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Bill Kuykendall

Digital Domain - Computers at Home - Educational Hope vs. Teenage Reality - NYTimes.com - 32 views

  • Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households.
  • little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts.
  • few children whose families obtained computers said they used the machines for homework. What they were used for — daily — was playing games.
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  • “Scaling the Digital Divide,” published last month, looks at the arrival of broadband service in North Carolina between 2000 and 2005 and its effect on middle school test scores during that period. Students posted significantly lower math test scores after the first broadband service provider showed up in their neighborhood, and significantly lower reading scores as well when the number of broadband providers passed four.
  • The expansion of broadband service was associated with a pronounced drop in test scores for black students in both reading and math, but no effect on the math scores and little on the reading scores of other students.
  • THE one area where the students from lower-income families in the immersion program closed the gap with higher-income students was the same one identified in the Romanian study: computer skills.
  • How disappointing to read in the Texas study that “there was no evidence linking technology immersion with student self-directed learning or their general satisfaction with schoolwork.”
Steve Ransom

NCTE Position Statement on Machine Scoring - 9 views

  • Conclusions that computers can score as well as humans are the result of humans being trained to score like the computers (for example, being told not to make judgments on the accuracy of information). 
  • Computer scoring systems can be "gamed" because they are poor at working with human language, further weakening the validity of their assessments and separating students not on the basis of writing ability but on whether they know and can use machine-tricking strategies.
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    Important and well written
smilex3md

Basic item analysis for multiple-choice tests. Kehoe, Jerard - 1 views

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    Basic Item Analysis for Multiple-Choice Tests. Jerard Kehoe, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University This article offers some suggestions for the improvement of multiple-choice tests using "item analysis" statistics. These statistics are typically provided by a measurement services, where tests are machine-scored, as well as by testing software packages. The basic idea that we can capitalize on is that the statistical behavior of "bad" items is fundamentally different from that of "good" items. Of course, the items have to be administered to students in order to obtain the needed statistics. This fact underscores our point of view that tests can be improved by maintaining and developing a pool of "good" items from which future tests will be drawn in part or in whole. This is particularly true for instructors who teach the same course more than once.
Maureen Greenbaum

Sugata Mitra - the professor with his head in the cloud | Education | The Guardian - 16 views

  • “A generation of children has grown up with continuous connectivity to the internet. A few years ago, nobody had a piece of plastic to which they could ask questions and have it answer back. The Greeks spoke of the oracle of Delphi. We’ve created it. People don’t talk to a machine. They talk to a huge collective of people, a kind of hive. Our generation [Mitra is 64] doesn’t see that. We just see a lot of interlinked web pages
  • “Within five years, you will not be able to tell if somebody is consulting the internet or not. The internet will be inside our heads anywhere and at any time. What then will be the value of knowing things? We shall have acquired a new sense. Knowing will have become collective.”
  • if you imagine me and my phone as a single entity, yes. Very soon, asking somebody to read without their phone will be like telling them to read without their glasses.”
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  • Twenty children are asked a “big question” such as “Why do we learn history?”, “Is the universe infinite?”, “Should children ever go to prison?” or “How do bees make honey?” They are then left to find the answers using five computers. The ratio of four children to one computer is deliberate: Mitra insists that the children must collaborate. “There should be chaos, noise, discussion and running about,” he says.
  • . Year 4 children (aged eight to nine) were given questions from GCSE physics and biology papers. After using their Sole computers for 45 minutes, their average test scores on three sets of questions were 25%, 26% and 13%. Three months later – the school having taught nothing on these subjects in the interim – they were tested again, individually and without warning. The scores rose to 57%, 80% and 16% respectively, suggesting the children continued researching the questions in their own time.
  • he says the main benefit of his methods is that children’s self-confidence increases so that they challenge adult perceptions.
  • the propositions that children can benefit from collaborative learning and that banning internet use from exams will get trickier, to the point where it may prove futile. It’s worth remembering that new technologies nearly always deliver less than we expect at first and far more than we expect later on, often in unexpected ways.
Mary Beth  Messner

Grading essays: Humans vs. machine - USATODAY.com - 28 views

  • The testing service compared the results of E-Rater evaluations of students' papers to human grading, and to students' scores on the SAT writing test and the essay portion of the SAT writing test (which is graded by humans). ETS found very high correlations between the E-Rater grades and the SAT grades and, generally, to the human grades of the placement test.
  • In fact, Ramineni said, one of the problems that surfaced in the review was that some humans doing the evaluation were not scoring students' essays on some prompts in consistent ways, based on the rubric used by NJIT.
Brianna Crowley

Adam Kirk Edgerton: Why I Quit Teaching - 53 views

  • Who orders books? A classroom teacher. Who writes the curriculum? A classroom teacher. Who handles discipline? A classroom teacher.
  • Evaluations are done by peers, and the tools are developed by teachers. Teachers are hired by other teachers. There are no outside consultants, no central office administrators, and no superintendents.
  • Let it be the person who pays the electrical bill, who makes sure everyone gets paid, who is a sounding board for teachers. Let it be someone who still has to lesson plan, grade and walk in front of a room of children every day and figure out what's best for them, one day at a time.
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  • given leadership positions while remaining in the classroom for their entire careers.
  • If we continue to treat our teachers like children, what will become of our children?
  • I quit teaching because I was tired of feeling powerless. Tired of watching would-be professionals treated as children, infantilized into silence. Tired of the machine that turns art into artifice for the sake of test scores. Tired of being belittled, disrespected and looked down upon by lawyers, politicians, and decision-makers who see teaching as the province of provincials, the work of housewives that can be done by anyone.
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    "If we continue to treat our teachers like children, what will become of our children?" Although this article is very confrontational, it does offer some solution-focused thinking. Teachers should be pushing our profession in these ways--prompting dialogue and debate among our communities and our faculties. 
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