{"id":902,"date":"2009-10-11T18:14:40","date_gmt":"2009-10-11T22:14:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=902"},"modified":"2009-10-11T18:14:40","modified_gmt":"2009-10-11T22:14:40","slug":"modeling-as-a-teachable-skill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2009\/10\/11\/modeling-as-a-teachable-skill\/","title":{"rendered":"Modeling as a Teachable Skill"},"content":{"rendered":"

New post on the INFORMS Blog <\/a>on a panel discussion I attended on how to teach modeling:<\/p>\n

I just attended a nice \u201cpanel discussion\u201d on Teaching the Art of Modeling, put together by Jim Orlin (MIT), Stephen Powell and Rob Shumsky (both from Dartmouth).\u00a0 This was not your normal INFORMS session!\u00a0 The panelists decided to do this as an \u201cactive learning\u201d session, so audience members had to work throughout the session.\u00a0 The first exercise was to think about how to model a hypothetical, but real-sounding problem:\u00a0 \u201cSuppose the Red Cross was considering paying people for their blood donations.\u00a0 How would you provide them with a model that could help them understand the tradeoffs.\u201d\u00a0 That (paraphrased) was all the information we got.\u00a0 We were then given 10 minutes or so to work individually on addressing this.\u00a0 The idea would be that this would be the first 10 minutes of whatever multiple-hour process we would go through to get a \u201creal\u201d model.\u00a0 Where would you start?<\/p>\n

For many, the starting point was brainstorming:\u00a0 putting down a whole set of issues to be considered and items that might go into the model.\u00a0 For others, it was graphing some of the anticipated relationships between key issues.\u00a0 Others still used techniques such as influence diagrams to help organize their thoughts.\u00a0 Be a hard-core mathematical programming, I thought in terms of objectives, variables and constraints, and was pretty far along with my nonlinear, nonconvex mixed integer program when time was called.<\/p>\n

Stephen Powell then asked some audience members what they did, eliciting the strategies given above.\u00a0 He has experimented with this problem with students and learned a number of things about what they do (presumably either inexperienced or novice at modeling).\u00a0 First, even for students who have taken modeling courses, it is surprising how little of what we teach gets used in this context.\u00a0 Students, when faced with a fuzzy modeling problem, often do some combination of the following:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. They grab on to data like a lifeboat, prompty multiplying or dividing every number in sight in the hope of getting the \u201cright answer\u201d the professor is looking for.\u00a0 The Red Cross example has no numbers, so they might make some up just to get going.<\/li>\n
  2. They dispense with modeling and go straight to the answer: \u201cThis is a bad idea because \u2026\u201d<\/li>\n
  3. They adopt inefficient methods and are unable to step back and recognize how inefficient they have become.<\/li>\n
  4. They overuse brainstorming relative to any aspect of structured problem solving that they might have been taught.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    If there is a column of numbers, you can bet that many students will immediately run a regression!<\/p>\n

    After discussing these results (there are a couple papers in the Journal of the Operational Research Society on \u201cHow Novices Formulate Models\u201d that covers this), Jim and Rob were given a problem new to them (on a model for deciding on the best morgtage to get) and they showed how an influence diagram approach would be used to begin understanding and modeling.<\/p>\n

    Powell and his co-author Robert Batt have a book entitled Modeling for Insight<\/em><\/a> (Wiley:\u00a0 one of the exhibitors here) .<\/p>\n

    It was great to see a session that required the audience to do some work!\u00a0 While I was not completely convinced by the modeling approach presented (give me my objective, variables, and constraints!), I was convinced about active learning as a way to make 90 minutes go by much faster and in a much more effective way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    New post on the INFORMS Blog on a panel discussion I attended on how to teach modeling: I just attended a nice \u201cpanel discussion\u201d on Teaching the Art of Modeling, put together by Jim Orlin (MIT), Stephen Powell and Rob Shumsky (both from Dartmouth).\u00a0 This was not your normal INFORMS session!\u00a0 The panelists decided to … Continue reading “Modeling as a Teachable Skill”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,18,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conferences","category-education","category-informs"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}