style question: returning multiple arguments - structure orlist
Jonathan, That makes a good deal of sense. I look forward to future postings of your experiences this fall. One thing that I have learned is a mistake is to try to "ease" the students into S by having them spend the first 2-3 weeks of the course using only the S-Plus graphical user interface. From now on I'm going directly to the command line. Frank
Jonathan Baron wrote:
From owner-r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch Sun Jul 29 09:36:10 2001 I too am troubled by the computer illiteracy of students these days. As an experiment this summer I am having incoming students who don't know at least one computer language work through the book "Beginning Programming for Dummies" by Wallace Wang.
This sounds like a good book, but I want to make a pedagogical point. Although transfer of learning does occur, the last 100 years of research have tended to support the view that it is incomplete and that it also works in both directions. In my youth, they tried to get me to learn Latin because it would "make French easier." (I refused, and learned German.) The fact is that learning French would make Latin easier, just as much as the reverse. Thus, if the target is S/R, teach S/R first. It will help students learn other languages just as much as the reverse. Of course, the availability of good teaching materials is an issue. I plan to work on this in the fall, when I force the students in our introductory graduate methods class to learn R, both as a beginning cure for computer illiteracy and as a useful tool in its own right - more useful for the average psychology researcher, I think, than C or anything else. Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania Home page: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._
Frank E Harrell Jr Prof. of Biostatistics & Statistics Div. of Biostatistics & Epidem. Dept. of Health Evaluation Sciences U. Virginia School of Medicine http://hesweb1.med.virginia.edu/biostat -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._