Surprises (with student comments in quotes)

Some lessons learned crept up on people. Sometimes the lesson is not the lesson.

"I was struck by the number of different resources we had to help with concepts and with R (you, S & W, blog, Pweb readings, DASIL, etc.) and how much flexibility we had to choose which we wanted to use. I think the way that I explored all of those different resources and decided which best served me was really (nonobviously) important to my learning process in the class."

"My social wherewithal. Ostensibly, not related to the process of coding at all, but very related to my ability to sit down and talk over code with other people, which was significantly more necessary to learning in this class than I initially thought it would be."

YES, very much THIS PREVIOUS COMMENT!

"While I learned a lot of statistics and coding, I think the most valuable skill was learning how to google efficiently to figure out what I was learning. If there was ever anything I was confused about, I would always turn to Google/Reddit to try and find an explanation that made sense to me. This skill is incredibly important as I was able to recognize my own learning style and find ways to facilitate it."

"I didn't realize how important lagging something against itself could be." (Explanation here)

"I think understanding why including random variation in your model can be helpful wasn't something that I initially viewed as important, but I definitely grew to understand and appreciate it."

"General assumption of independence. Also the meanings hidden/lying within '+' and '*' when presenting a model. The plus indicating summative, independent things like jigsaw puzzles perhaps, and the * being interactions."

"I was struck by how statistics really came out of natural observation and how it parallels our natural environment. While it seems obvious now that stats reflects nature, I had always seen stats as a way to manipulate nature into boxes that would never quite fit. I think one of the most important things that I learned was how development can be so well represented and explained with formulas and models."

Back to Longitudinal & Time Series Analysis or back to In the Classroom.