Good Stuff

This probably won't mean much to anyone else, except maybe James will appreciate it some. I just got home from class, my capstone research class. We've been going through the process (since Fall) of doing research from framing a question to data analysis & reporting. We just got into a data set from a national longitudinal study a few weeks ago, and tonight we were to come to class ready to talk about what we would do with the data, what variables we would consider, how we would represent them, and what sort of analysis would answer our question of interest. Our question is What is the effect of Latino teachers on Latino students' achievement? We got to consider what our regression model would look like, and what the interactions would be between variables, and why. Although my initial model wasn't complete (I knew it wasn't, because I ran out of time), I was thinking correctly, and given time I think it would have been almost there. One of the things I hadn't yet considered were the interactions. It was very exciting to collaborate on writing the model (James, yes, it is a mathematical model and we were writing it on the whiteboard). My confidence in being able to think and represent it really grew tonight. If you want to see my eyes light up, watch me while we're doing something like this. I could have stayed for another few hours.