I just read a wonderful piece written about how the Harvey Mudd increased the ratio of females declaring a major in Computer Science from 10% to 40% since 2006. That is awesome!
One of the things that they attribute this success to is changing the name of their introductory course. They renamed the course from Introduction to programming in Java to Creative Approaches to Problem Solving in Science and Engineering using Python.
Now, clearly, they changed the language they were using (literally) as well,from Java to Python, but it does beg the question, “what’s in a name?” According to Jim Croce and Harvey Mudd, a lot. If you don’t believe that, just ask anyone who has been in a class with the moniker Data Science, or any publisher who has published a book recently entitled [Insert anything here] Using R.
It would be interesting to study the effect of changing a course name. Are there words or phrases that attract more students to the course (e.g., creative, problem solving)? Are there gender differences? How long does the effect last? Is it a flash-in-the-pan? Or does it continue to attract students after a short time period? (My guess is that the teacher plays a large role in the continued attraction of students to the course.)
Looking at the effects of a name is not new. Stephen Dubner and Steve Levitt of Freakonomics fame have illuminated folks about research about whether a child’s name has an effect on a variety of outcomes such as educational achievement and future income [podcast], and suggest that it isn’t as predictive as some people believe. Perhaps someone could use some of their ideas and methods to examine the effect of course names.
Has anyone tried this with statistics (aside from Data Science)? I know Harvard put in place a course called Real Life Statistics: Your Chance for Happiness (or Misery) which got good numbers of students (and a lot of press). My sense is that this happens much more in liberal arts schools (David Moore’s Concepts and Controversies book springs to mind). What would good course words or phrases for statistics include? Evidence. Uncertainty. Data. Variation. Visualization. Understanding. Although these are words that statisticians use constantly, I have to admit they all sound better than An Introduction to Statistics.
