Learning objectives

It is important that you understand why you are doing things — i.e., the goals of your activities. The activities in this course:

• attending lectures,

• watching videos,

• reading articles and other materials,

• and, of course, working on the assignments

are all deduced from the learning objectives. These are things that you should be able to do after performing one or more of these activities. (Of course, full mastery may take more time.)

The learning objectives come at two levels: the course level and the weekly level. At the course level, we group them into five categories:

1. Descriptives statistics,

2. programming techniques,

3. interpretation challenges,

4. personal skills,

5. social skills.

At the weekly level, we only list the learning objectives for descriptive statistics and programming techniques. Listing the objectives for getting a sense of interpretation challenges would mean giving away the solutions to the assignments. The objectives in terms of personal and social skills would simply be too repetitive at the weekly level.

Please familiarise yourself with the learning objectives for the course and come back to them every now and then to see how you are progressing. Every week, please start with going through the objectives before the lecture.

Descriptive statistics¶

• Students use simple descriptive statistics

  • mean, median, mode

  • variance, standard deviation

  • covariance, correlation

  • Gini coefficient

  • inflation rate

• Students apply basic principles of good visualization (principle of proportional ink, meaningful scaling, representation of heterogeneity)

Programming techniques¶

• Students apply basic programming techniques to analyze data and describe simple economic relationships.

• Students use correct data types and transformations to analyze economic data in a typical form.

• Students work with

  • Series

  • DataFrames

  • Conditionals

  • Reduction operations

  • Indexing operations

  • Groupby operations

  • Loops

  • Functions

Interpretation challenges¶

• Students intuitively (i.e. not formally mathematically) describe the most common challenges in interpreting economic relationships

  • use of meaningful scales

  • selection effects

  • measurement errors

  • causality

  • Goodhard’s law

• Students critically assess quantitative statements in news reports.

Visualisation challenges¶

• Students format text using Markdown so that it is easily digestible by readers

• Students appropriately employ:

  • Scatterplots

  • Histograms

  • Line plots

  • Bar charts

• Students format tables so they convey the relevant information quickly

Personal skills¶

• Students work consistently throughout the semester

• Students navigate the course material and assignments independently

• Students reflect on their approach to understanding and solving problems

Social skills¶

• Students work constructively in groups to solve problems

• Students help each other to understand the material

• Students overcome potentially challenging group setups