Could Brain Imaging Replace The SAT? Imagine it's the year 2032. You are a high school student. You are at a center where a visual scanner confirms your identity so you can enter a room where you are about to receive a brain scan. You wake up. Well, as you were sleeping, you just took the neuro version of the SAT. This fictional scenario is certainly not a reality today, but perhaps something like it may be a reality in the future. Haier paints a picture of our future: "Can it be done today? In 1988, Haier and his colleagues scanned volunteers while they attempted to solve problems from the Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices, a nonverbal intelligence test. In other words, smarter people had brains that could be more efficient. Since that landmark study, the field of has started to take off. In Haier's words, "There was a network distributed around the brain that was related to intelligence, which we named the Parieto-Frontal Integration or P-FIT theory. Says Haier, "That's kind of a no brainer." © 2012 by Jonathan Wai
How to Destroy Education While Making a Trillion Dollars The Vietnam War produced more than its share of iconic idiocies. Perhaps the most revelatory was the psychotic assertion of an army major explaining the U.S. bombing of the provincial hamlet of Ben Tre: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” If only such self-extinguishing claims for intelligence were confined to military war. The U.S is ratcheting up a societal-level war on public education. Here’s a three-step recipe for how to destroy education. First, lower the costs so you can jack up the profits. Second, make the curriculum as narrow, rote, and regimented as you can. Finally, rinse and repeat five thousand times. This is the essential charter school model and the money is all the rationale its promoters need. But to really make a killing, you need not just revenues, but profits. That is what real teachers do. If America wants better education, it needs to fix the greatest force undermining education, which is poverty. So watch out.
DH |Towards a Rationale of Audio-Text Bauman 1975 Bauman, R. "Verbal Art as Performance." In American Anthropologist, New Series, 77, no. 2 (June 1975): 290-311. Bernstein 2011 Bernstein, C. Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions. University Of Chicago Press, 2011. Briet 2006 Briet, S. Bryant 2002 Bryant, J. Bryant 2011 Bryant, J. Buckland 1997 Buckland, M. Buzzetti and McGann 2006 Buzzetti, D. and McGann, J. Chaudhri 2009 Chaudhri, Talat. Clement Clement, T. Clement 2011 Clement, T. Clement 2014 Clement, T. Clement et al. 2014 Clement, T., Tcheng, D. Council on Library and Information Resources and The Library of Congress 2012 Council on Library and Information Resources and The Library of Congress. DeRose et al. 1990 DeRose, S. Drucker 2002 Drucker, J. Drucker and Rockwell 2003 "Introduction; Reflections on the Ivanhoe Game." Enrst 2012 Ernst, W. Enstrom 1993 Enstrom, D. Feinberg 2010 Feinberg, M. Floyd and Renear 2007 Floyd, I. and Renear, A. Frohmann 2004 Frohmann, B. Goldfarb 1981 Goldfarb, C..
Reflection and revision opportunities: Check! PBL Guidance states that learners should be allowed two formative assessments for each summative assessment. The final product for The Octopus's Garden Project is a presentation to the Principal of the school with design ideas for a 21st century classroom that will enhance teaching and learning in the school (post on this coming soon). Learners will also have to recount their learning in a report following the presentation. To prepare for these assessments, we worked on:- - note-taking skills - writing instructions - persuasive language - organisation - effective slide-making - recount writing - report writingCheck Points: Presentations Formative 1: team presentations on areas of expertise Formative 2: draft final presentation to soundboard Summative: final presentation to SLT Every team completed a peer assessment form (on a Google Form) created from the co-constructed presentation rubric when watching the films.
The real problem with multiple-choice tests Q) What is one responsibility that modern Presidents have NOT described in the Constitution? (From the 2010 NAEP exam) a) Commanding the armed forces b) Proposing an annual budget to Congress c) Appointing Supreme Court justices d) Granting pardons One of the biggest complaints about standardized tests is that the multiple-choice questions don’t measure deep thinking skills. Heick is an educator, husband, and father of three who is interested in improved social capacity through the design of progressive learning forms. (The answer to the question above is B, from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2010.) By Terry Heick The multiple-choice problem is becoming a bit of an issue. While it has been derided by educators for decades as incapable of truly measuring understanding, and while performance on such exams can be noticeably improved simply by learning a few tricks, the multiple choice question may have a larger, less obvious flaw that disrupts the tone of learning itself.
The Chronicle: Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index RELATED STORY: Faculty-Productivity Index Offers Surprises (November 16, 2007) How The Index Works The index examines faculty members who are listed on a Ph.D. program's Web sites, and includes a total of 217,254 names. The productivity of each faculty member is measured, although the data are aggregated before being published. For each discipline, Academic Analytics assigns a weight to each variable. Grants count as 30 points out of the 100, if they meet a threshold of importance in a particular discipline — that more than 10 percent of the programs in that discipline have received a federal grant. Awards and honors count as 10 points out of 100, as long as more than 10 percent of the programs in the discipline have received awards. Awards considered more prestigious are given more weight than others. If one or more variables are not used in the calculation of faculty productivity, that part of the equation is removed and the point scale reduced accordingly.
A warning to college profs from a high school teacher For more than a decade now we have heard that the high-stakes testing obsession in K-12 education that began with the enactment of No Child Left Behind 11 years ago has resulted in high school graduates who don’t think as analytically or as broadly as they should because so much emphasis has been placed on passing standardized tests. Here, an award-winning high school teacher who just retired, Kenneth Bernstein, warns college professors what they are up against. Bernstein, who lives near Washington, D.C. serves as a peer reviewer for educational journals and publishers, and he is nationally known as the blogger “teacherken.” His e-mail address is kber@earthlink.net. This appeared in Academe, the journal of the American Association of University Professors. By Kenneth Bernstein You are a college professor. I have just retired as a high school teacher. I have some bad news for you. Troubling Assessments I mentioned that at least half my students were in AP classes. A Teacher’s Plea
Wikipedia |Critical thinking Analysis of facts to form a judgment Critical thinking is the analysis of available facts, evidence, observations, and arguments in order to form a judgement by the application of rational, skeptical, and unbiased analyses and evaluation.[1] The application of critical thinking includes self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective habits of the mind,[2] thus Critical Thinking is an acquired skill used to evaluate data. [3] Richard W. Paul said that the mind of a critical thinker engages the person's intellectual abilities and personality traits.[4] Critical thinking presupposes assent to rigorous standards of excellence and mindful command of their use in effective communication and problem solving, and a commitment to overcome egocentrism and sociocentrism.[5][6] History[edit] In the classical period (5th c.–4th c. Etymology and origin of critical thinking[edit] Definitions[edit] Traditionally, critical thinking has been variously defined as follows: Deduction[edit]
AfL: Golden Rules Assessment for Learning: My Golden Rules Evaluation and assessment are not the same. My husband worked with a colleague who 'assessed' final exam art-work based on the standard of the class. He was gobsmacked when, during his first 'standardisation' meeting for IGCSE art, she laid out all the pieces across the room. She had decided, subjectively and without consultation of the criteria, that 'Sue' had produced the 'best' work, therefore she got an 'A', whilst 'Peter' was the 'worst', so he got the 'U' grade. She then divided up the grades equally among the remaining learners ranged between 'Sue' and 'Peter'. Since then, I have continued to think carefully about the purpose of assessment and how we assess with particular focus on Assessment for Learning (AfL). Comment OR grade. The advice of my Principal is to choose one or the other - feedback or grade - but not both. The feedback is part of the journey, the grade is the destination. Summative before formative. Assessment is a dialogue.
Is It Time We Threw Standardized Testing Out the Door? Dr. Mark Naison is involved in a movement he hopes will change the American education system. A professor of African-American studies and history at New York’s Fordham University, Naison wants to see less standardized tests in the classroom. “You should organize the school experience around what excites and energizes children—the arts, music, physical activity, hands-on science, collaborative learning—and do project-based assessment by teachers and school administrators, with standardized tests on a state or national level reduced to a minimum,” Naison told TakePart. He isn’t alone. At Seattle’s Garfield High School, for example, teachers took the bold step of voting unanimously in January to boycott a series of district-mandated tests. But it’s not just Seattle where protests are occurring. In Rhode Island, high school students dressed like zombies delivered a letter to Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee that criticized the use of an assessment exam as a requirement for graduation.
How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us by Gail Collins “What happens in Texas doesn’t stay in Texas when it comes to textbooks” No matter where you live, if your children go to public schools, the textbooks they use were very possibly written under Texas influence. If they graduated with a reflexive suspicion of the concept of separation of church and state and an unexpected interest in the contributions of the National Rifle Association to American history, you know who to blame. When it comes to meddling with school textbooks, Texas is both similar to other states and totally different. It’s hardly the only one that likes to fiddle around with the material its kids study in class. The difference is due to size—4.8 million textbook-reading schoolchildren as of 2011—and the peculiarities of its system of government, in which the State Board of Education is selected in elections that are practically devoid of voters, and wealthy donors can chip in unlimited amounts of money to help their favorites win. “Evolution is hooey”
Elements of Thought |How we think… SAT exam to be redesigned The famed SAT college admissions exam will undergo a thorough redesign by the College Board, which is calling it an “ambitious effort” to “better meet” the needs of students and schools. The SAT, first given in 1926, was revamped less than a decade ago when a written essay was added and some of the question formats were changed. Last year, for the first time, it lost its designation as the most popular college admissions exam to the ACT, by a margin of a few thousand students. The College Board, the nonprofit organization that owns the SAT, late last year appointed a new president, David Coleman, who was a co-writer of the Common Core State Standards. College Board Vice President Peter Kauffmann said the following e-mail was sent to all members of the College Board: In the months ahead, the College Board will begin an effort in collaboration with its membership to redesign the SAT® so that it better meets the needs of students, schools, and colleges at all levels.