The LSA's 2016 Annual Meeting will feature three minicourses, held for a few hours on Thursday, January 7 before the Annual Meeting.  Click below for more information and to register.  The Experimental Syntax and Statistical Methods using R minicourses are limited to 30 registrants and charge a fee of $30.  The professionalization course carries a $5.00 charge to cover the cost of materials and is capped at 40 registrants.

Experimental Syntax
Statistical Methods using R
Thriving as an Early Career Faculty Member

Experimental Syntax

Instructor:  Jon Sprouse (University of Connecticut)
Time:         10:00 AM - 3:00 PM, with a one-hour break for lunch
Room:       Salon 1

The goal of this course is to introduce students to the design and analysis of formal acceptability judgment experiments from start to finish. We will cover all of the major components of an experiment: securing IRB approval, extracting testable predictions from hypotheses, creating materials, distributing items across lists, constructing a presentation order, choosing the most appropriate task, deploying the experiment, exploring and analyzing the results, and creating publication quality figures. We will work through concrete examples from a large pre-existing dataset, and use R scripts that can be modified for use with future experiments. There is a lot to cover in just four hours, so the general plan will be to discuss the major points of each topic, explore concrete examples, and then point to readings that students can use to delve deeper into these topics on their own.

Participants should bring a laptop with the following installed: Excel (or an equivalent spreadsheet program), R, the example dataset, and the example R scripts. Students will receive an email before the course with a detailed list of items to download and install (along with links). These must be installed prior to the course because wifi will not be available in the classroom.

   
Click the button below to register for this Minicourse:

Statistical Methods using R

Instructor: Bodo Winter, University of California, Merced
Time:        10:00 AM - 3:00 PM, with an hour-long networking lunch break
Room:       Salon 2

R is a free software environment for statistical computing that is widely used for the analysis and visualization of data, including linguistic data. This four hour mini workshop will gently introduce participants to the R programming environment. In the first half, we will focus on the very basics of the R language itself: how to perform simple computations, how to load in, summarize and visualize data. The second half will give a quick introduction to regression modeling, a common and widely used statistical technique that has many useful applications in linguistics. The workshop will conclude by giving pointers to helpful learning resources and advice for approaching data analysis projects.

Absolutely no background in statistics or programming is required, but a willingness to engage with code is desirable. Participants should bring their own laptop with some recent version of R installed (www.r-project.org). In addition, I highly recommend to download and install RStudio (www.rstudio.com).

Please download the example data sets (will be posted by Dec 1, 2015) before the start of the workshop from the course webpage: http://www.bodowinter.com/lsa2016/
 
The Minicourse on Statistical Methods Using R is full. 

Thriving as an Early Career Faculty Member: a Minicourse for ABD Graduate Students and Postdoctoral Fellows

Instructors: Miranda McCarvel (University of Utah), Michal Temkin Martinez (Boise State University), Karen Adams (Arizona State University), Evan Bradley (Penn State Brandywine), Lynn Burley (University of Central Arkansas), and Elizabeth Canon (Missouri Western State University)
Time:           10:00 AM - 3:00 PM, with an hour-long networking lunch break                 
Room:          Salon 3

Although a career in the academy can be extremely gratifying, the transition from graduate student to faculty member can be bumpy and full of unknowns. The anxieties linked with successfully finishing one’s dissertation and obtaining a permanent academic position do not subside as an early career faculty member, but are rather mapped onto the stresses of a heavier teaching load, the building of a research program, and, in most cases, to getting settled in a new geographical location and a new institutional home. The importance of establishing connections
and creating relationships in one’s new institution as well as in their discipline is often overlooked by those experiencing these overwhelming anxieties.

This 4-hour mini-course aims to provide ABD graduate students and Post Doctoral Fellows with a toolbox for thriving as early career faculty members. During the mini-course, participants will reflect on their identity as scholars, educators, and community members, taking into consideration best practices for thriving in these three areas. We will interweave the theme of thriving as an early career faculty member while focusing on the following key elements:

  1. Integrating teaching, research, and service;
  2. Jump-starting your research program;
  3. Designing goal-oriented and student-centered courses.

Click the button below to register for this Minicourse: