income tax burden and economic growth, but one that shows a positive relationship, however statistically significant, at only a 90 percent level of confidence. Suppose 16 of the 24 expected negative relations are believable with a 99 percent level of confidence, five with a 95 percent level of confidence, two with only a 90 percent level of confidence, and one with only a 75 percent level of confidence (meaning there is a 25 percent probability the observed positive relationship does not exist). What do I report to the reading public?
What I typically would do is report several (possibly all) of the results, typically summarizing the 25 regressions by saying that “the predominance of evidence suggests there is a negative relationship between income taxes and economic growth.” Another researcher much more ideologically hostile to that finding might conclude “the evidence is decidedly mixed on the tax-growth relationship.” And some pro-tax highly progressive researcher might even claim, based on one study, that “results show that higher taxes actually increase growth,” ignoring both the low level of confidence in that result and, more importantly, the other 24 tests contradicting this conclusion. That novel result actually might also have a higher probability of journal acceptance because it contradicts most other studies, making it provocative. Moreover, it reaches a progressive policy conclusion that most academics would like. In other words, outside the laboratory sciences, the interpretation of results is highly manipulable.
As standards of morality and a respect for the rule of law decline generally, so too they apparently decline in academia. It is very sad to say, but I would be very suspicious about buying a used car from many academics these days.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14645&omhide=true&trk=title
**************************************************New Data: High School Boys Twice as Likely to Identify as Conservative as Liberal
According to a large survey of high school graduates, the share of young men identifying as conservative is rapidly increasing compared to previous decades. The left loves to trumpet their successes with “the youth vote”, but the reality is there is a growing gender gap that will have broad-reaching political implications for decades to come.
New research from the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future survey of 12th grade high school students shows just how vast the gender partisan gap has grown among young men and women.
The survey reveals data going back as far as 1975 tracking the political ideology of young men and women entering the voter pool, and the results are startling. Since approximately 2010, the share of young men identifying as conservative has skyrocketed, while the share identifying as liberal has dropped to the lowest point on record.
Today, young men are twice as likely to identify as conservative, with about a quarter of male 12th graders saying they are conservative or very conservative, while a mere 13% say they are liberal or very liberal.
This marks a notable transformation in the political perspectives of boys. While the share of boys identifying as liberal has been mostly declining since the 1970’s, there was a brief spike in liberal identity among young men in 2010 under President Obama and in 2016 just as Trump took office, but otherwise young men identifying as liberal has steadily fallen.
For young women, an opposite scenario has played out, with 12th grade women reaching the highest proportion of self-identified liberals on record in 2020, and that number declining incrementally in 2022.
The survey shows the share of 12th-grade girls who identify as liberal rose 11-percentage points from 19% in 2012 to 30% in 2022. The share of young women who identify as conservative sat at just 11% in the 2022 survey, down ever so slightly from 2020. The data shows the peak of young women identifying as conservative occurred in 2005 under George W. Bush and has been dwindling since then.
However, the largest group of high school boys and girls declined to share their political views, something that is not surprising in the age of censorship and cancel culture.
Regardless of those unwilling to share or unsure of their political views, there is a growing gender gap among young people that does not appear to be declining.
Gallup Polling reveals that 44% of women aged eighteen to twenty-nine now align themselves with liberal views, marking the highest figure in twenty years.
In contrast, only a quarter of young men between eighteen and twenty-nine embrace a liberal identity. The proportion of young men identifying as liberal has experienced fluctuations over the past 25 years, showing an overall decline. Meanwhile, the percentage of young women identifying as liberal has consistently risen.
Data from a 2022 Meredith College poll also reveals that while Gen Z may embrace more liberal viewpoints on issues like abortion and LGBTQ+ issues, young men exhibit notably less liberal perspectives compared to women. While nearly half of Gen Z wants to expand abortion access, this stance is predominantly driven by young women. In contrast, Gen Z men are less inclined to support such an expansion.
The Meredith College findings also reveal that a considerable portion of Gen Z men adhere to traditional notions of gender roles. More than 40% of young men expressed a preference for a male political leader, compared to 35% of Gen Z women favoring a female political leader. Among all age groups, Gen Z men exhibited the highest preference for a male political leader. Professor David McLennan, who directed the Meredith poll, noted:
“The results from our work suggest there is a strong conservative element within Gen Z on policy issues…a shift to more traditional views among the male population.”
Democrats lost four points with voters under thirty between 2018 and 2022, so their edge is declining. However, the gender gap is an important variable to watch in the next presidential election, considering President Biden has been struggling with young voters overall. Recent NYT/Siena polling shows Biden’s lead over Trump has shrunk 14-percentage points compared to his lead in 2020 exit polls, indicating Biden will have an uphill battle recouping young voters. If the growing body of research on gender and ideology is any indication, Biden will struggle most with young men.
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Australia: Teacher made to apologise for giving child ‘improvement strategies’ (!!)
A teacher who had recently started at a new school was asked to give one student some improvement strategies. The child went home and complained. The principal asked that teacher to apologise to the parents for making that student feel “stressed”.
Australia’s classrooms are ranked among the worst in the world when it comes to discipline and the responsibility for that should not fall solely on teachers, education experts have told a federal senate inquiry into disruptive classrooms.
The story of the teacher asked to apologise was recounted to the inquiry by Dr Paul Kidson, senior lecturer in educational leadership at the Australian Catholic University, who said parents and students had too often been given a free pass in the schooling system.
“There is no likelihood that there is going to be significant improvement in the achievement of a community where that behaviour is characterised as normal,” he said
Kidson said a combination of poorer mental health of students, a nationwide teacher shortage and schools’ inability to give high-need students adequate support meant behaviour had become a “wicked problem”.
However, he said there had also been an increase in the “overmedicalising of the normal human condition”. Last year there was a 30 per cent jump in prescriptions for drugs used to treat anxiety in children, the biggest annual increase seen in a decade.
‘[Young people] will expect things just to go their way. And if it doesn’t go their way, somebody else is to blame.’
“Facing academic challenges, an increasing number of students are claiming anxiety disorders or trauma in ways that minimise the seriousness of clinical, medical or psychological conditions experienced, sadly, by too many,” he said.
“That suggests to me that we are not building the resilience for a number of young people and, when they move into more independence, they will expect things just to go their way. And if it doesn’t go their way, somebody else is to blame.”
An OECD report earlier this year said the disciplinary climate in Australia was among the least favourable compared to other member nations while Australian teachers felt less capable when it came to dealing with disruptive students.
Literacy instruction provider Multilit chief executive Robyn Wheldall said simply creating engaging lessons would not resolve behaviour problems. The physical environment of the classroom had an effect on behaviour: she said arranging desks so students faced one another in small groups in primary school might seem to create a “nice” collaborative environment but was not always conducive to learning.
“If you wanted someone to do something social, like have a dinner party, you would sit around a table and chat. But if you’re in a classroom and you want kids to pay attention to you, the teacher, first of all, you don’t want half of them with their backs to you,” she said.
Her research had shown that teachers gave positive feedback when it came to a student’s academic progress – they are three times more approving rather than disapproving of students’ progress with schoolwork– but that ratio was reversed when it came to behaviour.
“They are more than three times disapproving of social behaviour than of approving. That means the teacher is talking a lot about, ‘Don’t do that, sit down, concentrate, don’t disturb’. All of these things are not going to change the world in terms of disruption or violence, but they create interruptions to what the teacher is trying to do and disturb other kids,” she said.
Ensuring teachers provide specific praise for behaviour like they did academic work coupled with the creation of consistent disciplinary environments within schools and educating teaching graduates at university about behaviour management could counter disruption in classrooms.
“There is a wealth of evidence from research and practice that we can draw on to bring about positive changes in classrooms, with relatively simple but effective methods,” she said.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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