A researchers' propensity for risky projects is passed down to their doctoral students - and stays with trainees after they leave the laboratory, according to an analysis of thousands of current and former PhD students and their mentors.
In the 70s and the 80s, you had this early explosion of behavioral economics led by people like Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler. And then 20 years ago was the Freakonomics phenomenon. So you had Steven Levitt, an economist, and Stephen Dubner, a journalist, who wrote a book that popularized all of this thinking that attempted to show the hidden side of everything, what truly motivates us as economic actors. And the field took off behind this basic tagline that conventional wisdom is wrong.
Around twenty years ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I taught a class in a special observation room at my university's teaching center. My students and I sat around a long oval table while cameras recorded us. I can't remember which novel we discussed, but I do know what I learned when I watched the tape afterward, with a teaching coach.
American colleges, especially the most selective ones, are confronting the dual problems of rampant grade inflation and declining rigor. At Harvard, as I wrote recently, the percentage of A grades has more than doubled over the past 40 years, but students are doing less work than they used to. Teacher evaluations are a big part of how higher education got to this point. The scores factor into academics' pay, hiring, and chance to get tenure.