Americans hardly move.

At all.

I was shocked when I got a Apple watch last year to learn that I wouldn’t hit 2k steps on a normal day (work at home, no gym).

It’s insanely easy to eat too many calories with so little movement - weight gain follows.

https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1581188246872023041

Historically people moved — a lot!

They also had less easy access to food overall, and especially calorically dense food that is every where in the US.

Try actually walking 10k steps a day. You’ll be amazed at how much you have to move to hit that & also that you’ll be hungry.

Are you a PhD who is curious about #altac jobs but doesn't want to go into big tech?

Here are 5 places to find diverse jobs in mission-oriented organizations 👇🏼 The Social Impact Job Board posts a variety of jobs that are with social impact oriented companies and organizations.

Bonus: salary transparency is required for every job posted!

wordsparkconsulting.com/social-impact-…

Growth mindset is an interesting area of research to demonstrate how interpretation of effect sizes can drive narratives around impact; and a great example of how small effect sizes are in educational interventions.

A🧵

https://twitter.com/StuartJRitchie/status/1579892931397554177

The two best and recent studies on growth mindset (GM) are a 2018 meta-analysis and a 2019 large scale intervention.

The meta-analysis concluded that GM impacts are minimal, effect size around .10, but may show some impact for low SES + at risk students.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09…

"Today's college students expect to make about $103,880 in their first post-graduation job, a survey suggests. But the reality is much lower – as the average starting salary is actually about half that at $55,260, statistics show."

whomp.

usatoday.com/story/money/pe… "Journalism students, for example, expected 139% more than the median journalist’s starting salary – projecting to make $107,040 one year after graduating while the average salary is actually $44,800." usatoday.com/story/money/pe…

After spending the week at the #SXSWEDU conference I have some thoughts on what we’re doing with traditional academic conferences and what we could do to make them better.

A rambling thread while I’m at the bar after 8 hours of sessions🧵 FWIW to start, in my experience @improvingpsych has it most right.

They’re interactive, engaged, and have varied session formats.

But they are the outlier, not the norm.

Last week I gave my first invited, hour long talk at a conference and had a strange new experience.

I wasn’t nervous before. No increase in heart rate. Just calm energy.

And it was the best talk I’ve given.

Not sure when the transition occurred, but I have some thoughts. 1/ In grad school we practice tons of research presentations at conferences and in classes. But despite all those presentations I still got nervous before every talk.

Looking back, I realized that a limitation of this practice was that it’s just one form of presentation. 2/

Great question! What’s going on behind the scenes? I’ve been on the board of an academic society for 5+ years and hosted an online conference last year for 600 attendees.

Some insights as to what *might* be going on🧵

https://twitter.com/jings_9/status/1494159729995796488

1. I presume most societies are paying a LOT for fancy conference app licensing fees, like Whova for instance. Especially with big conferences 1000+ people, this can get expensive. You’re also paying for labor of those that are monitoring for tech issues, customization, etc.

My intro development class I’m teaching starts tonight.

Already a few students are sick and can’t make it.

The pandemic has changed the structure of my (in person teaching).

Here’s how 🧵 1. My deadlines are soft.

All assignments have deadlines, but there’s no penalty to late submissions. Exams are still more strict but still soft as they are all take home now.

Honestly saves a lot of email hassle.

This Month's #BookmarkedReads📚 curated reading list provides eight of my favorite books on US education. These books will collectively provide a foundation from which to expand your understanding of both K12 and #HigherEd.

🧵
bookmarkedreads.substack.com/p/educationboo… (affiliate links) Best In Teaching

As the title suggests, The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You about College Teaching by @dgooblar, teaches you everything you were never taught about college teaching.

Must read for educators in the classroom. amzn.to/3zNTpPN

A 🧵of my hottest 🔥 takes of 2021 as indicated by views.

No. 1 – The Academic Publishing System is a Failure where I argue that academic publishing actively inhibits the dissemination of knowledge

nicolebarbaro.substack.com/p/failedjourna… No. 2 – Introduction to Psychology with Better Readings where I give you a full reading list of popular books that are way better to read than your dated intro psych textbook

nicolebarbaro.substack.com/p/introbooks

PhDs - if you’re not super into stats and data analysis and looking to shift to #altac/non-prof roles the skills you want to hone & excel at are:

- Writing (but not dense academic writing)
- Project management
- Strategic, big picture thinking

You have a leg up here ^^ use it. Now two years out, I look on whether my PhD was “worth it”.

If only based on job requirements then no. Most roles I want don’t need a PhD.

BUT my PhD gave me the writing, PM & strategy skills I use everyday that will get me on a new path. So yes, it was worth it.

🚨Highlight reel thread of today's talk.🚨

I spoke to students and faculty at @AbertayUni about how we do #edtech research at WGU Labs, and advice for psychology PhDs looking to land an #altac role.

[THREAD] with pics, links to posts, and the full presentation at the end 👇🏼 1/

https://twitter.com/NicoleBarbaro/status/1329424196276002817

The #edtech industry has been on the rise since 2018, but #COVID19 has acted as a catalyst for online learning at scale in 2020. Edtech adoption by educators has been a huge output of this pandemic & all the more reason that our work at Labs is super relevant right now. 2/

A study that does not measure racism but is framed as a study showing that “racism is a genetic trait”.

Oof.

An example of horrible #scicomm

THREAD 1/

phys.org/news/2020-08-r… I saw this title and “thought this is so unlikely to be what the actual scientific paper said” and I was right. First things first – let’s look at the title of the actual paper, linked at the end of the article 2/

I feel like doing a brief live tweet reading thread of this paper: A Validity-Based Framework for Understanding Replication in Psychology

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…

1/ Juicy take on why replication attempts *really* fail: The phenomenon I studied was super complex and you probably didn't do something correctly.

2/

[Thread] I'm a bit late but as people are prepping courses for the new semester (or already started) I wanted to share all my teaching materials for those that may find them useful! #TeachPsych #PhDchat please RT to share! 1. The Psychology of Human Sexuality [3000 level, elective, 4 credit hours]. I took an evo, cross-cultural approach. The 2-day a week course was split, I did lecture one day & discussed a recent research article the other. Term paper materials included osf.io/qn3w2/

[THREAD] There is a lot of twitter buzz about this new paper on gender and race bias in student evaluations.

Well, I have some comments *about this paper*

1/ cambridge.org/core/journals/… First, the good: The basic research design is great. The classes are online courses that were run by a single admin throughout the semester. The only difference was the brief video intro by the professor. This is a really clean way to run a realistic quasi-experimental design. 2/

Evolutionary theories of the female orgasm in humans tend to neglect comparative approaches to understanding the evolutionary history of the human female orgasm. New theory followed up by experimental evidence, however, is changing this. 1/ In 2016 researchers proposed that the female orgasm in humans, which is more likely to be induced via clitoral stimulation, may have been necessary and functional -- to induce ovulation in females -- further back in mammalian evolutionary history. 2/ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.100…

“Tests For the 'Big Five' Personality Traits Don't Hold Up In Much of the World”

This article is a fantastic example of misleading and inaccurate science reporting. [THREAD] 1/

blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2019/0… Is the Five Factor Model (FFM) WEIRD? Are the Big Five personality traits — statistically, the factor structure yeilding 5 traits — only valid in western countries?

Well, no. The research article shows primarily a methodological problem, not a cultural problem, with the FFM. 2/