[Catalist] Effects of data focus on US Physicians - some parallels and warnings for Educators

[Leon Harris]

Greetings all!
Here is an interesting article that analyses the increase in burnout and 
decline in work quality for US physicians.
This profession has undergone a few changes in the last decade, one of 
the more significant being shifting to electronic patient records and 
data capture.
Physicians report a miserably larger amount of time generating and 
tending to patient records, with a concomitant decline in 
patient-physician interactions.

There are potential lessons for us as educators too, as we careen down 
the twisting rabbit hole of student data.

How much data is enough? How well should each point represent a students 
body (eg a course mark aggregating 5 assessments) of work as compared to 
a single point in time (eg an exam) and how is that weighted? Are the 
highly visual, highly intuitive and highly flawed (quasi/pseudo 
statistical) methods that we currently use for analysis really up to the 
task?


https://ucrtoday.ucr.edu/53530

Cheers,
Leon
(I have shared this to both echalk and catalist, as there are people in 
both communities who might be interested in this)