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ELPS 676

• The seminar will be devoted to a study of the various Social and Educational Philosophy. Particular attention will be given to utilizing an understanding and evaluation of the aspects of an college/university community with the intent of strengthening an understanding of the role of an administrator in the programs and problems of education.

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Social Foundations

• Social Foundations: The study of social forces that affect schools and communities.

• Students in Social Foundations examine the sociological, historical, philosophical, anthropological, and political dimensions of schools and community change. Social foundations students investigate issues and contexts grounded in the core disciplines of the social sciences.

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• What experiences do you have in the study and/or application of the social sciences?

• Do administrators need to know the demographics of the faculty, staff, and students?

• Administrators need to understand diversity and the art of collaboration, but what are they?

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Subjectivity and Objectivity

• Subjectivity: a person’s premises, culture, religion, time, space, sexual orientation

• Is knowledge positional?• Objectivity: a person’s ability to understand

another’s positional knowledge, but do you experience another’s experience or your experience of their experience?

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Subjective/Reactor communication

• Subject to subjective communication is conductor to conductor communication

• Subject to reactor communication is conductor to reactor communication

• Objective to Objective communication is collaboration

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Subjective Objective Assessment

• Subjective: know your point of view and the point of view of the other

• Objective: know your subjective/objective point of view and the subjective/objective point of view of the other.

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Reading Online

• Alanazi, F.M., and Arnoldo Rodrigues. “Power Bases and Attribution in Three Cultures.” The Journal of Social Psychology 143, no. 3 (June 2003): 375–395.

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Leadership Style

• "power should be understood to be a condition of social relations. Thus, it is erroneous to ask who has power. Instead, it is necessary to explore how power is exercised.“ David Knights and Darren McCabe

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Leadership Styles

• Autocratic: Autocratic leadership, also known as authoritarian leadership, is a leadership style characterized by individual control over all decisions and little input from group members. Autocratic leaders typically make choices based on their own ideas and judgments and rarely accept advice from followers. Autocratic leadership involves absolute, authoritarian control over a group.

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Leadership Style

• Oppositional: oppositional leadership, like authoritarian leadership, is a leadership style characterized by individual control over all decisions and little input from group members. Oppositional style makes choices based on their ideas and judgments and rarely accepts advise from others. Oppositional leadership involves absolutes; authoritarian control over a group.

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Leadership Style

• Withdrawn: Withdrawn leaders allows the group complete freedom for decision-making, without participating him/herself. This leader type provides materials and offers to assist only by request. The withdrawn leader does not participate in work discussions or group tasks. This leader does not offer commentary on members' performance unless asked directly, and does not participate or intervene in activities.

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Leadership Style

• Capitulation: The capitulative leader welcomes team input from every point of view, but is not committed to anyone. He/she avoids group discussion and decision making to avoid exposing the capitulative nature of his/her leadership style. This leader type has no plan to share with the group or have an autocratic intent. He/she makes everyone believe that he/she is open and gives consideration to all points of view. Freud states that empathy (or in this case capitulation) is a great defense mechanism.

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Democratic Leader

• Democratic: The democratic leader welcomes team input and facilitates group discussion and decision making. This leader type shares plans with the group and offers multiple options for group consideration. Encourages members to work freely with each other and leaves division of tasks to the group. This leader is objective in praise and criticism, and joins group activities without over-participating.

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Democratic Leader

• The democratic conception of education informs all aspects of education. A democratic educational society embodies the ethical and intellectual aspects of working in a college or university.

The ethical commitments are:• Sensitivity toward the varieties of individual and cultural

diversity• Disposition and ability to collaborate effectively with others• High regard for learning and seriousness of personal,

professional, and public purpose• Respect for the college or university community

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Democratic Leader

The intellectual commitments are• Wide general knowledge and deep knowledge of the

multifaceted aspects of the institution• Knowledge and appreciation of the diversity among

members of the college or university community• Understanding of the factors that affect community

building• Interest in and ability to seek out and use informational,

technological, and collegial resources• Contagious intellectual enthusiasm and courage to be

creative and accept the creativity of others.

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Shared Governance

• The American Federation of Teachers believes the following is the way to run a successful college or university. We believe that all college and university employees—top tenured faculty, junior faculty, temporary and part-time/adjunct faculty, graduate teaching and research assistants, professional staff with and without faculty rank, the classified and support staff that keep the educational enterprise going—should have a guaranteed voice in decision-making, a role in shaping policy in the areas of their expertise.

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Shared Governance

• Shared governance, in turn, arose out of a recognition that:

• academic decision-making should be largely independent of short-term managerial and political considerations;

• faculty and professional staff are in the best position to shape and implement curriculum and research policy, to select academic colleagues and judge their work; and

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Shared Governance• the perspective of all front-line personnel is invaluable in making

sound decisions about allocating resources, setting goals, choosing top officers and guiding student life.

• It is widely understood that broad participation in decision-making increases the level of employee investment in the institution’s success.

• As a result, organizational theorists for many years have recommended shared decision-making as a key strategy to improve productivity in all kinds of organizations. In higher education, due to the high turnover rate of top administrators, the faculty and staff are often in the best position to provide the institutional history so valuable to institutional planning. Without that institutional history, institutions are apt to repeat past failures.

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Communication and Collaboration• Communicate Clearly

• Articulate thoughts and ideas effectively using oral, written and nonverbal communication skills in a variety of forms and contexts

• Listen effectively to decipher meaning, including knowledge, values, attitudes and intentions

• Use communication for a range of purposes (e.g. to inform, instruct, motivate and persuade)

• Utilize multiple media and technologies, and know how to judge their effectiveness a priori as well as assess their impact

• Communicate effectively in diverse environments (including multi-lingual)• Collaborate with Others

Demonstrate ability to work effectively and respectfully with diverse teams• Exercise flexibility and willingness to be helpful in making necessary compromises to

accomplish a common goal• Assume shared responsibility for collaborative work, and value the individual contributions

made by each team member

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Question

• What elements of the democratic concept have you experienced in your professional life?

• What type of administrative power model(s) do you subscribe?

• How would you foster collaboration?

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Paper

• Choose a topic and write a 2-3 page Strategic Plan for campus community engagement. Explain your goal(s), objective(s), strategy(s), and expected outcome(s)

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Reading Online

• Education for the 21 st Century: The Basics Introduction : Elements of 21st Century Learning Framework for 21st Century Learning 21 st Century Learners 21 st Century www.windhamsd.org/whs/21st_century_the_basics.pdf · PDF file

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Educational Philosophies

• Educational Premise: academic programs are based on the assumption that leadership in educational systems is essential for the society to successfully produce an enlightened, globally aware citizenry. Educational foundations is grounded in the belief that educational leaders require knowledge, skills, values, and commitment appropriate for administrative, policy, instructional, and research roles in societies striving to realize the democratic ideal.

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Four Major Educational Philosophies

• Perennialism: the aim of education is to ensure that students acquire understandings about the great ideas of Western civilization. These ideas have the potential for solving problems in any era. Essentialism: belief that there is a common core of knowledge that needs to be transmitted to students in a systematic, disciplined way. The emphasis in this conservative perspective is on intellectual and moral standards that schools should teach. The core of the curriculum is essential knowledge and skills and academic rigor.

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Progressivism

• Progressivism: belief that education should focus on the whole child, rather than on the content or the teacher. This educational philosophy stresses that students should test ideas by active experimentation. Learning is rooted in the questions of learners that arise through experiencing the world. It is active, not passive. The learner is a problem solver and thinker who makes meaning through his or her individual experience in the physical and cultural context. Effective teachers provide experiences so that students can learn by doing.

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Social Reconstructionist

• Social reconstructionist is a philosophy that emphasizes the addressing of social questions and a quest to create a better society and worldwide democracy. Reconstructionist educators focus on a curriculum that highlights social reform as the aim of education. Theodore Brameld (1904-1987) was the founder of social reconstructionist, in reaction against the realities of World War II. He recognized the potential for either human annihilation through technology and human cruelty or the capacity to create a beneficent society using technology and human compassion. George Counts (1889-1974) recognized that education was the means of preparing people for creating this new social order.

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Paulo Freire

• Paulo Freire (1921-1997) was a Brazilian whose experiences living in poverty led him to champion education and literacy as the vehicle for social change. In his view, humans must learn to resist oppression and not become its victims, nor oppress others. To do so requires dialog and critical consciousness, the development of awareness to overcome domination and oppression. Rather than "teaching as banking," in which the educator deposits information into students' heads, Freire saw teaching and learning as a process of inquiry in which the child must invent and reinvent the world.

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• For social reconstructionist and critical theorists, curriculum focuses on student experience and taking social action on real problems, such as violence, hunger, international terrorism, inflation, and inequality. Strategies for dealing with controversial issues (particularly in social studies and literature), inquiry, dialogue, and multiple perspectives are the focus. Community-based learning and bringing the world into the classroom are also strategies.

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Plato

• Education serves to identify those who are capable of philosophizing and helps to strengthen the characters of those who are capable. Furthermore, the philosopher-kings education will teach true love of learning and philosophy, as opposed to the false love of learning of the "noble puppies"

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Question

• Which educational philosophy is most compatible with your beliefs? Why?

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Learning Theories

• Information Processing theorists focus on the mind and how it works to explain how learning occurs. The focus is on the processing of a relatively fixed body of knowledge and how it is attended to, received in the mind, processed, stored, and retrieved from memory.

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Behaviorist

• Behaviorist theorists believe that behavior is shaped deliberately by forces in the environment and that the type of person and actions desired can be the product of design. In other words, behavior is determined by others, rather than by our own free will. By carefully shaping desirable behavior, morality and information is learned.

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Cognitivists or Constructivists

• Cognitivists or Constructivists believe that the learner actively constructs his or her own understandings of reality through interaction with objects, events, and people in the environment, and reflecting on these interactions. Early perceptual psychologists (Gestalt psychology) focused on the making of wholes from bits and pieces of objects and events in the world, believing that meaning was the construction in the brain of patterns from these pieces.

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Humanism

• The roots of humanism are found in the thinking of Erasmus (1466-1536), who attacked the religious teaching and thought prevalent in his time to focus on free inquiry and rediscovery of the classical roots from Greece and Rome. Erasmus believed in the essential goodness of children, that humans have free will, moral conscience, the ability to reason, aesthetic sensibility, and religious instinct. He advocated that the young should be treated kindly and that learning should not be forced or rushed, as it proceeds in stages.

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Humanism

• Humanism was developed as an educational philosophy by Rousseau (1712-1778) and Pestalozzi, who emphasized nature and the basic goodness of humans, understanding through the senses, and education as a gradual and unhurried process in which the development of human character follows the unfolding of nature. Humanists believe that the learner should be in control of his or her own destiny. Since the learner should become a fully autonomous person, personal freedom, choice, and responsibility are the focus. The learner is self-motivated to achieve towards the highest level possible. Motivation to learn is intrinsic in humanism.

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Question

In class Self Assessment and discussion

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Core Competencies

• 21st century education

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CommunicationI. Communication• Students will communicate effectively, which means the ability to:• A. Read - Students will be able to comprehend and interpret the assigned readings • B. Write - Students demonstrate the ability to:• Communicate thoughts, ideas and information pertinent to the course• Compose and create documents, such as: reports, essays, journals, examinations

with correct grammar, spelling, punctuation, and appropriate language, style, and format

• Check, edit, and revise written work for correct information, emphasis, form, style, and grammar

• C. Listen—Students will be able to receive, attend to, interpret, and respondappropriately to (1) verbal and/or (2) nonverbal messages

• D. Oral Communication - Students have the ability to:• Organize ideas and communicate verbal, or non-verbal messages

appropriate to the situation• Participate in conversations, discussions, and group activities• Speak clearly and ask questions

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Critical Thinking• II. Critical Thinking • Application and Analysis - including:• Applying rules and principles to new situations• Discovering rules and applying them in the problem solving process• Using logic to draw conclusions from information given• Differentiating between facts, influences, assumptions, and conclusions• Collect Information• Identify the need for data• Obtain data from various sources• Organize, process, and maintain records of the information collected• Analyze the information for relevance and accuracy• Synthesize, evaluate and communicate the results• Use current technology to acquire, organize, analyze, and communicate

information

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Problem Solving

• Solve Problems - Students demonstrate the ability to:

• Recognize whether a issue exists• Identify components of the issue• Create a plan of action to resolve the issue• Evaluate, and revise when necessary

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Global Awareness• III. Global Awareness• Students will demonstrate a measurable understanding and appreciation of the world

including its:• A. Scientific Thought - Students demonstrate an understanding of:• The scientific method• How experiments work• The major differences between social, natural and physical sciences• B. Social Diversity and Civics - Students demonstrate the ability to:• Interface with people from a variety of backgrounds• Understand different cultural beliefs and behaviors• Recognize important social and political issues in their own community• C. Aesthetics - Students have been exposed to:• The visual arts, including: drawing, painting, sculpture, photography and

digital media, and/or music of one or many cultures.• Analytical techniques for understanding the meaning in art, or they have• Hands-on experience with creative endeavors

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Personal Responsibility• IV. Personal Responsibility• A. Understands and Manages Self- The student is able to:• Accurately assess his/her own knowledge, skills, and abilities• Motivate self and sets realistic goals• Accept that taking feedback well is important to success• Respond appropriately to challenging situations• B. Social and Physical Wellness - Students make an appropriate effort to

demonstrate:• appropriate social skills in group settings• communicate content and process appropriately • C. Workplace Skills - Students understand the importance of:• Being dependable, reliable, and accountable• Meeting deadlines and completing tasks• Maintaining a professional attitude

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21st century interdisciplinary themes

• The following themes need to be weaved into the core competencies:

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21st Century Global Awareness

• Using 21st century skills to understand and address global issues

• Learning from and working collaboratively with individuals representing diverse cultures, religions and lifestyles in a spirit of mutual respect and open dialogue in personal, work and community contexts

• Understanding other nations and cultures, including the use of non-English languages

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Financial, Economic, Business and Entrepreneurial Literacy

• Knowing how to make appropriate personal economic choices

• Understanding the role of the economy in society

• Using entrepreneurial skills to enhance workplace productivity and career options

• Pragmatic evaluation of the “green and global” impact on involvement in the world business and ecological environment.

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Digital Literacy

• Introduction• Multimedia which is happening with the extensive

use of PowerPoint, videos, blackboard, moodle in 21st century education, must be utilized skillfully.

• However, Educators have become familiar with the technical skills required for rote use of multimedia, they lack the sophistication to critically assess whether a word, image or a sound is used to achieve the desired end.

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Creativity and Innovation• Think Creatively

Use a wide range of idea creation techniques (such as brainstorming)• Create new and worthwhile ideas (both incremental and radical concepts)• Elaborate, refine, analyze and evaluate their own ideas in order to improve and

maximize creative efforts

• Work Creatively with OthersDevelop, implement and communicate new ideas to others effectively

• Be open and responsive to new and diverse perspectives; incorporate group input and feedback into the work

• Demonstrate originality and inventiveness in work and understand the real world limits to adopting new ideas

• View failure as an opportunity to learn; understand that creativity and innovation is a long-term, cyclical process of small successes and frequent mistakes

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Civic Literacy

• Participating effectively in civic life through knowing how to stay informed and understanding governmental processes

• Exercising the rights and obligations of citizenship at local, state, national and global levels

• Understanding the local and global implications of civic decisions

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Health Literacy

• Obtaining, interpreting and understanding basic health information and services and using such information and services in ways that are health enhancing

• Understanding preventive physical and mental health measures, including proper diet, nutrition, exercise, risk avoidance and stress reduction

• Using available information to make appropriate health-related decisions

• Establishing and monitoring personal and family health goals • Understanding national and international public health and

safety issues

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Environmental Literacy

• Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the environment and the circumstances and conditions affecting it, particularly as relates to air, climate, land, food, energy, water and ecosystems

• Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of society’s impact on the natural world (e.g., population growth, population development, resource consumption rate, etc.)

• Investigate and analyze environmental issues, and make accurate conclusions about effective solutions

• Take individual and collective action towards addressing environmental challenges (e.g., participating in global actions, designing solutions that inspire action on environmental issues)

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Paper

Write a 2-3 page paper discussing a social and/or educational philosophical challenge facing colleges and universities in the 21st Century. Include a creative solutions and a way to marketing your solution.

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Critical Thinking

• Beliefs and bias are a compilation of one’s life experience. However, little attention has been paid to the stage development of critical thinking skills. Like other developmental processes, critical thinking must be examined both horizontally and vertically. Significant gains in the intellectual quality of student work will not be achieved except to the degree that skilled critical thinking is cultivated sequentially and thoroughly through predictable stages.

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Stage Theories

• Progress: a person is suppose to complete all stages and then move to the next stage.

• Anteriogress: a person skips a stage or moves to a new stage before the appropriate is brought to closure.

• Regress: a person who moves forward without bringing a stage to closure will have a gap in his/her development that prohibits completing tasks relative to that stage.

• Retrogress: a person who has anteriogressed identifies area of weakness and brings it to closure.

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Linda Elder and Richard Paul

• Have developed the following stage approach to critical thinking.

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CT Stage I

Unreflective thinkers are largely unaware of the determining role that thinking is playing in their lives and of the many ways that problems in thinking are causing problems in their lives.They lack the knowledge that high quality thinking requires regular practice in taking thinking apart, accurately assessing it, and actively improving it. They fail to recognize thinking as involving concepts, assumptions, inferences, implications, points of view, clarity, and lack accuracy, precision, relevance, logicalness, etc.

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CT Stage II

• Challenged thinkers are becoming aware that high quality thinking requires deliberate reflective thinking about thinking . They recognize that their thinking is often flawed, although they are not able to identify many of these flaws. Challenged thinkers may develop an initial awareness of thinking as involving concepts, assumptions, inferences, implications, points of view, etc., and as involving standards for the assessment of thinking: clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, logicalness, etc.

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CT Stage III

• Beginning thinkers, unlike challenged thinkers are becoming aware not only of thinking as such, but also of the role in thinking of concepts, assumptions, inferences, implications, points of view, etc. Beginning thinkers are also at some beginning stage of recognizing not only that there are standards for the assessment of thinking: clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, logicalness, etc., but also that one needs to internalize them and thus begin using them deliberately in thinking. They have a beginning understanding of the role of egocentric thinking in human life.

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CT Stage IV

• Practicing thinkers are becoming knowledgeable of what it would take to systematically monitor the role in their thinking of concepts, assumptions, inferences, implications, points of view, etc.

• They are also becoming knowledgeable of what it would take to regularly assess their thinking for clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, logicalness, etc.

• They recognize the need for systematic thinking and internalizing the habits of critical thinking. They clearly recognize the natural tendency of the human mind to engage in egocentric thinking and self-deception.

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CT Stage V

• Advanced thinkers are engaged in systematically monitoring the role in their thinking of concepts, assumptions, inferences, implications, points of view, etc. and knowledgeable of what it takes to regularly assess their thinking for clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, logicalness, etc. Advanced thinkers value the deep and systematic internalization of critical thinking into their daily habits. Advanced thinkers have keen insight into the role of egocentrism and socio-centrism in thinking, as well as the relationship between thoughts, feelings and desires.

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CT Stage VI

• Master thinkers have not only a high degree of knowledge of thinking, but a high degree of practical insight as well.

• They intuitively assess their thinking for clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, logicalness, etc.

• They have deep insights into the systematic internalization of critical thinking and the role that egocentric and socio-centric thinking plays in the lives of human beings, as well as the complex relationship between thoughts, emotions, drives and behavior.

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Thinking Fast and Slow

• Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow• System One, works 24/7 to keep us out of trouble,

while alerting us to fleeting opportunities. Appropriate for a species that is both predator and prey, System One lives in a world of snap judgments, extensible metaphors, ill-informed biases, and loosely constructed rules of thumb. We sometimes call this decision making apparatus intuition. Man’s intuition is sophisticated enough that it has helped us thrive across a variety of ever changing environments.

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System One

• Despite its utility, System One is often wrong, especially if numbers are involved. For a trivial example, answer quickly: If the sum of the cost of a ball and bat is $1.10 and the bat cost a dollar more than the ball, what does the ball cost? Your System One answer (most likely wrong) is good enough to avoid mistaking a hungry lion for a tasty chicken. But it’s not good enough to build an airplane or design an effective income tax code. (The answer is a nickel, not a dime.)

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System Two

• System Two is associated with enumeration, computation, objective analysis, and complex chains of logic. It is our rational brain. Kahneman’s work shows that even scientists like himself use System Two very sparingly, calling on it only when System One asks for help. In addition, in order to function at the highest levels, System Two requires training, discipline, concentration, skeptical and impartial evaluation of purported facts, and the ruthless elimination of contradictions.

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WASC

• CSU Northridge WASC Accreditation Web Site• The WASC Steering Committee has delineated

the ... Each of the themes has several sub-themes and a researchable ... Updated on 6 /22/11 ...

• www.csun.edu/~instrsch/wasc/themeshome.html

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Paper

• Reviewing everything we have studied to date, write the mission statement that you would support at he college/university that you are employed.

• After writing you mission statement, explain why you believe it is on that you can support.

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Prejudice, Profiling, and Diversity

• We must know who we are, why we are here, and how what we do relates to our self and purpose.

• We are now live in a global world and need to realize that the 21st century being is new and different than anything that has ever been experienced before.

• We need to change the skill of conquering for the skills of co-conducting.

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Geert Hofstede™ Cultural Dimensions

• Power Distance Index (PDI) that is the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. It suggests that a society's level of inequality is endorsed by the followers as much as by the leaders. Power and inequality, of course, are extremely fundamental facts of any society and anybody with some international experience will be aware that 'all societies are unequal, but some are more unequal than others'.

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• Power Distance Index (PDI) that is the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. It suggests that a society's level of inequality is endorsed by the followers as much as by the leaders. Power and inequality, of course, are extremely fundamental facts of any society and anybody with some international experience will be aware that 'all societies are unequal, but some are more unequal than others'.

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• Masculinity (MAS) versus its opposite, femininity, refers to the distribution of roles between the genders which is another fundamental issue for any society to which a range of solutions are found. The BEM studies revealed that (a) women's values differ less among societies than men's values; (b) men's values from one country to another contain a dimension from very assertive and competitive and maximally different from women's values on the one side, to modest and caring and similar to women's values on the other. The assertive pole has been called 'masculine' and the modest, caring pole 'feminine'. The women in feminine countries have the same modest, caring values as the men; in the masculine countries they are somewhat assertive and competitive, but not as much as the men, so that these countries show a gap between men's values and women's values.

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• Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI) deals with a society's tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity; it ultimately refers to man's search for truth. It indicates to what extent a culture programs its members to feel either uncomfortable or comfortable in unstructured situations. Unstructured situations are novel, unknown, surprising, different from usual. Uncertainty avoiding cultures try to minimize the possibility of such situations by strict laws and rules, safety and security measures, and on the philosophical and religious level by a belief in absolute truth; 'there can only be one truth and we have it'. People in uncertainty avoiding countries are also more emotional, and motivated by inner nervous energy (they can’t stand the fact that life doesn’t always follow rigid plans).

• The opposite type, uncertainty accepting cultures, are more tolerant of opinions different from what they are used to; they try to have as few rules as possible, and on the philosophical and religious level they are relativist and allow many currents to flow side by side

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• Long-Term Orientation (LTO) versus short-term orientation: this fifth dimension was found in a study among students in 23 countries around the world, using a questionnaire designed by Chinese scholars It can be said to deal with Virtue regardless of Truth (it doesn’t make sense, but I will adhere out of duty). Values associated with Long Term Orientation are thrift and perseverance; values associated with Short Term Orientation are respect for tradition, fulfilling social obligations, and protecting one's 'face'. Both the positively and the negatively rated values of this dimension are found in the teachings of Confucius, the most influential Chinese philosopher who lived around 500 B.C.; however, the dimension also applies to countries without a Confucian heritage.

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Paper

• Write a 2-3 paper on Diversity and political correctness.

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Data Mining

• What is Data Mining?• Data mining is the process of discovering

previously unknown, actionable and profitable information from large consolidated databases, often to support education decisions as well as curricular and operational procedures.

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Statistics and Data Mining

• Frequently the emphasis in statistics and machine learning is on finding the simplest, most automated tool in our bag of tricks to achieve the goal (classify objects correctly, show that a difference is significant, that two variables are dependent, etc). In this process, one ignores certain variables, outlying cases, or unusual cases as necessary. We will also learn to do all of those things, but only to temporarily defocus aspects of the data so that we may focus on something else. In data mining, the outlying cases may be exactly the cases we are interested in

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Clustering and Nearest Neighbor

• Clustering and the Nearest Neighbor prediction technique are among the oldest techniques used in data mining. Most people have an intuition that they understand what clustering is - namely that like records are grouped or clustered together. Nearest neighbor is a prediction technique that is quite similar to clustering - its essence is that in order to predict what a prediction value is in one record look for records with similar predictor values in the historical database and use the prediction value from the record that it “nearest” to the unclassified record.

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A simple example of clustering

• A simple example of clustering would be the clustering that most people perform when they do the laundry - grouping the permanent press, dry cleaning, whites and brightly colored clothes is important because they have similar characteristics. And it turns out they have important attributes in common about the way they behave (and can be ruined) in the wash. To “cluster” your laundry most of your decisions are relatively straightforward. There are of course difficult decisions to be made about which cluster your white shirt with red stripes goes into (since it is mostly white but has some color and is permanent press). When clustering is used in business the clusters are often much more dynamic - even changing weekly to monthly and many more of the decisions concerning which cluster a record falls into can be difficult.

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A simple example of nearest neighbor

• A simple example of the nearest neighbor prediction algorithm is that if you look at the people in your college/university (in this case those people that are in fact geographically representative of the population you want information about). You may notice that a large number of those who are not completing and have low retention come from families that are heterogenic. Thus if you want to improve retention and completion, you may want to focus on students from heterogenic households because chances are good that helping them will improve retention and completion. In this case the neighbor you will focus on are those from heterogenic households.

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• The nearest neighbor prediction algorithm works in very much the same way except that “nearness” in a database may consist of a variety of factors not just where the person’s family. It may, for instance, be far more important to know which high school someone attended and there gpa they attained when predicting completion and retention. The better definition of “near” might in fact be students who graduated from a certain high school with rather than their heterogenic household.

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• Nearest Neighbor techniques are among the easiest to use and understand because they work in a way similar to the way that people think - by detecting closely matching examples.

• An important aspect of any system that is used to make predictions is that the user be provided with, not only the prediction, but also some sense of the confidence in that prediction (e.g. the prediction is defaulter with the chance of being correct 60% of the time).

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Clustering• Clustering is the method by which like records are grouped

together. Usually this is done to give the end user a high level view of what is going on in the database. Clustering is sometimes used to mean segmentation - which most marketing people will tell you is useful for coming up with a birds eye view of the business. Two of these clustering systems are the PRIZM™ system from Claritas corporation and MicroVision™ from Equifax corporation. These companies have grouped the population by demographic information into segments that they believe are useful for direct marketing and sales. To build these groupings they use information such as income, age, occupation, housing and race collect in the US Census. Then they assign memorable “nicknames” to the clusters.

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Clustering Attrition High School Income Entry Age Parent

Education GPA

Taft

San Fernando

Granada Hills

Chatsworth

Reseda

Kennedy

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Conclusions

• This clustering information is then used by the end user to tag the students in their database. Once this is done the educator can get a quick high level view of what is happening within the cluster. Once the educator has worked with these variables for some time they also begin to build intuitions about how these different clusters will relate to attrition. For instance some of these clusters may relate to retention and some of them may not.

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SWOT

• Internal and external:• Strengths• Weaknesses• Opportunities• Threats