Nick Winter
> 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'?
Agreed. It does all depend, on among other issues, on
* how far you are teaching Stata itself or Stata as a means of doing
statistics
* how far students may be expected to continue with Stata over a
longer period (many Statalist questions imply that there should be
a pre-canned ado for every imaginable task, an expectation
doomed to disappointment; at some point there is the pain of
getting to grips with the details)
* what learning experience is missed by a wrapper. Some of
the wrappers I have in mind protect the user from some very
mundane operations and/or some Stataish jiggery-pokery
e.g. with -by:-. Creating added-variable plots yourself would be more
instructive.
Nick
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