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September 22, 2016

Personal Mention

Marsha LovettMarsha Lovett wrote a blog post for The Huffington Post, titled "Relying on 'Smile Scores' To Measure Student Learning Is Not a Good Idea." In her piece, Lovett talks about how teachers want students to enjoy courses and find instructional innovations engaging. But students’ perceptions of enjoyment or engagement are not measures of instruction’s effectiveness. Lovett says when you want a valid way to measure the effectiveness of instruction, consider what students should be able to do by the end of the instruction, and measure that – ideally by giving students direct performance tasks to complete before and after the instruction. Lovett is the director of the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation, teaching professor of psychology and co-coordinator of the Simon Initiative. Read the post.

Jim DanielsSee something, say nothing? Jim Daniels, the Thomas Stockham Baker University Professor of English, wrote about an experience he had with discrimination over the summer involving reactions to the Orlando nightclub shooting. "First Person: See something, say nothing? Confront your biases and then tell me about it," appeared in last Saturday's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Daniels founded CMU’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Writing Awards in 1999 to give high school and college students a safe, creative space to share similar, personal encounters with inequalities, and urges students to use the writing contest to confront their biases. Read the full piece.

William EddyWilliam F. Eddy recently received the Jerome Sacks Award for Cross-Disciplinary Research by the board of trustees at the National Institute of Statistical Sciences Joint Statistical Meeting. Eddy was honored for “serving as a model statistician engaged in cross-disciplinary research, including his pioneering work at the interface of statistics and computing, his research over several decades on functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data, his contributions to the analysis of census data and statistics in forensic science, and especially for introducing hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students to cross-disciplinary research outside the classroom.” A lifetime national associate of the National Academy of Sciences, Eddy is CMU’s John C. Warner Professor of Statistics, emeritus.

David DanksDavid Danks has been named the Louis Leon (L.L.) Thurstone Professor of Philosophy and Psychology. Danks, head of the Department of Philosophy, uses computational cognitive science to develop computational models to describe, predict and, most importantly, explain human behavior. Danks, who has been on the CMU faculty since 2003, is the first to hold the L.L. Thurstone Professorship at CMU. Thurstone was a pioneer in the fields of psychometrics and psychophysics and an early faculty member in CMU’s Division of Applied Psychology, the predecessor to the current Psychology Department. Learn more about the professorship.