...In the United States, millions of students partake in what we call standardized testing. Standardized testing is an unfair test that is administered to students and they are scored in a consistent manner. These tests are designed in such a way that the questions and procedures for scoring are homogenously consistent and students are scored in a predetermined, yet standard manner. The performance of a student should not be shown through standardized testing because the results are inaccurate. Standardized tests puts a lot of pressure on educators, students and parents; producing anxiety and causing parents to allow their children to opt out of tests. Standardized tests should be boycotted as a whole in schools because it is an irrelevant and inaccurate way of testing. These tests hinder a student’s overall learning potential. “Teachers agreed that standardized tests are unfair and provides misleading results” (Map and Kennedy 130). The current use of standardized testing does not in fact help educate students with their learning. Too much time is spent testing when it could be spent...
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...themselves at the far ends of a spectrum that I found myself somewhere in the middle on for most of the issues brought up. Waiting for Superman is clearly the work of a non-teacher, as the reforms showcased in the film highlight radical change to teaching staff, the dissolving of teachers unions, and the placement of the child’s needs above the adults. What ‘Superman’ got wrong, point by point is (as stated) the rebuttal to the movie from the view of a teacher. The educator who wrote this essay, Rick Ayers, shows his support for teachers unions, the addressing of the curriculum and method that we teach kids and not the people...
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...Standardized Testing Standardized testing has been a key part in education for awhile now, but how effective is it really? Does it truly grasp the students’ individualities to highlight their unique abilities? Of course it does not, how can it? If this is true, however, why are they still vital to earn a high school diploma? Education was once about the students, not about the score. It was about enjoying the time in the classroom, creating a desire to want to know more. Standardized tests have taken this away from classrooms, they have caused many pupils to not enjoy the material they are taught while also taking the individualism, the one on one individual experiences, out of the classrooms. Education is no longer about the individual student. It is about the student body, making everyone the same or “equal”. Education should be fun. It should make the student desire to learn more. Francine Prose discusses this in her essay, I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read. She talks of how each September she is more and more depressed when she receives her sons’ reading lists for the upcoming school year. Not only have the books they are forced to read not the best choices, but the information from the books is forced down the student’s throats. Students are not given the opportunity to read the books and enjoy them. Upon receiving the their assignments, they are also given worksheets and other assignments,outlining the information and key points they are expected understand...
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...Standardized Testing: An Ineffective Way to Measure Students’ Intelligence High-stakes testing turns many classrooms and schools into prep centers rather than offering rich, engaging, well-rounded instruction. Rote and narrow instruction bores and alienates students, making them tune out and feel they are little more than their scores (FairTest, 2004). High schools exit exams (FairTest, 2008) push many thousands of students out of school. As a result of these factors, urban graduation rates have decreased. Some students see no realistic option other than dropping out; some are deliberately pushed out or fail the tests. Either way, these young people are much more likely to end up in trouble or in prison. ("How Testing Feeds the School-to-Prison Pipeline") According to Peter D. Hart, a research associate for the Association of American Colleges and Universities, standardized tests unfairly measure students’ intelligence and academic performance. Therefore, the tests must be changed drastically or abandoned completely. Educators and parents have vocalized their view on the rising number of standardized tests the government has implemented in efforts to improve education in American schools. In light of the No Child Left Behind legislation under President George W. Bush, the government administers more and more tests to children, predominantly in lower grade levels ("Standardized Testing"). Along with No Child Left Behind, opponents have shown their disapproval of these...
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...Higher education is increasing as the years increase and the importance of grade standardization has increased. The emphasis on GPA, SAT, ACT and other standardized test have been placed on high scale of a students’ future success. Is this nonsense? Some professors feel that these standardizations are the best alternatives as it sets an equal scale for everyone of all ethnicities, genders, and races. Others argue that each individual cannot be grouped in the same category because of their differences in learning and testing strategies. With there being so many different aspects to determine the future of a person, there was a search for a standardization scale to be put in place, ultimately, matching the future of a person with the higher...
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...“Research shows that a fast-paced, multiple-choice format favors males over females. Guessing, a risk males are more likely to take, is rewarded. Since multiple-choice items do not allow for shades of meaning they work against the most typical female thinking style” (“The ACT: Biased, Inaccurate, and Misused”), which makes such assessments unfair. One huge misconception is that these standardized tests set all students on an equal field for evaluation. There is a positive correlation between a student’s performance on ACT and SAT tests and their socioeconomic status. Basically, those that already have an advantage in education are given another advantage in college admissions. Those that can afford preparation material for these assessments are also placed at an advantage against those who cannot afford them. Furthermore, the scoring on these assessments are imprecise, since there are margins of error in the individual tests according to data from the ACT and SAT. “The margins of error, while appearing to be small at 1.43 - 2.20, can actually have significant consequences for applicants when admissions offices or financial aid programs require minimum scores” (“The ACT: Biased, Inaccurate, and Misused”), and a single point can be a crucial...
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...The Intelligent Essay Assessor: Applications to Educational Technology Peter W. Foltz, New Mexico State University Darrell Laham, Knowledge Analysis Technologies Thomas K. Landauer, University of Colorado Abstract The Intelligent Essay Assessor (IEA) is a set of software tools for scoring the quality of essay content. The IEA uses Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), which is both a computational model of human knowledge representation and a method for extracting semantic similarity of words and passages from text. Simulations of psycholinguistic phenomena show that LSA reflects similarities of human meaning effectively. To assess essay quality, LSA is first trained on domain-representative text. Then student essays are characterized by LSA representations of the meaning of the words used, and they are compared with essays of known quality in regard to their degree of conceptual relevance and the amount of relevant content. Over many diverse topics, the IEA scores agreed with human experts as accurately as expert scores agreed with each other. Implications are discussed for incorporating automatic essay scoring in more general forms of educational technology. 1. Introduction While writing is an essential part of the educational process, many instructors find it difficult to incorporate large numbers of writing assignments in their courses due to the effort required to evaluate them. However, the ability to convey information verbally is an important educational achievement...
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...TermPaperWarehouse.com - Free Term Papers, Essays and Research Documents The Research Paper Factory Join Search Browse Saved Papers Home Page » Social Issues Human Trafficking Annotated Bibliography In: Social Issues Human Trafficking Annotated Bibliography Human trafficking An annotated bibliography Web Links Anti-Slavery International http://www.antislavery.org/ Anti-Slavery International's Trafficking Programme comprises three elements: campaigning to end human trafficking, lobbying for victim protection, and research on measures governments take to protect victims of trafficking, especially those who act as witnesses. The web site provides information about both current and historical slavery operations. The UN Global Programme Against Trafficking in Human Beings The Global Programme against Trafficking in Human Beings (GPAT) assists Member States in their efforts to combat trafficking in human beings. It highlights the involvement of organized criminal groups in human trafficking and promotes the development of effective ways of cracking down on perpetrators. The GPAT's' overarching objective is to bring to the foreground the involvement of organized criminal groups in human trafficking and to promote the development of effective criminal justice-related responses. UNICEF UNICEF is mandated by the United Nations General Assembly to advocate for the protection of children's rights, to help meet their basic needs...
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...encountered the cost involved, but I am interested in if anyone has personally dealt with sunk costs and how this may have affected the overall budget or outcome of the project. Earned Value Analysis: I also found when researching the history of EVM that there are 32 criteria that are used to determine an organizatin performance with Earned Value Management Systems. There are 5 categories with a total of 32 criteria. It's an interesting read because so far there is a relationship to the chapters we have read so far. Category 1: Organization ( A lot around Work Breakdown Structure and organization of costs) Category 2: Planning and Budgeting (Scheduling, sequencing, time phase planning for the ability to measure costs against budget, budget against work packages, reserves and undistributed budget.) Category 3: Accounting Considerations (Work Breakdown Structure, Direct costs, indirect costs, allocation and control accounts. Category 4: Analysis and Management Reports (Monthly reporting at control levels, At least monthlyplanned and actual comparisons, implementation of manager actions in relation to earned value informatin, revised estimating of cost at completion. Comparisoons of performance for identification of variances. Category 5: Revisions and Data Maintenance...
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...Privacy Protections a. What are some of the Constitutional protections of privacy? The Fourth Amendments to the United States Constitution provides the “rights of people to be secure in their persons, their houses, families, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures by the federal government.” Courts have used this to imply a right to privacy. However, this privacy provision applies to government searches and is not applicable to private sector employees. According to Jacobsen, J.D, there are no explicit federal "privacy rights" beyond "reproduction, contraception, abortion, marriage and childrearing", and so the notion of a constitutional right to privacy has little bearing on employment law. b. What privacy rights are afforded to public and private sector employees? The restrictions on employer inquiries of applicants at hiring are based mainly on prohibitions against discrimination, rather than on privacy rights. Pre-employment privacy rights for both public and private sector employees are very limited beyond this. Post-employment privacy rights are also often the ancillary effect of discrimination laws. For example, the Americans with the Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) specifically prohibits the disclosure of medical information relating to disabled. In the public sector, two factors govern the permissible extent of intrusion into an individual's affairs, that is, the relation of the subject's job to the line of inquiry, and secondly, the subject's...
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...The purpose of this essay is to describe and analyze the cultural myths and ideologies that surround the knowledge that is being distributed to public schools by examining a history text. A cultural myth refers to “the dominant ideologies of our time” (Chandler). For example, a group of people could have a belief in a myth while another group might believe otherwise. I will analyze a seventh grade history by using the method of semiotics. An examination of the history book shows that children are being deprived from a lot of historical information. In this paper I will argue that the educational system only centers it’s purpose of education and learning on the human capital ideology. This subject is important because like Joel Spring states in “The Knowledge Industry: for many young children these textbook are the only source of knowledge and the information that’s is being distributed to our children is not necessarily true or complete. As a result students are being restricted from learning how to be thoughtful and productive because teachers are being forced to teach according to a strict curriculum. The method of semiotics refers to the study of the way people make meaning. According to Daniel Chandler in “Semiotics For Beginners, a sign is a fundamental unit in the method of semiotics. A sign has two components, a signifier (the carrier of meaning) and a signified (the meaning that has been made). To describe the relationship between the signifier and the signified...
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...Case Study 11: Should a Computer Grade Your Essays? The case study discusses the April 2013 launch of Harvard/MIT’s joint venture MOOC (massively open online course) essay scoring program, utilizing AI (artificial intelligence) technology to grade educational essays and short answers, with immediate feedback and ability to revise, resubmit, and improve grades. In 2012, a group of colleagues, Les Perleman, Mark Shermis, and Ben Hamner, introduced over 16,000, K7-12 standardized school tests to the AES (automated essay scoring software) to compare results of hand-scored essays; the results appeared to produce a more accurate grade, however, no official statistical studies were performed to accurately maintain the claim. Essay Raters (e-Rater), developed by the Educational Testing Service (ETS), allowed Perelman to access, and analyze the technology. ETS uses vocabulary and content to score criteria, such as essay length, conjunctive adverb usage, and large word usage, in combination with paper and word length, words per sentence, and word complexity. The downside is the programs’ inability to differentiate factual from nonfactual information, intent, or meaning. Some educators banned to form the group, Professionals Against Machine Scoring of Student Essays in High-Stakes Assessment; they are concerned educators will reduce writing standards to conform to software constraints. Laudon & Laudon further discuss the probability of lost jobs due to computers taking the...
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... tenure policies, and increasingly on the use of standardized tests, which began in the mid-1800s and has been a huge part of American education. The conspiracy of the government dumbing down education is they are doing this because the government wants an obedient civilization that would be easy to control and have a docile future workforce ,therefore this being said the conspiracy of dumbing down of education is assisting the government but it isn’t benefiting the people by corrupting the education system through the...
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...calculator when responding to an item. A test may be administered formally or informally. An example of an informal test would be a reading test administered by a parent to a child. An example of a formal test would be a final examination administered by a teacher in a classroom or an I.Q. test administered by a psychologist in a clinic. Formal testing often results in a grade or a test score.[1] A test score may be interpreted with regards to a norm or criterion, or occasionally both. The norm may be established independently, or by statisticalanalysis of a large number of participants. A standardized test is any test that is administered and scored in a consistent manner to ensure legal defensibility.[2]Standardized tests are often used in education, professional certification, psychology (e.g., MMPI), the military, and many other fields. A non-standardized test is usually flexible in scope and format, variable in difficulty and significance. Since these tests are usually developed by individual instructors, the format and difficulty of these tests may not be widely adopted or used by other instructors or institutions. A non-standardized test may be used to determine the proficiency level of students, to motivate students to study, and to provide feedback to students. In some...
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...however are school board officials, parents, and even students. Gutting’s main thesis explains how we should be finding a reason as to why students do bad on standardized tests and how schools shouldn’t be so hasty to make changes because every students test differently from each other and one drastic change won’t necessarily fix the problems. Even though I agree with the point he is trying to get across, there are points in his argument where I don’t wholeheartedly agree with and that are weak and could use more substantial evidence. He often contradicts himself and statements he makes are opinionated. Not to mention that the examples he refutes, like the survey he included, are unreliable which goes back to where his argument is weak. There are a couple areas up for improvement, regarding the weak areas and contradicting statements. “What do test scores tell us” begins with telling how standardized testing isn’t used to benefit students, but that it’s used more as an evaluation for teachers and the school system. It then goes on explaining how bad test scores cause “educational reform”, supporting this with evidence...
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