New report on Millennials from Pew Research

It’s been four years since Pew released its first big study of the Millennial generation.  This week, they released a comprehensive report comparing generational attitudes, affiliations, and preferences.  Some pretty interesting ramifications for civic life as Millennials become the dominant cultural force over the next 20 years.

A quick report on 6 key differences between Millennials and others.

The full report.  (Skimming the overview and/or just checking out the graphs could be a quick way to process this report.)

Here’s one finding of note for our ongoing discussion of civic engagement:

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Public Policy Institutes (Think Tanks)

Yep, it turns out that there are organizations whose job is to come up with well researched policy proposals for addressing a variety of the world’s problems.  At last count the US has 1,984 think tanks–almost a third of the world’s total.  Lots of decisions, at the federal, state, and local levels, are based off of research and arguments developed by these organizations.

Some examples: The center-left Brookings Institution is typically ranked by those in Washington as the most influential general public policy institute, regardless of the means for measuring performance.  Cato Institute is the most frequently cited online, and comes from a libertarian perspective (fiscally conservative, socially liberal).  Heritage Foundation is the dominant conservative think tank out there, and continues to be the number two source in media citations–just behind Brookings.  (Here’s a great list of think tanks organized by political leaning, with a brief description of their stance.  Also, here is left-leaning media watchdog FAIR.org’s perspective of bias for the 25 think tanks most cited in the media.)

It can be really useful to look to these sources not only because of the well developed research they provide, but because they can provide arguments you could appropriate (with citation!) as you present your own recommendation in the policy essay.  You might use Harvard’s Think Tank Search to explore what has been discussed on your particular issue.  For instance, I typed in “Crimea,” the portion of Ukraine that Russia seems intent on “annexing” in the next 48 hours.  (Seriously.  Check out the news.)  I found this policy brief from 2009 that warned of the likelihood of the current situation and provided recommendations that could potentially have headed off the brewing conflict between Russia and the West.

After the jump, I’ve copied the list of top 55 US think tanks, as compiled by U Penn’s Think Tanks and Civil Society Program, as well as a link to an alternate ranking system from the Center for Global Development.  (You can also review U Penn’s full report, which ranks think tanks by issue; I could see this being especially important for some topics you might explore.)

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Online Deliberation Site

First, update your sites.psu.edu profile so that your name shows up, and so that there’s a picture of you.  (If you’re strongly opposed to having your picture show up, you can substitute another image.)  Log in to sites.psu.edu and click on your name (or userID) in the upper right corner. Go to “edit my profile” and ensure that the name field has your first and last name (in English).  Click on “save changes.”  Then, click on “change avatar” to choose a file and upload an image.  Be sure to save changes here too.

Here’s the deliberation site: http://sites.psu.edu/highereducationdeliberation/

When commenting, try to follow standard conventions when responding.  You can use some basic HTML tags to add emphasis.  When responding directly to a single comment–and especially to more than one in a single post–you might want to use the @ convention to indicate the intended recipient of the comment:

@Robin Kramer: I am providing and insightful comment to your idea, and not merely saying “I agree.”

Teaching Philosophy Examples

Several people asked to be able to review the teaching philosophies we explored in class.  I’m posting the document we reviewed; note that we considered the first and third philosophies provided, but you might also gain some insight by perusing the other two.

Teaching Philosophy Examples

If you were absent: We considered each paragraph in the statements to determine what function it performed in a personal philosophy such as this–its purpose.  We also considered  what it looks like to both expand and particularize beyond mere best practices (the things that every teacher should do) to something genuinely personal.  While your moderating philosophy will cover a different function from teaching, the tasks bear enough similarity that we could draw a lot of parallels in terms of expression and amplification.

Deliberation Rubrics

Here are the three rubrics for the three deliberation assignments.  Note that these are to be consider in conjunction with the assignment descriptions themselves.  As I mentioned in class, I strongly recommend completing the analysis of the in-class, Civic Issues Deliberation as soon as possible, while it’s still fresh in your head.

Civic Issue Deliberation Analysis Rubric (Gen Ed Reform)

Moderation Philosophy Rubric

Online Deliberation Rubric

Finally (mostly just to get some visual interest), from the New York Times’ Economix Blog on college grades:

grade inflation

 

And a few more items of potential interest:

The political party of your professors may shape the grades they give you

College degrees have become less rigorous, but provide more return on investment

Confirmation bias in decision-making

At its heart, most rhetoric is about how decisions get made. Ideally, people would respond rationally to information they receive and reach the best possible decision.  But you’ve probably had experiences where the person you were interacting with seemed “immune” to reason.  Sometimes this is due to differing value systems, but other times this is due to the heuristics we use to process information.

You can think of heuristics as a set of mental procedures or shortcuts for making decisions–often on the fly.  You have a heuristic, for instance, that lets you weigh the competing variables for deciding where to eat lunch; you might weight price and healthful options most highly, and rate proximity, wait time, and decor somewhat lower.  For many decisions, we simply don’t have the time to research all the options exhaustively.  When buying a new car, our decision to prefer one that we see as stylish, or exciting, or a good value, or safe is also driven by mental shortcuts, and these are an amalgam of perceptions of friends’ attitudes, presumed likelihood of accidents, brand reputation (marketing), etc.

Here at Penn State, Smeal College of Business professor Meg Meloy has found that when deciding among multiple options, we make an initial “best guess” as to what our decision will be, and then look for evidence that confirms that initial gut reaction.  We will then tend to discount evidence supporting other choices–not give them their full value.  We think that we’re processing information logically, but in most situations that’s simply not how it happens.  This is a variation of what psychologists call confirmation bias.  (David McRaney has an entertaining, well researched explanation at his blog: You Are Not So Smart.)

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Did you just think to yourself,  “Sure, this is something that OTHER people do, but surely I don’t do this”?  Congratulations, you’ve just demonstrated another heuristic, call the self-serving bias.  We tend to discount anything that challenges our sense of self worth, rationalizing it away.  And when things go wrong, we tend to explain it based on external circumstances.  (We don’t always give other people the same benefit of the doubt, though.)

Why bring this up?  As we look at deliberating between choices in the coming weeks, our goal is to be intentional (deliberate) about our beliefs and preferences.  While the issues are too complex to apply something as rigorous as the scientific method, carefully questioning our own assumptions really can help us reach better decisions.  So do your best to check your biases at the door.

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Recording your This I Believe essay

You should record your TIB essay in one of the recording or media production rooms on campus.  You can schedule an appointment with Media Commons in several ways, but I recommend doing so early as all 600+ RCL students will be looking to do so in the next few days.