A fully developed curriculum is likely to generate a huge amount of potentially useful data on student performance. The IB Diploma Program is a prime example. The IB assessment model encourages students to perform on a wide variety of assessments, each with its own report and standards. It is very difficult to see the trends in student performance and answer even simple questions about the strengths of a particular school’s program. Making sense of the river of data is overwhelming.
Here are some data visualization tools that might be useful to either a teacher looking for ways to show students ways to see information, or administrators who are working with ways to report their school’s progress, or for the casual observer who enjoys a beautiful thing.
The education world – or, the thinkers and writers that dominate it – appears to be desperate to maintain an illusion that it knows what it is doing. The fact is, we know very little about those things that would make up a theory of education: mechanisms for learning new things, how best to activate them, how institutions interact with individuals, how societies impact educational outcomes, how all the variables add up to an educated adult.
New IB Data is available, only from Wandering Academic. The IBO doesn’t even calculate these numbers, but they provoke lots of interesting questions. Is it really true that it’s harder to get a 7 in English than in Physics? Have score distributions changed dramatically over time?
Teachers are important influences in children’s lives. Duh. Interesting research has been conducted on the need to intelligently give praise, to tailor rewards such that they don’t interfere with intrinsic motivation to learn and take risks, and now that even the suggestion of gender bias can influence people’s performance on assessments.
RateMyTeachers.com has 11 million ratings posted, and climbing. Many international schools are listed, and a growing number of teachers are being rated by students and parents (or colleagues.) Are you on the site? What impact will ratings sites like this have on teachers? What impact have anonymous ratings of schools and administrators (ISR) had on the int’l teaching scene?
If you look at Alfie Kohn or those in his “camp”, you’ll notice a distinct trend away from standards-based curricula. The NYTimes is reporting about a proposed single standard for all US public schools. In an increasingly data-driven educational landscape, will standards help raise the level of learning, or will students be forced into modes of learning that limits their individuality and creativity?
The NYTimes highlights a satisfaction survey regarding the services of college counselors…and the results aren’t pretty. But what do people expect? Show me someone who can actively manage 1,000 different contacts in their social network, and I’ll show you a queen ant. Literally. Whatever, just read this.
A professional economist and close associate of the Wandering Academic (he is Nate Clinton, a director of product management at Thomson Reuters, former analyst at the Federal Reserve) has done a short analysis of the School Rankings numbers. The results? IB diploma scores and SAT composite scores are not well correlated. Read to see his visualization and comments.
" http://t.co/YBHoykFy Shakespeare w/ an iPad. Focus on integration, not tech focused. Tech is a tool to enhance learning. Comments welcome. " — wanderacademic
