Academic Salvage

One of my jobs is to facilitate research grants for educational development through the ISTLD (Institute for the Study of Teaching and Learning in the Disciplines) at Simon Fraser University. The Institute has given more than 130 awards to faculty-lead projects to improve the educational experiences of their classrooms. I've read the grant proposals and final reports of many of these awards and among the patterns that have emerged:

- Almost all the granted projects reach completion close their proposed timeline and submit a final report.

- Many of them mention plans to publish research papers in their proposals.

- Many of them have made measurable beneficial impacts on the experience of students, and these effects are publishable in education journals.

- Many of the final reports mention sharing the findings at on-campus talks and posters.

- Not as many project results actually get submitted to journals, even in response to a follow up a year after the final reports are submitted.

Papers are getting submitted, but not as many as there could be. Sure, there are some There's some barriers at the end of the projects to publishing. Part of the barrier is that the primary goal of the projects is to improve education, not to write about it. Still, it feels like a waste to finish research and write a report and a poster, but never get published credit for it.

I've been told by some colleagues that statistical analysis of the data at the end is often an issue, as well as the paper writing process. It makes me want to find projects that ended in this ABP (all-but-publication) state and offer to write and analyze in exchange for a name on the paper. From my perspective as a statistician and a writer, it seems like one of the most efficient ways to boost my own paper count. From the perspective of a faculty member who has completed such a project, I hope they would consider such an offer as a way to be first author of a real paper rather than sole author of an none.

Is there a name for someone makes these sort of arrangements? If not, I'd like to suggest 'academic salvager'?  Specifically, I mean in someone who takes the raw materials from the unpublished research of others and value-adds it up to a paper.

Is there a lot of research in this all-but-publication state in other fields? This is just from one granting program, how much 'academic salvage' is out there waiting to be gathered, refined, and shipped out? 

First look at the statistical thesaurus

Part of my work at the Institute for the Study of Teaching and Learning in the Disciplines, or ISLTD for short, is to develop a handbook for statistical design and analysis.

The clients of the ISTLD are Simon Fraser University faculty across all disciplines that are looking to incorporate new teaching ideas and methods into their courses. This handbook is intended for faculty and grad student research assistants with little statistical background. As such, the emphasis is on simplicity rather than accuracy.

One wall I've run into in making this document as accessible as possible is terminology. Different fields use different terms for the same statistical ideas and methods. There's also a lot of shorthand that's used, like "correlation" for "Pearson correlation coefficient".

Why is spatial autocorrelation referred to as 'kriging'? Why is spatial covariance described in terms of the 'sill' and the 'nugget'? Because those are the terms that the miners and geologists came up with when they developed it to predict mineral abundance in areas.

Why are explanatory variables still called 'independent variables' in the social sciences even though it causes other mathematical ambiguities? Because they're trying not to imply a causal relationship by using terms like 'explain' and 'response'.

For the sake of general audience readability field specific language will be kept to a minimum, and shortenings will be used whenever a default option is established, as it is with correlation. However, the alternate terms and shortenings will be included and explained in a statistical thesaurus to be included with the handbook.

Here are three pages from the rough draft of that thesaurus. Since such a thesaurus, to my knowledge, has not been published before, I would very much appreciate your input on its readability, or what terms should be included.


https://docs.google.com/document/d/15IWtH9a_bpfhu2cvvtBOCL6FCCaH7zyPwDDsLEXz7d4/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks for reading!
- Jack