Eric Ekholm
LightNews LightNews
ekholme.bsky.social
Eric Ekholm
@ekholme.bsky.social
1.6K followers 370 following 91 posts
Data Scientist for Chesterfield Co Public Schools. Interested in education, data science, reading & writing, CrossFit, baking, and good dogs.

ericekholm.com
Posts Replies Media Videos
ekholme.bsky.social
New edudata blog post: being “data driven” vs being “data informed”

#edusky #databs

www.edudata.blog/being-data-i...
Being Data-Informed vs Data-Driven
Within the past week or so, I’ve encountered two people who have purposefully distinguished between being “data driven” and “data informed.” First, Rick Saporta differentiates these two approaches in ...
www.edudata.blog
October 30, 2025 at 11:18 PM
ekholme.bsky.social
Most data science work is just asking SMEs to help me understand their data/help me make sure I’m filtering the data correctly.
October 23, 2025 at 3:05 PM
ekholme.bsky.social
I just pushed v0.1.0 of my {blueycolors} #rstats package to GitHub.

Check it out if you’re interested in using Bluey-themed colors in ggplot:

ekholme.github.io/blueycolors/
Provides Bluey Inspired Color Palettes
Provides Bluey-inspired color palettes and ggplot2 scales.
ekholme.github.io
September 26, 2025 at 7:47 PM
ekholme.bsky.social
After a few week hiatus, edudata is back with another post. This one reviews Virginia’s fall-to-spring VALLSS growth report and offers some critiques about measuring student growth using ordinal categories:

www.edudata.blog/virginias-va...

#dataBS #edusky
Virginia's VALLSS 2024-25 Fall-Spring Growth Report
Programming note: I’m back after a long summer hiatus. I honestly just kind of lost motivation to do weekly posts. So, moving forward, I’m not going to promise weekly posts. I’ll shoot for a 1 or 2 ti...
www.edudata.blog
August 22, 2025 at 3:11 PM
ekholme.bsky.social
I just learned about “doubleML models.” Is this just data science/ML people trying to reinvent causal inference with the worst name possible?

#rstats #datascience
June 25, 2025 at 10:51 PM
ekholme.bsky.social
This week’s Edudata blog post is on the narrative fallacy, school improvement, and root cause analysis

www.edudata.blog/the-narrativ...

#education
The narrative fallacy and education
I recently read this article on the Ludicity blog about the narrative fallacy, and it got me thinking about how this applies to education. Just to make sure we’re all on the same page, the narrative ...
www.edudata.blog
June 22, 2025 at 8:43 PM
ekholme.bsky.social
I’ve been doing stats/data stuff “seriously” for about 10 years, and I still think bootstrapping is voodoo.

It’s the “ONE WEIRD TRICK” of statistics.
May 30, 2025 at 1:53 PM
Reposted by Eric Ekholm
stephenjwild.bsky.social
Among my favorites, from @cameronpat.bsky.social
Tweet: Stats twitter: “All statistical methods fail horribly without telling you and you shouldn’t trust any research ever. fml.” Data science twitter: “Here are NINE SIMPLE WAYS to convert your data into ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS using POWERFUL AI. Number 3 will astound you!! I’m on a boat”
May 27, 2025 at 2:08 PM
ekholme.bsky.social
New edudata blog post: alternatives to stacked bar charts, and some thoughts on tradeoffs when visualizing data

#dataBS #rstats #edusky

www.edudata.blog/stacked-bar-...
Stacked bar charts and data viz tradeoffs
Stacked bar charts aren’t good plots, and this is a hill I will die on. Even though everyone over the age of, say, 7, has seen a stacked bar chart at some point in their lives and probably intuits wh...
www.edudata.blog
May 16, 2025 at 11:41 PM
ekholme.bsky.social
New edudata blog post: In which I self-consciously offer a framework for data-driven decision making

#datascience #edusky

www.edudata.blog/some-hopeful...
Some hopefully useful questions to guide data-driven decisions
I’ve mentioned in multiple posts on this blog that the primary “point” of data is to help inform decisions. There are probably occasions where it’s useful to just report out on broad compliance-y thin...
www.edudata.blog
May 2, 2025 at 8:19 PM
ekholme.bsky.social
TFW the Google Gemini VSCode extension just writes your #rstats
function documentation for you
a man and a woman are dancing in front of a sign that says fast lake spartans chess team
ALT: a man and a woman are dancing in front of a sign that says fast lake spartans chess team
media.tenor.com
April 30, 2025 at 3:05 PM
ekholme.bsky.social
New edudata blog post: what can educators learn from luxury brands like Hermes?

#edusky #dataBS

www.edudata.blog/luxury-goods...
Luxury goods and non-negotiable values
I’ve been very much into the Acquired podcast lately. The premise of the podcast is that each episode describes a single company, usually beginning at some pivotal pre-company occurrence (the birth of...
www.edudata.blog
April 25, 2025 at 2:12 PM
Reposted by Eric Ekholm
cghlewis.bsky.social
I keep coming across new lists of education research (and adjacent) job opportunities so if you are looking for work, check out these links. 👇

docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

www.purposephilcareer.com
April 25, 2025 at 1:15 PM
ekholme.bsky.social
New edudata post: do we really need “big data” to tell us obvious things?

www.edudata.blog/i-feel-like-...
I Feel Like I'm Taking Crazy Pills
I recently stumbled onto a preprint research article examining the writing quality of college students before and after the introduction of ChatGPT, as well as some reporting on the same article publi...
www.edudata.blog
April 18, 2025 at 5:41 PM
Reposted by Eric Ekholm
iantb.bsky.social
April 9, 2025 at 10:42 AM
ekholme.bsky.social
I’m writing an #rstats package to work with data extracts (csvs) from a specific source. I mostly want a set of functions that will do data-frame-like operations on these extracts. My inclination is to create a new class that’s a thin wrapper around the data (formatted as a dataframe)…
April 9, 2025 at 6:42 PM
ekholme.bsky.social
For my educator friends in the RVA area, VCU is hosting (and I’m helping run) a free event on AI in education on 4/16.
April 3, 2025 at 4:31 PM
Reposted by Eric Ekholm
merriam-webster.com
“I’ll be 10 min late sorry!!!”

-ashamed
-fragile
-unreliable

“A thousand apologies. The relentless slog of time has overtaken my faculties.”

-powerful
-commanding
-honest
April 2, 2025 at 3:46 PM
ekholme.bsky.social
This week’s Edudata newsletter is a reaction to Emily Oster’s recent article on why we still need test scores:

www.edudata.blog/reaction-to-...

#dataBS #edusky
Reaction to Emily Oster's "why we need test scores"
Programming Note: I’m doing an intensive AI training next week, so there will be no post on 4/4. I’ll be back again the following week. Emily Oster recently published an article (post? blog?) on her ...
www.edudata.blog
March 28, 2025 at 1:05 PM
ekholme.bsky.social
This week’s Edudata newsletter is about writing, AI, and owning your thinking:

www.edudata.blog/writing-for-...

#dataBS #edusky
Writing for busy readers, and why not to use AI
I recently read The Productivity Shift (TPS) – a report from Grammarly with the basic premise that businesses should use AI to help employees communicate better, which will increase productivity. You ...
www.edudata.blog
March 21, 2025 at 6:21 PM
ekholme.bsky.social
New edudata post: when do predictions about students’ future performance help?

www.edudata.blog/when-do-pred...

#edusky #databs
When do predictions about students' future performance help?
One common use of statistical models is to make predictions about the future. These predictions are ubiquitous in our tech-infused lives today. Meteorologists deliver predictions about the weather to ...
www.edudata.blog
March 14, 2025 at 7:50 PM
ekholme.bsky.social
New edudata blog post: does your data structure match the question you want to answer?

www.edudata.blog/does-your-da...

#edusky #databs
Does your data's structure match the question you want to answer?
I have this thesis that people in education often get frustrated with data – or they feel like data is useless – because the structure of the data they’re collecting doesn’t allow them to answer the q...
www.edudata.blog
March 7, 2025 at 4:58 PM
ekholme.bsky.social
I haven’t done #TidyTuesday in years apparently, but I decided to fiddle with this week’s dataset to play with the S7 system in #rstats

github.com/ekholme/Tidy...

I haven’t used it enough to have an opinion, but I’m excited to see where this goes!
TidyTuesday/2025_9_animal_shelter/script.R at master · ekholme/TidyTuesday
TidyTuesday visuals and code. Contribute to ekholme/TidyTuesday development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
March 6, 2025 at 8:47 PM
ekholme.bsky.social
Anyone have resources/suggestions on including spatial data (lat/long) in a propensity score model? My gut is to use a non-parametric model (eg random forest) to predict intervention exposure and then use those predictions to get weights.

But spatial data is not my expertise

#databs #rstats
March 6, 2025 at 6:58 PM
ekholme.bsky.social
In this week’s Edudata post, I review the (completely overcomplicated and superfluous) Readiness component of Virginia’s school performance framework:

www.edudata.blog/reviewing-vd...

#databs #edusky
Reviewing VDOE's school performance framework (pt 3)
In the last two posts in this mini-series reviewing Virginia’s new school performance framework, I shared my thoughts on its mastery and growth components. I’d encourage you to check out those posts i...
www.edudata.blog
February 28, 2025 at 1:30 PM