In a recent post, I confessed my interest in a recent National Academy Press report on teaching methods. The tough thing for me about using this discipline-based education research (DBER) approach is not the name or the acronym, but coming up with the misunderstood concepts from the discipline that students benefit from learning actively. In the report examples, it seems like they are articulated by geniuses dedicated to teaching after years of student observation. I don’t know if I’ll get there one day, but I’m certainly not there now.
But I had a great idea, or at least one that I think is great: see what people are confused by online. I tried this out for my lecture last week on cross-validation, using the stats.stackexchange site: http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cross-validation?sort=votes&pageSize=50
After reading a ton of these, I decided that if my students know when they need test/train/validation splits and when they can get aways with test/train splits then they’ve really figured things out. Now I can’t find the question that I thought distilled this best, though.
Healthy Algorithms 