AER progress 3/25

Research progress today:

I started the day with the Bio (40 question) tests read in, formatted, and processed for all 40 questions.  Today I was working on getting the results for the taught vs. not-taught questions.  When we started this project, we took the standards-based MOSART tests and used all of their questions.  However, realistically, we cannot in 4 semesters cover 9 years worth of science curriculum.  Nor should we.  There are many questions in those assessments that are not good measures for the progress of our students.  Any questions covering grade 6-8 material that is not related to deeper understanding of the K-5 material is irrelevant to us.  In addition, there are some questions that we think are bad questions (our students understand the issue more deeply than the question intends) and so they get it wrong, but are scientifically right.  We decided that keeping these questions as part of our overall scoring process is not reasonable.  It simply muddies the water and makes it hard to measure what we want to know, which is:  for the content that we consider vital, do our students learn it better in HoS than they would have in the alternative lecture classes they would have been taking?

So today:
-I created processtaught.pro which runs the same analysis on learning gains overall (pre average, post average, histograms), but only on the questions that instructors agree are "taught" in HoS.  This can include explicitly covered, or relevant to students and we expect they should understand it based on having taken our classes. 
Relevant output:  *qN.meas, *qN.hist, *.qNhist.pdf

-Started really hammering out itemanal.pro, but this is not complete.
--Now we read in whole fits files and sift out taught/not-taught (generalized for any class),
--Plot all questions from the assessment.  These are the arrow plots where classwide change for each question is shown, with averages on the end for taught & not-taught content.  The purpose of this file is to gauge the relevance of the not-taught questions.  Presumably, if we are not teaching them, or anything related to them, students should show little change on these questions (grayed out), and the average should be a short arrow. 
Relevant output:  *itemQall.pdf
--Plot only the taught questions.  These are also arrow plots per question, but for this version any questions with a decrease in the fraction of students who answer correctly (show negative learning gains) are highlighted in red.  We should be worried if there is a high fraction of these or if there are large changes downward. 
Relevant output:  *qN.pdf

Seeking Balance

It seems like every few months there is a new burst of debate on the interwebs about "having it all."  Struggling to find a comfortable work-life balance is hard.  I am in the midst of my own personal debate on this issue, and seeking to find a satisfactory answer.  One of my biggest fears is that there isn't one.

I have three main facets to my life right now, each of which I would gladly devote more of my time to.  I'm a person, I'm an educator, and I'm a scientist.  I have recently shifted jobs, and have spent the last three months trying to nail down a routine that will allow me to be successful and happy with myself in regard to those three facets.  However, I find that no matter how I juggle my schedule or shift my focus, I'm not where I want to be in any of those areas.  It's like the grad school mantra revised:  life, teaching, research - pick two.  (For reference, the grad school saying is "Friends, food, sleep - pick two."  At least I've upgraded.)

Only how could I pick two?  I love all three!  They each contribute a major factor toward making me who I am.  But to actually be happy with any of them, I really need to focus more time and energy in that area.  Am I content to be okay at three things?  Do I need to be awesome at each of them?  How much do I need all three?  I'm not even sure exactly where I do feel like I should be in each respect.

I postulated this existential crisis to a friend who asked, "Why is each important to you?"  I just sat in silence thinking "Well, obviously, because they are."  Then I realized maybe I really do need to formulate the answer to that question in order to balance what is most important.  Seems obvious, I guess, but each of the three facets just seem so natural to me that I hadn't even stopped to think why it is each one is important and what need it fulfills.  Why is it I fight so hard for my personal life, my teaching, and my research?  Can I be okay doing it all, even if that means not doing all of it to my fullest ability?