Phil McAleerIf I had one wish for everyone teaching with #rstats this academic year it would be to focus your materials on “learning skills through R” and not simply “learning R”. The latter is an unachievable goal and sets your students up to fail. The former approach can be used to break the teaching down into manageable building blocks, for students, & learning subsequent complex skills. When you are learning, how something is phrased matters!
Doug Baldwin@mcaleerp This can generalize to learning / learning skills through any software tool or language. Too often the tool is so overwhelming that students' entire attention is distracted by the tool and they lose sight of why they're learning it.
@DougBaldwin oh 100% agree. I focused on R simply as that is what we use to teach data skills and that’s the materials I see more on my timeline. But you are right though, for me this would apply for all teaching - R, Matlab, Python, SPSS, etc. Focus on the skills, and the why they are needed; the software is just a tool. This thinking also helps with student questions - “I can’t do R” becomes “I can’t do X in R” and that is much better starting point for helping someone.
Barry Rowlingson@mcaleerp You can learn all of R's syntax in about an hour...the rest is documentation.
@geospacedman I would really disagree there to be honest. In my experience students need longer to fully understand and repeat, not just copy, y <- function(argument = x, ….). Sure some get that aspect quicker than others, but even just spending a two or so hour lab running, repeating and testing students on that would be beneficial. To me that goes back to learning building blocks well, learning to run a function in R, and not just learning R. Just my view though.
@mcaleerp Yes, but maybe your first building block is about language syntax and parsing in the abstract.
@geospacedman yeah that I can agree with. There is nothing wrong with just spending time to make sure students have that basis to work from. That will save a lot of issues in the long run.
@mcaleerp I probably go too far in my course by teaching them about relays and logic gates though.