Picking up and running a different direction, I note that Nick Cox
suggests:
>
> No doubt you have many other examples, but to my mind the
> teaching issue often boils down to providing very simple wrapper
> commands which mean that students very rarely have the problem
> you describe at the outset.
>
I'm not sure this is always the case. For some
courses/students/purposes, certainly: the goal is to have the students
complete the analysis as easily as possible, and then work hard on
interpretation, explanation, etc.
However, sometimes going through things "the hard way" makes the
teaching point much more clearly. I remember well creating my own
"added variable plots" back in my first year grad stats course, by
regressing y on all-other-xvars, and x1 on all-other-xvars; saving both
sets of residuals, and plotting them against each other. There are now
commands that do it automatically.
In this context, making things too-well wrapped up removes the learning.
That said, I would probably just have students work through 'do' files,
using the /// line continuation syntax (which I personally feel is
easier than semi-colon delimiting to use for the beginner. By the time
you are creating special key combinations to type a multiple-line
command in the command window, why not just type it in the do-editor,
highlight it, and click 'submit'?
Nick Winter
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