...description: The ENC 1101 capstone project focuses on analyzing and synthesizing ideas from at least two complex texts. At the end of the unit, students should * Interact with a group of texts, explore alternative perspectives, and present a new perspective of their own; * Summarize multiple complex texts indicating understanding of the authors’ arguments and rhetorical strategies; * Develop a focused thesis that indicates their analysis and synthesis of assigned readings to arrive at their own perspective; * Use textual evidence effectively to support claims; * Cite sources appropriately using MLA or other assigned style manual; * Use syntax, punctuation, and spelling effectively in service of rhetorical purpose. Assignment: Your final essay will loosely based on the structure of a ‘literature review.’ As such, it will be either a closed-form, thesis-based structure or a thesis-seeking structure. You will choose one of the following topics and at least two of the assigned articles and create a synthesis essay based on them. Your paper should do the following: 1) introduce your research question and thesis (the answer to your research question and the argument you are defending), 2) summarize the articles from the authors’ perspectives, 3) compare and contrast the themes of the articles according to your research question, and 4) analyze the articles from your perspective and come to a conclusion on your research question using the information from...
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...Standardized Testing Standardized testing is probably one of the most bittersweet aspects of American education. On one hand, It helps us set a baseline of where students are academically and what needs to be approved on in average. On the other, it adds a tremendous amount of stress to some students, and encourages the system to lean to a curriculum that “teaches to test”. In this essay, I will discuss the pros and cons of standardized testing and provide my personal opinions on it in the end. Standardized testing does a pretty good job of establishing a baseline of where students land and what needs to be improved on. “Standardized testing gives parents a good idea of how their children are doing as compared to students across the country and locally.”(Columbia University School and Child Care Search Service 1). This also gives us areas that need to be improved on. Another good thing about standardized testing is that it helps teachers know what material needs to be taught during the year. “Probably the greatest benefit of standardized testing is that teachers and schools are responsible for teaching students what they are required to know for these standardized tests.” (Columbia University School and Child Care Search Service 1). Standardized testing improves international rankings as...
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...Associate Program Material Characteristics of the Expository Essay What Is an Essay? An essay is an important part of your college experience because it requires critical thinking as well as organization and research. Essay is a broad term. Sometimes an essay is just a page long; sometimes, essays are five pages or longer. Essays, however, focus on a single subject and idea. They also have different purposes: to persuade, explain, or entertain. Consider the following essay titles: • “Why You Should Never Vote for a Democrat” • “My Friend Harry Reasoner” • “Cell Phones: Getting the Most for the Least” • “Gay Marriage Does Not Hurt Traditional Marriage” • “How to Write an Essay” How would you categorize the essays above based on the titles? Is “Why You Should Never Vote for a Democrat” a persuasive essay or an entertaining one? Does “How to Write an Essay” explain or persuade? Even within a classification, writers use different types of development and have multiple purposes for their essays. Essay Classifications Writers classify essays in different ways. The following table includes common types of essays as well as examples: Type of Essay Definition Example Expository Uses evidence, examples, or facts to explain a concept or to inform about a topic with a thesis as its base; the information must be presented fairly and in a nonbiased manner “How to Stop Smoking” Persuasive or Argumentative Uses evidence, examples, or facts to persuade your...
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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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...socioeconomic backgrounds, Apison consistently does well on standardized state tests. 72% of their students scored...
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...costs that bring no value to the project, often a result of a mistake or a result of something going wrong in a project. Due to lengthy projects, I have never personally 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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...Homework and Testing 1 Homework and Testing Assigning Homework How much is too much? As with classroom assignments, homework should never be given as busy work. It should have a purpose with a goal. And as I mentioned in the Behavioral Approach to Learning, homework should NEVER be given as punishment. The kid will associate homework with punishment. This may interest you. Harris Cooper (1998) analyzed more than 100 research studies on homework in American schools. He found that homework had a very small connection with test scores at the elementary level. If anything, the more homework an elementary school student had, the more negative their attitude was toward school. Plus it takes away from their social time, which is an important part of growing up. Kids need to learn social skills. Too much homework causes stress, as you probably know very well by now. Kids need to have down time too! Why does homework have such a small effect at the elementary level? One reason is that young children have limited attention spans and are very distractible. It is difficult to do homework in a house that has many distractions. Teachers need to work with parents and help students find a quiet space to do homework. Most professional organization in education agrees that homework should never exceed 10 - 20 minutes per day in grades K - 2. In grades 3 - 6 homework should never exceed 30 - 60 minutes per day. Another reason elementary school children do not benefit much from homework is...
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...Standardized Testing- How Beneficial is it? Student Name Toulmin Model Position Paper English Comp II – 112 Phaire Due Date – mm/dd/yy Word Count – nnn Outline Position Statement: Is ‘No Child Left Behind’ a valid method of assessing school, teacher and student performance? No, I do not think this act is a valid method to assess school, teacher and student performance. Rhetorical Context: This issue will address all the problems that are occurring because of the standardized testing which is taking place in all public schools. This issue is important to parents who have children going to public schools because it gives them an overview of what is wrong with this act. It is also important for the teachers and school administrators since they take some part in shaping the curriculum around standardized testing. Audience Analysis: The audience for this essay will be the parents because they are able to make changes to this act. Many parents may not understand the problems that this act is causing which can be quite harmful for their children. Many parents let the government make laws for the schools, because they think if the government is doing it, it must be right. Claim: The ‘No Child Left Behind’ act is not a valid method to assess school, teacher and student performance. Reasons: There are many reasons why ‘No Child Left Behind is not working. 1. The same tests are used for all students...
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...passing the CPA exam on the first try herself, she decided that she would like to help those who want to take the CPA exam pass on their first try as well. And so she developed a business and marketing plan, convened with various professors to create a comprehensive curriculum, and opened her firm's doors. Instead of the normal review route of using books, software, or online courses, she provided a full service 6 week, 3-6 hours a day review regimen for her clients that include one hour live lectures from various professors, discussions about test taking skills and organizational skills to digest information faster, provided audiotapes that the clients can listen to at home or in their cars, executed timed mini tests as well as practice essay questions, one on one bi weekly client meeting to see how they've progressed and for them to ask questions, and a direct line to her via e mail for any queries the clients may have. She Even guaranteed a repeat course if any of them failed. All of this she offered for 1100. Her passing rates are quite high, although most of her students are second takers. But now she is having problems about her impact on the market, which she currently has 10% of, thanks to her primary competitor NTC, whose long standing reputation and variety of review courses offers attracts tons of...
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...Educator Guide to the 2014 Grade 7 Common Core English Language Arts Test THE UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK Regents of The University MERRYL H. TISCH, Chancellor, B.A., M.A., Ed.D. ................................................................ ANTHONY S. BOTTAR, Vice Chancellor, B.A., J.D. ............................................................... ROBERT M. BENNETT, Chancellor Emeritus, B.A., M.S. ....................................................... JAMES C. DAWSON, A.A., B.A., M.S., Ph.D. .......................................................................... GERALDINE D. CHAPEY, B.A., M.A., Ed.D. ........................................................................... HARRY PHILLIPS, 3rd, B.A., M.S.F.S. .................................................................................... JAMES R. TALLON, Jr., B.A., M.A. .......................................................................................... ROGER B. TILLES, B.A., J.D. ................................................................................................... CHARLES R. BENDIT, B.A. ..................................................................................................... BETTY A. ROSA, B.A., M.S. in Ed., M.S. in Ed., M.Ed., Ed.D. ............................................. LESTER W. YOUNG, Jr., B.S., M.S., Ed.D. .............................................................................. CHRISTINE D. CEA, B.A., M.A., Ph.D. .......................
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...In 2000, President George Bush signed into law the no child left behind act. This act was supposed to help get children caught up to grade level math, reading, and science test scores. After 12 years about 82 percent of all the nations’ schools are considered to be failing academically (Dillon).What is a failing school? A failing school is a school where the majority of its students failed to do well on standardized tests that were provided during the school year. The problem is that these schools are found all over the United States. What can be done? How can we fix these failing schools? Who is to blame? Most people would blame the teacher first and foremost, but I disagree. In this paper I will discuss what we can do to fix schools that are failing academically. I will argue that adding early childhood education classes, changing curriculum, and modifying standardized tests are all effective steps in correcting the problems that failing schools continually face. I will support my argument by using the views of authors such as Alfie Kohn and his ideas of making the curriculum more entertaining to make learning easier, Fred Lunenburg’s ideas that preschool is a critical point to achieve success later on in school, Sam Dillon’s views about how the No child left behind act has hurt more public schools than helped them, and other researchers as well. One step I feel that could help with fixing schools that are failing academically is by adding free early childhood education to...
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...Introduction A. Social Problem Education plays an important role in the way a particular country progresses. The US has always strived for high education standards; however, recent statistics point out that the country has competitively fallen behind when compared to other developed countries. For this reason, education has played an important role in the US agenda for many years. In January 8th, 2002, the US Congress passed a law called “No Child Left Behind Act” (NCLB), which expanded the role of federal government in education. This law strongly emphasizes the implementation of standardized tests in public schools to measure the progress of students as well as to hold teachers and schools accountable for students’ progress. A social problem that the NCLB is trying to fix is the fact that the quality of education in US’ public schools has decreased during the last years. Alarming statistics have shown that the country’s education system is not as internationally competitive as it used to be. For example, according to a report issued by the Council on Foreign Relations, the United States has slipped ten spots in high school and college graduation rates in the past three decades (CFR). Poor education affects the entire country because of the close relation that progress has with having a skillful workforce. Furthermore, other social problems, such as poverty and crime, are indirectly related to inferior education. An extensive body of research has found that people with...
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...was required by my high school, and it was a horrific, four hour long test that I was unfamiliar with. Standardized tests, like the ACT, should be highly revised, if not abolished, due to its inefficient measurement of skill, high levels of stress caused to the students, and its unfairness. Although there are many reasons as to why the ACT is not a reliable test, there are some good qualities it has. The main one is its objectivity: “they are given under nearly identical testing conditions, and are graded by a machine” (Bless). This gives the test some credibility, but in reality, the questions are quite unfair because “objectivity” is different for...
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...No Child Left Behind Act On American Education Education Essay Recently; main concern of teachers, parents and students has been devising ways that can increase test scores. Since the beginning of an implementation of state based NCLB standardized tests, there is an increase in expectations of the parents and teachers in terms of an improvement in test scores. However, these expectations can only be fulfilled when planning and implementation is strategic, while the reality of implementation of NCLB is on the contrary. This paper will describe pros and cons of “No Child Left Behind” act and its effects on American education system. Introduction Originally proposed by the Bush administration under US federal law in 2001, “No Child Left Behind” act was designed in order to provide funding, from federal governments, to different schools in all American states in order to make changes in learning capabilities of students. It was realized at the local government level that educational standards in schools in different states were not being considered for improvement, highlighting failures of local American governments. Various accountability standards have been defined under this law that gives the parents an opportunity to choose schools in which they want their children to be admitted. Thereby, rational that was followed while designing this law was that all children and students within schools would achieve their full academic potential because of improved programs provided in...
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...Criterion SM Online Essay Evaluation: An Application for Automated Evaluation of Student Essays Jill Burstein Educational Testing Service Rosedale Road, 18E Princeton, NJ 08541 jburstein@ets.org Martin Chodorow Department of Psychology Hunter College 695 Park Avenue New York, NY 10021 martin.chodorow@hunter.cuny.edu Claudia Leacock Educational Testing Service Rosedale Road, 18E Princeton, NJ 08541 cleacock@ets.org Abstract This paper describes a deployed educational technology application: the CriterionSM Online Essay Evaluation Service, a web-based system that provides automated scoring and evaluation of student essays. Criterion has two complementary applications: E-rater®, an automated essay scoring system and Critique Writing Analysis Tools, a suite of programs that detect errors in grammar, usage, and mechanics, that identify discourse elements in the essay, and that recognize elements of undesirable style. These evaluation capabilities provide students with feedback that is specific to their writing in order to help them improve their writing skills. Both applications employ natural language processing and machine learning techniques. All of these capabilities outperform baseline algorithms, and some of the tools agree with human judges as often as two judges agree with each other. 2. Application Description Criterion contains two complementary applications that are based on natural language processing (NLP) methods. The scoring application, e-rater®, extracts...
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