Incredible! Someone actually attempted an answer to the question rather than endlessly re-framing it to suit their irrelevant knowledge and experience. Thank you.
You might also check out the learning apps developed at Terc http://www.terc.edu/products.html where "The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis" was developed. http://www.terc.edu/work/423.html
**dirty secrets of standardized testing industry** How the difficulty of items is determined is its own SNAFU. As an item writer, I learned that the goal was not to test content knowledge or even problem solving but to foster ambiguity such that one "community of interpretation" (a Stanley Fish term from his famous essay on interpreting irreducible tropes in Milton) would likely be divided from another. As your post attests, items that yield the pretty curve are considered successful items, never mind what they actually test.
ETS, whose sister company I used to work for, keeps an army of "psychometricians" to justify and perpetuate their arcane assessment methods, and they keep those PhDs well away from the media or any outsiders. They aren't interested in learning at all, psychometics is the blackbox that protects publishers from lawsuits should anyone whose college prospects and earning potential attempt to sue. Honestly, giving up on the essay question signals a sad resignation to the opacity of clean curves.
Computer adaptive testing is a hot potato because not only do the same people score quite differently when retested, scores can be wildly affected by things like font size, color contrast, and having questions read aloud as well as printed on screen. If that's the case, then content and complexity aren't what's being tested at all.
What does it mean that someone tests well? There's a long list of answers to that. Leaping to the myopic answer that engineers only need to answer the spatial reasoning questions on an IQ test misses the complexity of the problem entirely.
The underground soundsmith Peter Blasser has been making, playing and bartering his paper circuit instruments for plants a looong time now. Hear his "Luteus" samples at http://resipiscent.com and download his paper circuit designs at http://www.ciat-lonbarde.net/paper/index.html
I believe Leonardo Music Journal published an article by him earlier this year too.
You would deign to communicate with people before flying into a power mad rage and cutting off their priviledges??
Komrad, you let us down. Better to rule by fear than by respect. That is the hallmark of human intelligence. Scream, threaten, wear a chaplin moustache, call them ignorant, or better yet, smugly tell them nothing and cut them off.
If you have no policy, then neither do they. So, make up some rules designed to humuliate any and all humans who don't spend their lives thinking about bandwidth. Computers exist for programmers. Punish schoolteachers for taking an interest. One only learns about computers by beginning with Fortran.
Require Fortran classes then. That will effectively keep teachers who might discover valid uses of technology including improved understanding of their students, to just leave well enough alone.
That's only fair. I can't fix a jet so I don't fly, can't fix a car so I don't drive, and can't think outside an arm's length context so I don't think. Slashdot Ubber Alles! Workers... isolate!
Slashdot Mirror
Incredible! Someone actually attempted an answer to the question rather than endlessly re-framing it to suit their irrelevant knowledge and experience. Thank you.
You might also check out the learning apps developed at Terc http://www.terc.edu/products.html
where "The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis" was developed. http://www.terc.edu/work/423.html
**dirty secrets of standardized testing industry**
How the difficulty of items is determined is its own SNAFU. As an item writer, I learned that the goal was not to test content knowledge or even problem solving but to foster ambiguity such that one "community of interpretation" (a Stanley Fish term from his famous essay on interpreting irreducible tropes in Milton) would likely be divided from another. As your post attests, items that yield the pretty curve are considered successful items, never mind what they actually test.
ETS, whose sister company I used to work for, keeps an army of "psychometricians" to justify and perpetuate their arcane assessment methods, and they keep those PhDs well away from the media or any outsiders. They aren't interested in learning at all, psychometics is the blackbox that protects publishers from lawsuits should anyone whose college prospects and earning potential attempt to sue. Honestly, giving up on the essay question signals a sad resignation to the opacity of clean curves.
Computer adaptive testing is a hot potato because not only do the same people score quite differently when retested, scores can be wildly affected by things like font size, color contrast, and having questions read aloud as well as printed on screen. If that's the case, then content and complexity aren't what's being tested at all.
What does it mean that someone tests well? There's a long list of answers to that. Leaping to the myopic answer that engineers only need to answer the spatial reasoning questions on an IQ test misses the complexity of the problem entirely.
The underground soundsmith Peter Blasser has been making, playing and bartering his paper circuit instruments for plants a looong time now. Hear his "Luteus" samples at http://resipiscent.com and download his paper circuit designs at http://www.ciat-lonbarde.net/paper/index.html
I believe Leonardo Music Journal published an article by him earlier this year too.
Achtung!
You would deign to communicate with people before flying into a power mad rage and cutting off their priviledges??
Komrad, you let us down. Better to rule by fear than by respect. That is the hallmark of human intelligence. Scream, threaten, wear a chaplin moustache, call them ignorant, or better yet, smugly tell them nothing and cut them off.
If you have no policy, then neither do they. So, make up some rules designed to humuliate any and all humans who don't spend their lives thinking about bandwidth. Computers exist for programmers. Punish schoolteachers for taking an interest. One only learns about computers by beginning with Fortran.
Require Fortran classes then. That will effectively keep teachers who might discover valid uses of technology including improved understanding of their students, to just leave well enough alone.
That's only fair. I can't fix a jet so I don't fly, can't fix a car so I don't drive, and can't think outside an arm's length context so I don't think. Slashdot Ubber Alles! Workers... isolate!
They must be made to know how smart they are not.