CELESE faculty development teaching and research symposium

In January 2014, my department, the Center for English Language Education (CELESE) at Waseda University Faculty of Science and Engineering held our own internal faculty development symposium to share our own teaching, learning, and research projects. We have about 70 full and part-time faculty and about 15 of us gave presentations that day. It was a great event with lots of interesting talks ranging from the completely practical (e.g., classroom management) to the mostly theoretical (e.g., Actor-network theory: ANT. For my part, I talked about the CCHP and some of the findings that have come out from out. One comment I got from a colleague is, I think, worthy of some comment here.

So, a colleague looked at one of the graphs showing the relationship between one fluency factor (e.g., speech rate, silent pause duration, filled pause rate) and noted that although analyses of variance gave a significant result, a large number of the actual data points were quite far from the regression line (i.e., the residuals were quite large). I didn't really have a good answer for him at the time (though I should have) except to simply underscore the fact that the p-values were significant. This was not sufficient. What I needed to have done was to give a proper linear model result as well as to include a measure of how much variance was explained by the model (e.g., r² or Cohen's d). I should have also pointed out that I was presenting the results with respect to several different factors separately and thus, the variance not explained by any single factor may have been explained (in part) by a combination of the other factors. In short, I think I should have just done a full linear effects model with all of the factors at once and presented those results. Live and learn, I guess.

Anyone who'd like to see the slides from this presentation can access them here.

[Note: This post was published in August 2015 but has been dated in order to reflect the actual timing of the events described here.]