Last week we had our grant writing marathon. On the final day, my 3 students each read a 20 page, single spaced (0.5 inch margin!) document to give feedback. The feedback totaled about 900 revisions. One student suggested creating a google doc to work from simultaneously, but I worried about working on sections at the same time, and about loss of formatting in the conversion.

Nervously, I went with merging track changes and comments in Word. It mostly worked, creating one document with everyone’s comments combined. You can find details about how to do it here.

In brief:

·         Choose compare from the Review tab

·         Choose combine revisions from multiple authors

·         Choose an original and a revised version

·         You can choose what you do and do not want to compare/merge, and how to do it

·         Repeat as many times as necessary depending on how many people worked on the document

I ended up with one document that had everyone’s tracked changes, plus everyone’s comments, in one place. Magic.

I would do one thing differently. I didn’t learn until I had everyone’s feedback that Word will not merge formatting edits from multiple documents, so it lost everyone’s formatting edits. It wasn’t a huge deal, because we weren’t doing careful formatting reads this time (e.g., fixing indents, fixing bold vs. underline). However, if I did it again, I would ask all readers not to make any formatting changes, but instead, to make comments as to where they thought formatting changes should be made (e.g., highlight text and write in comment “should be bold.”).

Either way, much better than trying to go through 900 revisions across 3 documents. Thank you everyone!

“The post Word trick #1: Merging tracked changes and comments first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on May 29, 2014.”

My students and I had a 3-day grant writing marathon. It’s the first time I’ve ever done something like it, and I’m a total convert and want to convince the rest of the world how fabulous it is.

I got the idea from Cindy Berg, who holds an annual writing retreat with her research group. Toward the end of Spring semester this year, my students and I scheduled a 3-day period and a 5-day period. 

I recently decided to aim for a June 5 instead of an October 5 grant writing deadline. I had been thinking, October 5! Then I have the whole summer to write this proposal. But I hate writing grant proposals. It is a huge writer’s block issue for me, and I have been working on the same proposal for way longer than I will admit in writing. So I finally had an aha! moment where I realized that if I aim for October 5, then I actually have the whole summer NOT to write the proposal, while the proposal gets in the way of all of my other writing. So I committed to June 5, with the goal that it is out at the start of the summer, and then I have the rest of the summer for paper writing. The other advantage of June 5 is that after classes end, May often disappears and I don’t really know what I accomplished, so the proposal becomes a clear May accomplishment.

My three current students and I blocked off Monday – Wednesday, 9:00 AM – 4:00 PM of last week for proposal writing. I crammed all of my meetings for that week into Thursday (Fridays I generally don’t come into the office) and we claimed the conference room across the hall from my office (my lab space is 2 flights away from my office, not ideal for interactive collaboration).

It’s hard to convey how well this process worked for me/us. We certainly didn’t start from scratch, so I’m not saying that we wrote a whole proposal start to finish in 3 days. I had drafts of most sections by the start of Monday, in part with help from the students and some other collaborators prior to the scheduled days. On Monday and Tuesday, I mostly assigned people specific tasks related to holes in the proposal, e.g.: write a couple of specific paragraphs/sentences to beef up some sections; find literature to support specific points; work on the reference list; add details on measures or find new measures to address certain points; find relevant program announcements; fill out the enrollment chart; run frequencies on specific variables to add to proposal; take a first pass at some supporting sections, like resource plan or budget justification, so that I had a start or outline to work with.

On Wednesday morning, I sent around the full draft for everyone to read. Everyone sent feedback by the end of the day. Wednesday night I read through all of the feedback (about 900 revisions in the 20 or so pages), made edits, and then sent some final follow-up questions based on everyone’s feedback. Everyone had replied to me by the end of the day Thursday (technically not one of the grant writing days), and I was able to share with the other investigators for their feedback.

Reasons why I think it worked/what was great about it:

·         We all had blocked off the time to work on it. Perhaps it goes without saying that blocking off the time means that we all concentrated on the proposal and not other tasks in our lives. This distinction was huge for me, because I tend to reply to things immediately and drop what I’m working on to respond to things in real time. For these 3 days, I mostly ignored emails that weren’t urgent. When my department head emailed me and asked if we could talk by phone about something that day, I replied, asked if it was urgent, and said if it was not urgent, could we wait until the next day. We could I never, ever say things like that to people, so it was a big step for me to prioritize my own research over an administrative responsibility.

·         As I told my colleague, it was the first time in 3 years that I mostly neglected my Professor-in-Charge (PIC) duties for 3 straight days. And the world didn’t end. I did reply to a few urgent emails, but left the non-urgent tasks for Thursday and beyond. It was a good lesson to me of the value of occasionally stepping away from the tasks that are always there and never really finished.

·         Being physically together – and knowing we were all working on the same task – was important for all of us. It really reduced response time and ability to check in about things. When my students had questions for me, they could come across the hall and ask me. Because the lab is 2 flights of stairs away, they never, ever pop in with questions. They always email me, and that obviously requires some delay in response time. Instead, I could answer their questions immediately. Similarly, I could ask them questions right away; give them a new task right away; or approach the group with a conceptual question I was struggling with, rather than waiting until our next lab meeting to do so. Currently, given my office location, departmental staff I work with pop in regularly with questions related to my administrative role, and that works well. I now look forward to moving to our new building in 14 months where my lab space will be next door to my office.

·         The other advantage of being physically together is it made it harder to goof off. I didn’t want someone to walk into my office and see me surfing the web. One of my students in particular said that she really liked working with me nearby because it kept her on task and away from procrastinating, knowing I could walk in at any moment. She also said she looked forward to working near my office in the future for that very reason.

·         There were 3 students working on my tasks, and as a result, I constantly was scrambling to stay ahead of them to keep them in tasks. Someone was always popping in to say that they finished the last task, what next? That time pressure was excellent for keeping my momentum. Again, if we weren’t together with blocked off time, it would have been me, alone, slowly working through one thing, emailing it to someone, slowly working through something else, emailing it… instead, it was a constant back and forth of documents.

·         In the beginning, I really was thinking about the 3-days advantaging me and the proposal, and the students indirectly in that funding for the proposal would translate to student funding. It wasn’t until the last day that I realized the direct benefit to the students. They learned a fair bit about grant writing, what all the sections are about, what you need to highlight, how to edit it, etc. etc. By the end they said that they had learned a fair bit about proposal writing, and I think the intensity of the 3 days really made the process a better learning experience.

·         Snacks! One day a student brought in lunch for everyone. Each of the 3 days someone brought in dessert. On day 3 we needed a change of scenery so I took them out to lunch and we didn’t talk about the proposal. Food was good.

I have fabulous students, whom I genuinely like, so spending 3 days with them all day was invigorating and enjoyable. I am so grateful to all of them for dedicating this time to the proposal, and am really impressed with how much we accomplished in 3 days. I highly recommend trying something similar to anyone working on a grant proposal.

In June we have our one week paper writing marathon. Stay tuned.

“The post Grant writing marathon first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on May 27, 2014.”

If you teach at a university, chances are right around now you are receiving your teaching evaluations. When I started teaching these were hand written forms. Now that our university has moved from handwritten to online teaching evaluations (we call them SRTE’s, Student Ratings of Teacher Effectiveness), I receive all of the feedback electronically. Before tenure, SRTE’s were not only feedback on my teaching, but felt like a determining factor in whether I kept my job or not. That scared me. Now, I no longer live in fear that I could lose my job if I have a bad semester, but I still read each and every comment on my SRTE’s (easy this semester as I had only 9 students in my grad seminar). Responses to feedback from teaching evaluations are as variable as the instructors who receive them. I know people who do not read them at all, or who read them, dismiss them, and are done. I know people who focus on the positive feedback and use it as an ego boost. Once in grad school another student was discussing with me how great her teaching evaluations were. I told her that mine weren’t that good; I had one really unhappy student who said a lot of negative things. She asked me if anyone said anything positive, and I said that everyone else had been neutral or positive. And then she revealed that she had people write negative things, too, but she was only focusing on the positive feedback. And then there are instructors who dwell on the negative responses, even if they are swimming in a sea of positive feedback.

I’m a dweller. I have always had trouble separating myself from negative comments, and tend to take them personally. It could be considered a good trait, I suppose, in that I explore possible reasons for any negative response, and consider ways I might change my course in response. But over the years what I realized is that I would sometimes focus so much on one or two positive responses that I would work too hard to change my class in reaction to those perspectives, even if they disagreed with the majority of the class. I found the most negative ones the most salient and memorable, and would focus my energy and attention there.

Through the years in my roles as professor-in-charge of the undergraduate and now graduate program, I have worked with a number of other faculty trying to summarize written responses to SRTE’s. So, I wanted to share what I find most helpful, particularly in courses with many students.

Basically, I informally and quickly code the responses. Our SRTE’s have 2 open-ended questions: 1) What helped you learn, and 2) What changes would improve your learning. I open up Excel and start reading through the responses. I do a separate tally for the 2 different questions. So starting with the responses to question 1, I start reading each response, and very briefly summarize any main point. For instance, if someone wrote “The articles and 4-pointers really supplemented the lectures nicely” I would create a new row called “articles” and one called “4-pointers” and then each would get 1 tally mark. Then when someone else wrote “the weekly four pointers that were assigned in the course helped relate classroom material to outside world and readings” I would give “4-pointers” a second tally mark. Unhelpful comments (e.g., the TA was hot; I wish she let us meet outside) as well as hostile comments without constructive feedback (e.g., I hate her and wish she had never been born [note: I made that one up!]) don’t make it into the count.

By the end, I have a helpful count of what students liked about the course, and what they wanted to change. I can sort by frequency of responses, allowing a visual way to see which comments occurred frequently and which did not. Often in doing so, I have realized that the comment that stuck with me was a very infrequent perspective, and was salient only because of the emotion attached to it.

The other great thing about this method is that I do not need to sort through the actual responses in the future. When I get ready to teach this course again, I can look at the emotion-free version, and so I don’t get defensive in reading the feedback.

I have used this method both for my own teaching, and in my PIC role for others, and I always find it brings clarity to what went well and did not go well. Here’s an example taken from various pieces of feedback across different classes so you can see what one looks like.

“The post Getting the most out of teaching evaluations first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on May 13, 2014.”

Our last class of the semester. They were a great and engaged group and I will miss meeting with them.

Our student presenter talked about The Forgotten Half and what we now know. She shared this rap about the forgotten half. She discussed improvements over the past couple of decades, but also evidence that there are still major challenges for non-college bound youth, and particularly for undocumented immigrants, who may not have the choice to go to college in the United States.

We talked about the transition to adulthood in different cultures, in particular Italy, Sweden, and Germany based on this paper by Cook and Furstenberg (2002).

We talked about the transition to marriage, and whether women over 40 really are more likely to get shot by a terrorist than married (short answer: No; longer answer: see Rose [2005]).

And we talked about the gender gap in income and in STEM careers. Did you know that women outnumber men now in number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in Science & Engineering (S&E)?

But men still outnumber women in S&E doctoral degrees, and the disparity increases as you go along the pipeline all the way up to full professors. The controversy over statements made by Lawrence Summers when he was president at Harvard, and how accurate (as opposed to prudent) his statement was.

We discussed immigration and the fact that 2012/2013 was the first birth cohort where 0-1 year olds from ethnic minority groups outnumber those from European American backgrounds.

We discussed fertility rates by country, concerns about declining fertility rates in much of Europe, and the silly but entertaining Do it for Denmark campaign.

This year, for only the second time ever, one of my students opted to create a website rather than submit a traditional final paper. Check it out here.

“The post This week in Adolescent Development: Transition to adulthood first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on May 5, 2014.”

You know when a speaker first opens up his PowerPoint slides, and he hasn't started the presentation yet so it's open in edit mode, and it may say something in the notes section like, "Good afternoon, thank you so much for inviting me here" or something else that he probably didn't want you to know that he wrote out?  Or it shows the first 6 slides, so you see the big punchline coming up? There's a solution for that.

You can save your slides as a Show, rather than as a Presentation. It's a simple option in "save as" under "save as type," just as if you wanted to save it as a PDF instead. If you save something as a Show, then as soon as you click on the file, it will open up your first slide in full screen all ready to start presenting, rather than opening it in edit mode.

A couple of caveats.

1. If you think you might go back to edit it again, make sure you SAVE CHANGES in the Presentation version before you save as a Show. You actually CAN edit a Show version, but it's harder to get it to open in edit mode (you have to do it within PowerPoint, rather than in Explorer or directly from a desktop/file folder). So I find it easier to work with the Presentation version, but save the Show version for the actual presentation.

2. If it's something where I'm going right into the material without a title (like my presentation tonight for HDFS Follies), then I like to have a blank slide at the beginning, so that I can open it up as early as I want but don't have to show my first slide until I'm ready.

“The post PowerPoint trick #2:  Save as a show first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on May 2, 2014.”