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It is not until you change your identity to match your life blueprint that you will understand why everything in the past never worked.
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Shannon L. Alder
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educators best serve students by helping them be more self-reflective. The only way any of us can improve—as Coach Graham taught me—is if we develop a real ability to assess ourselves. If we can’t accurately do that, how can we tell if we’re getting better or worse?
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Randy Pausch (The Last Lecture)
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When students are not asked to assess, but only to remember, they do not learn how to assess or how to think for themselves.
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James W. Loewen (Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong)
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A bad curriculum well taught is invariably a better experience for students than a good curriculum badly taught: pedagogy trumps curriculum. Or more precisely, pedagogy is curriculum, because what matters is how things are taught, rather than what is taught.
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Dylan Wiliam (Embedded Formative Assessment)
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For example, students of policy have noted that the availability heuristic
helps explain why some issues are highly salient in the public’s mind while
others are neglected. People tend to assess the relative importance of
issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is
largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media
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Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
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The greatest impact on learning is the daily lived experiences of students in classrooms, and that is determined much more by how teachers teach than by what they teach.
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Dylan Wiliam (Embedded Formative Assessment)
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One problem with the systems of assessment that use letters and grades is that they are usually light on description and heavy on comparison. Students are sometimes given grades without really knowing what they mean, and teachers sometimes give grades without being completely sure why. A second problem is that a single letter or number cannot convey the complexities of the process that it is meant to summarize. And some outcomes cannot be adequately expressed in this way at all. As the noted educator Elliot Eisner once put it, “Not everything important is measurable and not everything measurable is important.
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Ken Robinson (Creative Schools: Revolutionizing Education from the Ground Up)
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forward-thinking teachers and school administrators across the country are creating a whole range of alternatives to cookie-cutter teaching and evaluation methods, such as the use of student portfolios and exhibitions in addition to conventional exams to assess students' progress.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton (It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us)
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As soon as students get a grade, the learning stops. We may not like it, but the research reviewed here shows that this is a relatively stable feature of how human minds work.
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Dylan Wiliam (Embedded Formative Assessment)
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Most of what our students need to know hasn’t been discovered or invented yet. “Learning how to learn” used to be an optional extra in education; today, it’s a survival skill.
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Dylan Wiliam (Embedding Formative Assessment: Practical Techniques for K-12 Classrooms)
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Characteristics of sound feedback include that it should be frequent, give students a clear picture of their progress and how they might improve, and provide encouragement.
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Robert J. Marzano (Classroom Assessment and Grading That Work)
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feedback should cause thinking. It should be focused; it should relate to the learning goals that have been shared with the students; and it should be more work for the recipient than the donor. Indeed, the whole purpose of feedback should be to increase the extent to which students are owners of their own learning,
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Dylan Wiliam (Embedded Formative Assessment)
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Use two-way communication on oral exams to check the students' knowledge, not their attitudes. Checking attitudes can lead to the slippery area of subjective assessment.
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Eraldo Banovac
“
Anytime you make the work public, set the bar high, and are transparent about the steps to make a high-quality product, kids will deliver.
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Ron Berger (Leaders of Their Own Learning: Transforming Schools Through Student-Engaged Assessment)
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Assessment is about teachers and not about students.
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Deepa Bhushan
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The teacher’s job is not to transmit knowledge, nor to facilitate learning. It is to engineer effective learning environments for the students. The key features of effective learning environments are that they create student engagement and allow teachers, learners, and their peers to ensure that the learning is proceeding in the intended direction. The only way we can do this is through assessment. That is why assessment is, indeed, the bridge between teaching and learning.
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Dylan Wiliam (Embedded Formative Assessment)
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experience simply did not create skill in a wide range of real-world scenarios, from college administrators assessing student potential to psychiatrists predicting patient performance to human resources professionals
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David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
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It is essential that we develop a learning space where failure is positive, as it is a catalyst for growth and change. Students need to recognize that taking a risk and not succeeding does not mean they are failing: It means they need to try another way. After
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Starr Sackstein (Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School (Hack Learning #3))
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Most of us know intuitively that a score on a personality test, a rank on a standardized assessment, a grade point average, or a rating on a performance review doesn’t reflect your, or your child’s, or your students’, or your employees’ abilities. Yet the concept of average as a yardstick for measuring individuals has been so thoroughly ingrained in our minds that we rarely question it seriously.
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Todd Rose (The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness)
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Being supportive and building students’ confidence is not accomplished by blindly telling them they are doing a great job every day. It involves assessing weaknesses and strengths and delivering feedback in a timely manner so that they can build their skills to complete the task at hand.
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Oran Tkatchov (Success for Every Student: A Guide to Teaching and Learning)
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The explosion of paperwork, in turn, is a direct result of the introduction of corporate management techniques, which are always justified as ways of increasing efficiency, by introducing competition at every level. What these management techniques invariably end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell each other things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of our students’ job and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors, institutes, conference workshops, and universities themselves, which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors. Marketing and PR thus come to engulf every aspect of university life.
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David Graeber (The Utopia of Rules)
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Over recent years, [there's been] a strong tendency to require assessment of children and teachers so that [teachers] have to teach to tests and the test determines what happens to the child, and what happens to the teacher...that's guaranteed to destroy any meaningful educational process: it means the teacher cannot be creative, imaginative, pay attention to individual students' needs, that a student can't pursue things [...] and the teacher's future depends on it as well as the students'...the people who are sitting in the offices, the bureaucrats designing this - they're not evil people, but they're working within a system of ideology and doctrines, which turns what they're doing into something extremely harmful [...] the assessment itself is completely artificial; it's not ranking teachers in accordance with their ability to help develop children who reach their potential, explore their creative interests and so on [...] you're getting some kind of a 'rank,' but it's a 'rank' that's mostly meaningless, and the very ranking itself is harmful. It's turning us into individuals who devote our lives to achieving a rank, not into doing things that are valuable and important.
It's highly destructive...in, say, elementary education, you're training kids this way [...] I can see it with my own children: when my own kids were in elementary school (at what's called a good school, a good-quality suburban school), by the time they were in third grade, they were dividing up their friends into 'dumb' and 'smart.' You had 'dumb' if you were lower-tracked, and 'smart' if you were upper-tracked [...] it's just extremely harmful and has nothing to do with education. Education is developing your own potential and creativity. Maybe you're not going to do well in school, and you'll do great in art; that's fine. It's another way to live a fulfilling and wonderful life, and one that's significant for other people as well as yourself. The whole idea is wrong in itself; it's creating something that's called 'economic man': the 'economic man' is somebody who rationally calculates how to improve his/her own status, and status means (basically) wealth. So you rationally calculate what kind of choices you should make to increase your wealth - don't pay attention to anything else - or maybe maximize the amount of goods you have.
What kind of a human being is that? All of these mechanisms like testing, assessing, evaluating, measuring...they force people to develop those characteristics. The ones who don't do it are considered, maybe, 'behavioral problems' or some other deviance [...] these ideas and concepts have consequences. And it's not just that they're ideas, there are huge industries devoted to trying to instill them...the public relations industry, advertising, marketing, and so on. It's a huge industry, and it's a propaganda industry. It's a propaganda industry designed to create a certain type of human being: the one who can maximize consumption and can disregard his actions on others.
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Noam Chomsky
“
students of policy have noted that the availability heuristic helps explain why some issues are highly salient in the public’s mind while others are neglected. People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media.
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Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
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For example, students of policy have noted that the availability heuristic helps explain why some issues are highly salient in the public’s mind while others are neglected. People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media.
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Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
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Playing to passion when you can will keep students motivated and working toward mastery.
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Starr Sackstein (Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School (Hack Learning #3))
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Students would be assessed on effort rather than skill. You didn't have to be a natural athlete to do well in gym.
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John J. Ratey (Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain)
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Grades ultimately end up being a power tool that serves the teacher but not the student.
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Starr Sackstein (Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School (Hack Learning #3))
“
Beyond simply rewording the standard into teacher-friendly, student-friendly language, teachers need to tightly align these standards with their curriculum, instruction, and assessment.
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Austin Buffum (Simplifying Response to Intervention: Four Essential Guiding Principles (What Principals Need to Know))
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Formative assessments nurture hope and say to students, 'You might not get this yet, but you will. Here is something else you can try that might help you understand and improve.' Formative assessment empowers teachers and students because it gives them specific information about individual performance. When teachers share the information with students, students have a concrete way to improve.
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Cris Tovani (So What Do They Really Know?: Assessment That Informs Teaching and Learning)
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The faculty and students share ownership of the learning outcomes; the students assume responsibility for their learning, and the faculty assumes responsibility for providing appropriate resources for that learning.
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Tina Goodyear (Competency-Based Education and Assessment: The Excelsior Experience)
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there is a significant body of research that shows that one hour students spend devising questions about what they have been learning with correct solutions is more effective than one hour spent completing practice tests
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Dylan Wiliam (Embedding Formative Assessment: Practical Techniques for K-12 Classrooms)
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Open-minded people genuinely believe they could be wrong; the questions that they ask are genuine. They also assess their relative believability to determine whether their primary role should be as a student, a teacher, or a peer.
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Ray Dalio (Principles: Life and Work)
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It has long been known that learners remember responses they generate themselves better than those responses that are given to them, and this is now often called the generation effect (Slamecka & Graf, 1978). In particular, one hour students spend writing test questions on what they have been studying results in more learning for them than one hour spent working with a study guide, answering practice tests, or leaving the students to their own devices (Foos, Mora, & Tkacz, 1994).
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Dylan Wiliam (Embedding Formative Assessment: Practical Techniques for K-12 Classrooms)
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Three Big Ideas That Drive the Work of a PLC The essence of the PLC process is captured in three big ideas: 1. The purpose of our school is to ensure all students learn at high levels. 2. Helping all students learn requires a collaborative and collective effort. 3. To assess our effectiveness in helping all students learn we must focus on results—evidence of student learning—and use results to inform and improve our professional practice and respond to students who need intervention or enrichment.
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Richard DuFour (Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work TM)
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This strange new test called PISA, which stood for the Program for International Student Assessment. Instead of a typical test question, which might ask which combination of coins you needed to buy something, PISA asked you to design your own coins, right there in the test booklet.
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Amanda Ripley (The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way)
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In the end, educators best serve students by helping them be more self-reflective. The only way any of us can improve—as Coach Graham taught me—is if we develop a real ability to assess ourselves. If we can’t accurately do that, how can we tell if we’re getting better or worse? Some
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Randy Pausch (The Last Lecture)
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Assessment must be a conversation, a narrative that enhances students’ understanding of what they know, what they can do, and what needs further work. Perhaps even more important, they need to understand how to make improvements and how to recognize when legitimate growth has occurred.
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Starr Sackstein (Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School (Hack Learning #3))
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You may ask whether I have changed my own educational practice and assessment. I have. There are no “final” exams at the end of the semester in my classes. Instead, I split my courses up into thirds so that students only have to study a handful of lectures at a time. Furthermore, none of the exams are cumulative. It’s a tried-and-true effect in the psychology of memory, described as mass versus spaced learning. As with a fine-dining experience, it is far more preferable to separate the educational meal into smaller courses, with breaks in between to allow for digestion, rather than attempt to cram all of those informational calories down in one go. In
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Matthew Walker (Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams)
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Assessment centers on demonstrated competencies, not memorized content. Standardized tests are used thoughtfully to identify and assist students lagging in “learning how to learn” skills. Students teach and learn from each other. They learn to make the most of online resources and machine intelligence and draw on adults for guidance.
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Ted Dintersmith (What School Could Be: Insights and Inspiration from Teachers across America)
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Averaged scores say very little about actual learning: any number of students can earn a B for many different combinations of reasons. A gifted student who does little work may receive the same grade as a struggling student who has improved steadily throughout the course or a student who started off strongly but performed poorly in the last quarter.
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Starr Sackstein (Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School (Hack Learning #3))
“
Educational achievements of US students (or a lack thereof) are scrutinized with every new edition of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA. The latest results (2018) for 15-year-olds show that, in math, the United States ranks just below Russia, Slovakia, and Spain, but far
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Vaclav Smil (Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World)
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Conversations about grading weren’t like conversations about classroom management or assessment design, which teachers approached with openness and in deference to research. Instead, teachers talked about grading in a language of morals about the “real world” and beliefs about students; grading seemed to tap directly into the deepest sense of who teachers were in their classroom.
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Joe Feldman (Grading for Equity: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How It Can Transform Schools and Classrooms)
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Ultimately, students—not only teachers—must be able to use standards to guide efforts toward achievement and mastery. Implementation of new standards must be done in a manner that ensures that they result in different experiences for students; curriculum, instruction, assessment, and rubrics should look different in a classroom where a new set of standards is being used to guide student learning.
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Tony Frontier (Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School)
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In the United States, a consistent finding from the National Assessment of Educational Progress is that students at all levels of testing (ages nine, thirteen, and seventeen) are generally able to show mastery of the procedures taught, but struggle to apply their knowledge to problem-solving situations that are not clear-cut matters of applying a rule (Carpenter, Corbitt, Kepner, Lindquist, & Reys, 1980).
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Ron Ritchhart (Creating Cultures of Thinking: The 8 Forces We Must Master to Truly Transform Our Schools)
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Show vulnerability when assessing a difficult situation, but present a clear path forward. Become a student of the people you manage: avoid telling people what to feel, listen carefully, and manage individually. Prioritize yourself and seek support from other leaders to avoid emotional leaks that negatively affect your reports. Understand the challenges you and others may face in leadership positions and take steps to reduce them.
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Liz Fosslien (No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work)
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A healthy and ideal system of education would be where a teacher would patiently impart knowledge, instead of curriculum, upon the students, only after assessing their acceptability – where a student would acquire knowledge in order to learn, not to earn – where the parents would be willing to make necessary sacrifices in order to adorn their child with curiosity and thereafter nourish that curiosity, regardless of how absurdly impractical it becomes to the eyes of the society.
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Abhijit Naskar (The Education Decree)
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Effective curriculum, instruction, and assessment can occur without textbooks or technology. New resources can be used in a manner that augments the quality of the curriculum and transforms student learning. Schools and districts that most effectively leverage the acquisition of new materials invest significant time, effort, and energy in establishing the professional skills and strategies, standards, assessments, and curriculum that will be used to drive students' use of those resources.
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Tony Frontier (Five Levers to Improve Learning: How to Prioritize for Powerful Results in Your School)
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Professor Mary Main at the University of California, Berkeley, formerly a student of Dr. Ainsworth’s, developed an accurate means of assessing an adult’s childhood attachment relationship patterns with his parents. Her technique considers primarily not what a person said in response to questions but how he said it. The patterns of people’s speech and the key words they “happen” to employ are more meaningful descriptors of their childhoods than what they consciously believe they are communicating.
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Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No)
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What makes the SAT bad is that it has nothing to do with what kids learn in high school. As a result, it creates a sort of shadow curriculum that furthers the goals of neither educators nor students.… The SAT has been sold as snake oil; it measured intelligence, verified high school GPA, and predicted college grades. In fact, it’s never done the first two at all, nor a particularly good job at the third.” Yet students who don’t test well or who aren’t particularly strong at the kind of reasoning the SAT assesses can find themselves making compromises on their collegiate futures—all because we’ve come to accept that intelligence comes with a number. This notion is pervasive, and it extends well beyond academia. Remember the bell‐shaped curve we discussed earlier? It presents itself every time I ask people how intelligent they think they are because we’ve come to define intelligence far too narrowly. We think we know the answer to the question, “How intelligent are you?” The real answer, though, is that the question itself is the wrong one to ask.
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Ken Robinson (The Element - How finding your passion changes everything)
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So,” Will begins, “do you play ball as well as you run?”
I laugh a little. I can’t help it. He’s sweet and disarming and my nerves are racing. “Not even close.”
The conversation goes no further as we move up in our lines. Catherine looks over her shoulder at me, her wide sea eyes assessing. Like she can’t quite figure me out. My smile fades and I look away. She can never figure me out. I can never let her. Never let anyone here.
She faces me with her arms crossed. “You make friends fast. Since freshman year, I’ve spoken to like . . .” She paused and looks upward as though mentally counting. “Three, no—four people. And you’re number four.”
I shrug. “He’s just a guy.”
Catherine squares up at the free-throw line, dribbles a few times, and shoots. The ball swished cleanly through the net. She catches it and tosses it back to me.
I try copying her moves, but my ball flies low, glides beneath the backboard. I head to the end of the line again.
Will’s already waiting it half-court, letting others go before him. My face warms at his obvious stall.
“You weren’t kidding,” he teases over the thunder of basketballs.
“Did you make it?” I ask, wishing I had looked while he shot.
“Yeah.”
“Of course,” I mock.
He lets another kid go before him. I do the same. Catherine is several ahead of me now.
His gaze scans me, sweeping over my face and hair with deep intensity, like he’s memorizing my features. “Yeah, well. I can’t run like you.”
I move up in line, but when I sneak a look behind me, he’s looking back, too.
“Wow,” Catherine murmurs in her smoky low voice as she falls into line beside me. “I never knew it happened like that.”
I snap my gaze to her. “What?”
“You know. Romeo and Juliet stuff. Love at first sight and all that.”
“It’s not like that,” I say quickly.
“You could have fooled me.” We’re up again. Catherine takes her shot. It swishes cleanly through the hoop.
When I shoot, the ball bounces hard off the backboard and flies wildly through the air, knocking the coach in the head. I slap a hand over my mouth. The coach barely catches herself from falling. Several students laugh. She glares at me and readjusts her cap.
With a small wave of apology, I head back to the end of the line.
Will’s there, fighting laughter. “Nice,” he says. “Glad I’m downcourt of you.”
I cross my arms and resist smiling, resist letting myself feel good around him. But he makes it hard. I want to smile. I want to like him, to be around him, to know him. “Happy to amuse you.”
His smile slips then, and he’s looking at me with that strange intensity again. Only I understand. I know why. He must remember . . . must recognize me on some level even though he can’t understand it.
“You want to go out?” he asks suddenly.
I blink. “As in a date?”
“Yes. That’s what a guy usually means when he asks that question.
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Sophie Jordan (Firelight (Firelight, #1))
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Assessment can be either formal and/or informal measures that gather information. In education, meaningful assessment is data that guides and informs the teacher and/or stakeholders of students' abilities, strategies, performance, content knowledge, feelings and/or attitudes. Information obtained is used to make educational judgements or evaluative statements. Most useful assessment is data which is used to adjust curriculum in order to benefit the students. Assessment should be used to inform instruction. Diagnosis and assessment should document literacy in real-world contexts using data as performance indicators of students' growth and development.
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Dan Greathouse & kathleen Donalson
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Student-engaged assessment involves students in underst anding and in vesting in their own growth. It changes the primary role of assessment from evaluating and ranking students to motivating them to learn. It empowers students with the understanding of where they need to go as learners and how to get there. It builds the independence, critical thinking skills, perseverance, and self-reflective understanding students need for college and careers and that is required by the Common Core State Standards. And, because student-engaged assess ment practices demand reflection, collaboration, and responsibility, they shepherd students toward becoming positive citizens and human beings.
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Ron Berger (Leaders of Their Own Learning: Transforming Schools Through Student-Engaged Assessment)
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If collaboration is a headache for learning in the workplace, it’s hard to know where to start with schools. First, most schools don’t call it ‘sharing’ anyway – they call it ‘cheating’. Think about it for a moment: the kids who are now in school will be entering a workplace where internal and external collaboration is the work. We prepare them for this interconnected world, by insisting that almost everything they do, every piece of work they submit, is their own work, not the fruits of working with others, because every student has to have an individual, rigorously assessed, accountable grade – if they don’t, the entire examinations system collapses like a deck of cards. Except it doesn’t.
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David Price (Open: How We’ll Work, Live and Learn In The Future)
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Jobs also attacked America’s education system, saying that it was hopelessly antiquated and crippled by union work rules. Until the teachers’unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform. Teachers should be treated as professionals, he said, not as industrial assembly- line workers. Principals should be able to hire and fire them based on how good they were. Schools should be staying open until at least 6 p.m. and be in session eleven months of the year. It was absurd, he added, that American classrooms were still based on teachers standing at a board and using textbooks. All books, learning materials, and assessments should be digital and interactive, tailored to each student and providing feedback in real time.
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Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
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students of policy have noted that the availability heuristic helps explain why some issues are highly salient in the public’s mind while others are neglected. People tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory—and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media. Frequently mentioned topics populate the mind even as others slip away from awareness. In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the public’s mind. It is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media. Because public interest is most easily aroused by dramatic events and by celebrities, media feeding frenzies are common.
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Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
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What would a final exam look like in a course organized around a complex problem that must be considered in the light of several disciplines? Students would be asked to write an extended take-home essay about "what it means to be an American."-- and they would know from the first day of class that this was the final exam question.
The second part of the final exam would require students to present and defend their papers in a public exhibition where parents would observe and ask questions. The Students’ oral and written work would be assessed on their ability to display a range of evidence to make their points. They would have to meet a performance standard to get a Merit Badge in American Studies.” -- this is the essence of the digital portfolio. (page 139)
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Tony Wagner (Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era)
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Finnish education appears paradoxical to outside observers because it seems to break a lot of the rules. In Finland, “less is more.” Children don’t start academics1 until the year they turn seven. They have a lot of recess (ten to fifteen minutes every forty-five minutes, even through high school), shorter school hours than we do in the United States (Finnish children spend nearly three hundred fewer hours2 in elementary school per year than Americans), and the lightest homework load of any industrialized nation. There are no gifted programs, few private schools, and no high-stakes national standardized tests. Yet over the past decade, Finland has consistently performed at the top on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given to fifteen-year-olds in nations around the world. While American children3 usually hover around the middle of the pack on this test, Finland’s excel.
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Christine Gross-Loh (Parenting Without Borders: Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us)
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The modern educational system provides numerous other examples of reality bowing down to written records. When measuring the width of my desk, the yardstick I am using matters little. My desk remains the same width regardless of whether I say it is 200 centimetres or 78.74 inches. However, when bureaucracies measure people, the yardsticks they choose make all the difference. When schools began assessing people according to precise marks, the lives of millions of students and teachers changed dramatically. Marks are a relatively new invention. Hunter-gatherers were never marked for their achievements, and even thousands of years after the Agricultural Revolution, few educational establishments used precise marks. A medieval apprentice cobbler did not receive at the end of the year a piece of paper saying he has got an A on shoelaces but a C minus on buckles. An undergraduate in Shakespeare’s day left Oxford with one of only two possible results – with a degree, or without one. Nobody thought of giving one student a final mark of 74 and another student 88.6
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Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
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Study Questions Define the terms deaf and hard of hearing. Why is it important to know the age of onset, type, and degree of hearing loss? What is the primary difference between prelingual and postlingual hearing impairments? List the four major types of hearing loss. Describe three different types of audiological evaluations. What are some major areas of development that are usually affected by a hearing impairment? List three major causes of hearing impairment. What issues are central to the debate over manual and oral approaches? Define the concept of a Deaf culture. What is total communication, and how can it be used in the classroom? Describe the bilingual-bicultural approach to educating pupils with hearing impairments. In what two academic areas do students with hearing impairments usually lag behind their classmates? Why is early identification of a hearing impairment critical? Why do professionals assess the language and speech abilities of individuals with hearing impairments? List five indicators of a possible hearing loss in the classroom. What are three indicators in children that may predict success with a cochlear implant? Identify five strategies a classroom teacher can use to promote communicative skills and enhance independence in the transition to adulthood. Describe how to check a hearing aid. How can technology benefit individuals with a hearing impairment?
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Richard M. Gargiulo (Special Education in Contemporary Society: An Introduction to Exceptionality)
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The reformers believe that scores will go up if it is easy to fire teachers and if unions are weakened. But is this true? No. The only test scores that can be used comparatively are those of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, because it is a no-stakes test. No one knows who will take it, no one knows what will be on the test, no student takes the full test, and the results are not reported for individuals or for schools. There is no way to prepare for NAEP, so there is no test prep. There are no rewards or punishments attached to it, so there is no reason to cheat, to teach to the test, or to game the system. So, let’s examine the issues at hand using NAEP scores as a measure. The states that consistently have the highest test scores are Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Consistently ranking at the bottom are states in the South and the District of Columbia. The highest-ranking states have strong teachers’ unions and until recently had strong tenure protections for teachers. The lowest-ranking states do not have strong teachers’ unions, and their teachers have few or no job protections. There seems to be no correlation between having a strong union and having low test scores; if anything, it appears that the states with the strongest unions have the highest test scores. The lowest-performing states have one thing in common, and that is high poverty. The District of Columbia has a strong union and high poverty; it also has intense racial isolation in its schools. It has very low test scores. Most of the cities that rank at the very bottom on NAEP have teachers’ unions, and they have two things in common: high poverty and racial isolation.
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Diane Ravitch (Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools)
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It may seem paradoxical to claim that stress, a physiological mechanism vital to life, is a cause of illness. To resolve this apparent contradiction, we must differentiate between acute stress and chronic stress. Acute stress is the immediate, short-term body response to threat. Chronic stress is activation of the stress mechanisms over long periods of time when a person is exposed to stressors that cannot be escaped either because she does not recognize them or because she has no control over them. Discharges of nervous system, hormonal output and immune changes constitute the flight-or-fight reactions that help us survive immediate danger. These biological responses are adaptive in the emergencies for which nature designed them. But the same stress responses, triggered chronically and without resolution, produce harm and even permanent damage. Chronically high cortisol levels destroy tissue. Chronically elevated adrenalin levels raise the blood pressure and damage the heart. There is extensive documentation of the inhibiting effect of chronic stress on the immune system.
In one study, the activity of immune cells called natural killer (NK) cells were compared in two groups: spousal caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s disease, and age- and health-matched controls. NK cells are front-line troops in the fight against infections and against cancer, having the capacity to attack invading micro-organisms and to destroy cells with malignant mutations. The NK cell functioning of the caregivers was significantly suppressed, even in those whose spouses had died as long as three years previously. The caregivers who reported lower levels of social support also showed the greatest depression in immune activity — just as the loneliest medical students had the most impaired immune systems under the stress of examinations. Another study of caregivers assessed the efficacy of immunization against influenza. In this study 80 per cent among the non-stressed control group developed immunity against the virus, but only 20 per cent of the Alzheimer caregivers were able to do so. The stress of unremitting caregiving inhibited the immune system and left people susceptible to influenza. Research has also shown stress-related delays in tissue repair.
The wounds of Alzheimer caregivers took an average of nine days longer to heal than those of controls. Higher levels of stress cause higher cortisol output via the HPA axis, and cortisol inhibits the activity of the inflammatory cells involved in wound healing. Dental students had a wound deliberately inflicted on their hard palates while they were facing immunology exams and again during vacation. In all of them the wound healed more quickly in the summer. Under stress, their white blood cells produced less of a substance essential to healing. The oft-observed relationship between stress, impaired immunity and illness has given rise to the concept of “diseases of adaptation,” a phrase of Hans Selye’s. The flight-or-fight response, it is argued, was indispensable in an era when early human beings had to confront a natural world of predators and other dangers. In civilized society, however, the flight-fight reaction is triggered in situations where it is neither necessary nor helpful, since we no longer face the same mortal threats to existence. The body’s physiological stress mechanisms are often triggered inappropriately, leading to disease.
There is another way to look at it. The flight-or-fight alarm reaction exists today for the same purpose evolution originally assigned to it: to enable us to survive. What has happened is that we have lost touch with the gut feelings designed to be our warning system. The body mounts a stress response, but the mind is unaware of the threat. We keep ourselves in physiologically stressful situations, with only a dim awareness of distress or no awareness at all.
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Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
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The modern educational system provides numerous other examples of reality bowing down to written records. When measuring the width of my desk, the yardstick I am using matters little. My desk remains the same width regardless of whether I say it is 200 centimetres or 78.74 inches. However, when bureaucracies measure people, the yardsticks they choose make all the difference. When schools began assessing people according to precise marks, the lives of millions of students and teachers changed dramatically. Marks are a relatively new invention. Hunter-gatherers were never marked for their achievements, and even thousands of years after the Agricultural Revolution, few educational establishments used precise marks. A medieval apprentice cobbler did not receive at the end of the year a piece of paper saying he has got an A on shoelaces but a C minus on buckles. An undergraduate in Shakespeare’s day left Oxford with one of only two possible results – with a degree, or without one. Nobody thought of giving one student a final mark of 74 and another student 88.6 Credit 1.24 24. A European map of Africa from the mid-nineteenth century. The Europeans knew very little about the African interior, which did not prevent them from dividing the continent and drawing its borders. Only the mass educational systems of the industrial age began using precise marks on a regular basis. Since both factories and government ministries became accustomed to thinking in the language of numbers, schools followed suit. They started to gauge the worth of each student according to his or her average mark, whereas the worth of each teacher and principal was judged according to the school’s overall average. Once bureaucrats adopted this yardstick, reality was transformed. Originally, schools were supposed to focus on enlightening and educating students, and marks were merely a means of measuring success. But naturally enough, schools soon began focusing on getting high marks. As every child, teacher and inspector knows, the skills required to get high marks in an exam are not the same as a true understanding of literature, biology or mathematics. Every child, teacher and inspector also knows that when forced to choose between the two, most schools will go for the marks.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
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What are the path of love and the path of meditation? There are basically two different paths to enlightenment. These two paths are The path of love and The path of meditation.
The path of love is the female path to enlightenment and The path of meditation is the male path to enlightenment. The path of love is the path of love, joy, relationships, devotion and surrender. The path of meditation is the path of meditation, silence, aloneness and freedom.
These two paths has different ways, but they have the same goal. Through love and surrender the person that walks The path of love discovers the inner silence. Through meditation and aloneness the person that walks The path of meditation discovers the inner source of love. These two paths are like climbing the mountain of enlightenment through different routes, but the two paths are meeting on the summit of the mountain - and discover an inner integration between love and meditation, between relating and aloneness.
Before I accept to work with a student now, I make an intuitive and clairvoyant evaluation about which spiritual paths that the student has walked before in previous lives. This intuitive assessment gives information about the spiritual level that the student has attained, and it also makes it easier to guide the person spiritually if he has followed a certain path in the past.
A female student of mine laughed recently when I told her that she had followed The path of love in several past lives. She commented: "You have told me three times now that I have walked the path of love and silence, but with my head I still do not understand it." But this overall assessment of her spiritual growth uptil now, and of the spiritual paths that she had walked, made all the pieces of her life puzzle fit together - and brought a new, creative light to all her life choices in her current life.
A male student of mine, who was a Tibetan monk in a previous life, walks The path of meditation, and I notice how I change my language and the methods that I recommend when I guide him along the path of meditation.
I now work with students who walk both The path of love and The path of meditation, which also allows me to discover a deeper integration of love and meditation on my path to enlightenment.
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Swami Dhyan Giten (Presence - Working from Within. The Psychology of Being)
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The educational goal of self-esteem seems to habituate young people to work that lacks objective standards and revolves instead around group dynamics. When self-esteem is artificially generated, it becomes more easily manipulable, a product of social technique rather than a secure possession of one’s own based on accomplishments. Psychologists find a positive correlation between repeated praise and “shorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions.” 36 The more children are praised, the more they have a stake in maintaining the resulting image they have of themselves; children who are praised for being smart choose the easier alternative when given a new task. 37 They become risk-averse and dependent on others. The credential loving of college students is a natural response to such an education, and prepares them well for the absence of objective standards in the job markets they will enter; the validity of your self-assessment is known to you by the fact it has been dispensed by gatekeeping institutions. Prestigious fellowships, internships, and degrees become the standard of self-esteem. This is hardly an education for independence, intellectual adventurousness, or strong character. “If you don’t vent the drain pipe like this, sewage gases will seep up through the water in the toilet, and the house will stink of shit.” In the trades, a master offers his apprentice good reasons for acting in one way rather than another, the better to realize ends the goodness of which is readily apparent. The master has no need for a psychology of persuasion that will make the apprentice compliant to whatever purposes the master might dream up; those purposes are given and determinate. He does the same work as the apprentice, only better. He is able to explain what he does to the apprentice, because there are rational principles that govern it. Or he may explain little, and the learning proceeds by example and imitation. For the apprentice there is a progressive revelation of the reasonableness of the master’s actions. He may not know why things have to be done a certain way at first, and have to take it on faith, but the rationale becomes apparent as he gains experience. Teamwork doesn’t have this progressive character. It depends on group dynamics, which are inherently unstable and subject to manipulation. On a crew,
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Matthew B. Crawford (Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work)
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told my people that I wanted only the best, whatever it took, wherever they came from, whatever it cost. We assembled thirty people, the brightest cybersecurity minds we have. A few are on loan, pursuant to strict confidentiality agreements, from the private sector—software companies, telecommunications giants, cybersecurity firms, military contractors. Two are former hackers themselves, one of them currently serving a thirteen-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. Most are from various agencies of the federal government—Homeland Security, CIA, FBI, NSA. Half our team is devoted to threat mitigation—how to limit the damage to our systems and infrastructure after the virus hits. But right now, I’m concerned with the other half, the threat-response team that Devin and Casey are running. They’re devoted to stopping the virus, something they’ve been unable to do for the last two weeks. “Good morning, Mr. President,” says Devin Wittmer. He comes from NSA. After graduating from Berkeley, he started designing cyberdefense software for clients like Apple before the NSA recruited him away. He has developed federal cybersecurity assessment tools to help industries and governments understand their preparedness against cyberattacks. When the major health-care systems in France were hit with a ransomware virus three years ago, we lent them Devin, who was able to locate and disable it. Nobody in America, I’ve been assured, is better at finding holes in cyberdefense systems or at plugging them. “Mr. President,” says Casey Alvarez. Casey is the daughter of Mexican immigrants who settled in Arizona to start a family and built up a fleet of grocery stores in the Southwest along the way. Casey showed no interest in the business, taking quickly to computers and wanting to join law enforcement. When she was a grad student at Penn, she got turned down for a position at the Department of Justice. So Casey got on her computer and managed to do what state and federal authorities had been unable to do for years—she hacked into an underground child-pornography website and disclosed the identities of all the website’s patrons, basically gift-wrapping a federal prosecution for Justice and shutting down an operation that was believed to be the largest purveyor of kiddie porn in the country. DOJ hired her on the spot, and she stayed there until she went to work for the CIA. She’s been most recently deployed in the Middle East with US Central Command, where she intercepts, decodes, and disrupts cybercommunications among terrorist groups. I’ve been assured that these two are, by far, the best we have. And they are about to meet the person who, so far, has been better. There is a hint of reverence in their expressions as I introduce them to Augie. The Sons of Jihad is the all-star team of cyberterrorists, mythical figures in that world. But I sense some competitive fire, too, which will be a good thing.
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Bill Clinton (The President Is Missing)
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All learning is subjective, and when we only offer one chance or route for learning, we greatly limit the possibility that every student will achieve mastery
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Starr Sackstein (Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School (Hack Learning #3))
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Study Questions What is the legal definition of blindness? How does it differ from the IDEA definition? What does the Snellen chart assess? What does 20/200 mean? Describe how the eye functions. Define the terms myopia, hyperopia, and astigmatism. List five eye problems common to school-age children. Why is early detection of vision problems important? Describe the social and emotional characteristics of persons with visual impairments. What is functional vision, and how is it evaluated? Define the term learning media. Give three examples of different forms of learning media. In what two educational settings do the majority of students with a visual impairment receive a special education? What are some common educational accommodations that a student with a visual impairment may require? List five signs of possible vision problems in children. Identify three critical issues that must be addressed if an adolescent is to successfully transition to postsecondary education or enter the workforce. Besides cultural differences, what diversity issue must be addressed for parents who are also visually impaired? Identify five technology accommodations that can be provided in high school for a student who is legally blind. Discuss the shortage of orientation and mobility specialists and how a child’s educational plan is affected by a shortage of personnel.
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Richard M. Gargiulo (Special Education in Contemporary Society: An Introduction to Exceptionality)
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student and perhaps a student’s first-year success in college or in a professional program—which says that the tests could be helpful for students after they are admitted, to assess who needs extra assistance the first year. And so, on October 12, 1977, a White male sat before the Supreme Court requesting slight changes in UC Davis’s admissions policies to open sixteen seats for him—and not a poor Black woman requesting standardized tests to be dropped as an admissions criterion to open eighty-four seats for her. It was yet another case of racists v. racists that antiracists had no chance of winning.3 With four justices solidly for the Regents, and four for Bakke, the former Virginia corporate lawyer whose firm had defended Virginia segregationists in Brown decided Regents v. Bakke. On June 28, 1978, Justice Lewis F. Powell sided with four justices in viewing UC Davis’s set-asides as “discrimination against members of the white ‘majority,’” allowing Bakke to be admitted. Powell also sided with the four other justices in allowing universities to “take race into account” in choosing students, so long as it was not “decisive” in the decision. Crucially, Powell framed affirmative action as “race-conscious” policies, while standardized test scores were not, despite common knowledge about the racial disparities in those scores.4 The leading proponents of “race-conscious” policies to maintain the status quo of racial disparities in the late 1950s had refashioned themselves as the leading opponents of “race-conscious” policies in the late 1970s to maintain the status quo of racial disparities. “Whatever it takes” to defend discriminators had always been the marching orders of the producers of racist ideas. Allan Bakke, his legal team, the organizations behind them, the justices who backed him, and his millions of American supporters were all in the mode of proving that the
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Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
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As the saying goes, "It's not who you know, but who knows you."
How does that relate to getting a job?
Lets look at 2 cases where "who knows you" resulted in landing the best job. Keep in mind: The great thing is that you can start right where you are right now!
Case 1
In my first teaching job in Mexico in the early 1980's, we were half way through the semester, when the director called me into his office to tell me he had taken a job in Silicon Valley, California. What he said next floored me. "I'd like you to apply for my job."
How could I apply to be the director of an English school when it was my first teaching job, all the teachers had more teaching experience than I did, and many of them had doctorate degrees. I only had a bachelors degree.
"Don't worry," he said. "People like you, and I think you have what it takes to be a good director."
The director knew me, or at least got to know me from teachers' meetings, seeing me teach, and noticing how I interacted with people.
Case 2
Fast forward 3 years. After Mexico, I moved to Reno, Nevada, to work on my Master's degree in Teaching English as a Second Language. I applied for a teaching job at the community college, and half-way into the semester, a teacher had to leave and I got the job. I impressed the director enough that she asked me to be the Testing and Placement Coordinator the next year.
At the end of that year, I wrote a final report about the testing and placement program. It so impressed the college administration that when a sister university was looking for a graduate student to head up a new language assessment program for new foreign graduate teaching assistants and International faculty, I got recommended.
What Does This Mean?
From these two examples, you can see that when people see what you can do, you have a greater chance of being seen and being known. When people see what you are capable of doing, there is less risk in hiring you. Why? Because they've seen you be successful before. Chances are you'll be successful with them, too.
But, if people don't know you and haven't seen what you can do, there is much greater risk in hiring you. In fact, you may not even be on their radar screen.
Get On Their Radar Screens
To get on the radar screens for the best jobs, do the best job you can where you work right now. Don't wait for the job announcement to appear in the newspaper. Don't wait for something else to happen. Right now, invest all of you and your unique talents into what you're doing. Impress people with what you can do! Do that, and see the jobs you'll get!
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HASANM21
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The Four Dominant Learning Styles
What are the Four Types of Learners?
If you have spent any considerable amount of time in a learning institution, you know for almost a fact that each learner is different from the next. It is relatively easy to pick out the differences among learners. For instance, you can identify a student who has an easier time retaining information when presented in a particular format.
Until recent decades, education seemed to be incredibly rigid towards the learners. Most often than not, they were subjected to a one-size-fits-all model that never accommodated for the differences in learning. However, research and studies made tremendous strides in identifying and reconciling these discrepancies.
Nowadays, educators are developing strategies that help them reach out to each student's specific learning style. This gives each learner a fair chance at acquiring an education. This article seeks to breakdown the four main ways that learners acquire, process, and retain information.
Visual Learners
Information is optimally acquired and processed for this type of learners when conveyed in graphic or diagrammatic form. Such students retain content when it is presented as diagrams, charts, etcetera with much more ease. Some of them also lean towards pictures and videos at times.
These learners tend to better at processing robust information rather than bits and pieces. This makes them holistic learners. Hence, they derive more value from summarized visual aids as opposed to segments.
Auditory Learners
On the other hand, these students learn more by processing information that has been delivered verbally. Such students are also more attentive to their instructors in class. Sometimes, they will do so at the expense of taking notes which can sometimes be mistaken for subpar engagement.
Such learners will also thrive in group discussions where they get to talk through schoolwork with their peers. This not only reinforces their understanding but also presents an excellent opportunity to learn from others. Similarly, they can obtain significant value from reading out what they have written.
Reading/Writing Learners
These students lean more towards written information. For as long as they read through the content, they stand a better chance at retaining it. Such students prefer text-heavy learning. Thus, written assignments, handouts in class, or even taking notes are their most effective learning modes.
Kinesthetic Learners
Essentially, these students learn by doing. These are the students that rely on hands-on participation in class. For as long as they are physically proactive in the learning process, such learners stand a better chance at retaining and retrieving the knowledge acquired. This also earns them the popular term, tactile learners, since they tend to engage most of their sense in the learning process.
As you would expect, such leaners have the most difficulties in conventional learning institutions. However, they tend to thrive in practical-oriented set-ups, such as workshops and laboratories.
These four modalities will provide sufficient background knowledge on learning styles for you to formulate your own assessment. Ask yourself first, no less, what type of a learner are you?
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Sandy Miles
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Teaching academic writing to Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) students is crucial early in their academic journey and should continue throughout their program. Here's a breakdown:
Foundation Level (First Year): Introducing basic academic writing skills at the onset helps students develop a strong foundation. This includes understanding essay structure, proper citation methods (APA, MLA), and critical reading and writing skills NURS FPX 4010 Assessment 2.
Core Nursing Courses: As students progress into core nursing courses, integrating academic writing into these subjects is beneficial. Assignments related to evidence-based practice, research papers, case studies, and reflective writing can aid in linking theoretical knowledge to practical application through writing.NURS FPX 4010 Assessment 3
Clinical Practice Integration: Incorporating writing assignments that reflect on clinical experiences or patient interactions helps students articulate their observations, reflections, and professional development, enhancing their communication skills.online class help services
Advanced Nursing Courses: In advanced years, focus on more complex academic writing, such as scholarly articles, thesis or capstone projects, and literature reviews. This phase aligns with deeper research and specialization within nursing fields.
Continuous Improvement: Encourage ongoing improvement by providing resources, workshops, and feedback on writing. Additionally, revisiting and reinforcing academic writing skills periodically ensures students maintain and enhance these crucial abilities.nursfpx.com
By introducing and reinforcing academic writing skills across various stages of the BSN program, students develop proficiency in communicating their ideas effectively, a skill essential for their future practice, research endeavors, and professional growth.
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nimra
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Worse, tests emphasize exactly the wrong skills. They emphasize the memorization of massive amounts of facts that neurologically have a half-life of about 12 hours. They focus on short-term rewards through cramming to compensate for a failure in long-term development of value. It is no wonder we have financial meltdowns caused by successful students. We have to swallow a hard pill. The issue is not how do we make tests better? Or how can we have more or different types of tests? Or how do we arrange for more parts of a school program (such as a teacher’s worth) to be based on tests? The reality is, tests don’t work except as a blunt control-and-motivation mechanism for the classroom, the academic equivalent of MSG or sugar in processed food. In place of schools as testing centers, we have to begin imagining and setting up learning environments that involve no tests at all, that rely on real assessment and the creation of genuine value instead.
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Clark Aldrich (Unschooling Rules: 55 Ways to Unlearn What We Know About Schools and Rediscover Education)
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What to Do Tonight Make sleep a family value, and set a family goal of sleeping more. Ned always tells his teenage students, “Pay yourself first,” a lesson adopted from financial planning that involves putting money into your savings account before you pay your bills. He tells kids “you’ll need to sleep something in the neighborhood of sixty-three hours a week (nine hours a day), so plan that and then plan what you’ll do the rest of the time.” It’s good advice for you as well as your kids. Talk to your kids about your own sleep-related challenges, and let them know if you’ve found things that have worked for you. Tell them you’re open to their suggestions. Assess whether your child has an effective wind-down routine before bed. If not, read about what experts call good sleep hygiene, or sleep habits. Try getting ready for bed before you’re really tired, as it’s harder to inhibit the desire to do one more thing or watch one more episode when you’re tired. Encourage your teens to try the same thing. Dim lights and pull shades at least thirty minutes before a child’s bedtime, which will trigger melatonin production. Try using blackout curtains and/or relaxation tapes. Also try warm milk, which actually does have a sleep-inducing effect. If necessary, talk to your pediatrician about the use of melatonin, which can be very effective for highly anxious kids and for kids with ADHD. Encourage exercise during the day, particularly if falling asleep in the first place is hard. If your child is a light sleeper or struggles to fall asleep, consider a white-noise generator.
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William Stixrud (The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives)
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A good teacher will assess the class before teaching. A good student will understand before he applies.
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Jay Shetty (8 Rules of Love: How to Find It, Keep It, and Let It Go)
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Instead of using one exam as the primary summative assessment, he told teachers to use multiple formative assessments along the way—assignments, discussions, observations, and conversations—to inform semester grades. Instead of focusing on getting a grade on a specific exam, he wants students to focus on doing interesting work and teachers to focus on providing meaningful feedback throughout the semester.
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Mike Anderson (Tackling the Motivation Crisis: How to Activate Student Learning Without Behavior Charts, Pizza Parties, or Other Hard-to-Quit Incentive Systems)
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The four major testing companies—Pearson Education, Educational Testing Service, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and McGraw Hill—make $2 billion a year in revenue while spending $20 million a year lobbying for more mandated student assessments. Prisons bring in $70 billion a year in revenue, and its industry spends $45 million a year lobbying to keep people incarcerated and for longer sentences.
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Bettina L. Love (We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom)
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Gernot Wagner, a student and coauthor, notes the need to use judgment when assessing whether refraining from action reflects status quo bias. More generally, maxims describing human behavior apply in some contexts, but not others. “Status quo bias is a prime example. It is the friend of not acting, and you ignore it at your peril. But we also see ‘action bias.’ Often political leaders just want to be seen as doing something, anything – leading them to want to act, even if no action is the preferred choice.
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Dan Levy (Maxims for Thinking Analytically: The wisdom of legendary Harvard Professor Richard Zeckhauser)
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Of all the maxims in this book, this is the most popular among Richard’s coauthors and former students. Broadly speaking, this maxim can be especially helpful for two kinds of situations: To understand a concept, problem, or idea better; or To assess the best-case or worst-case consequences of a decision you are struggling to make.
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Dan Levy (Maxims for Thinking Analytically: The wisdom of legendary Harvard Professor Richard Zeckhauser)
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So much so that this situation caught the attention of the US Department of Defense, and the following assessment was made in the annual report: “Chinese science and engineering students have mastered technologies that later became critical for military systems and over time have reached unintentional violations of US export control laws.” Neo-Red Guard PLA has sponsored the training of more than 2,500 military engineers abroad since 2007. For this reason, the progress made by the PLA on sensitive military technologies has been deemed risky by some experts and various restrictions have been demanded. (58)
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Abdulhakim Idris (Menace: China’s Colonization of the Islamic World & Uyghur Genocide)
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Congress revisited drug policy in 1988. The resulting legislation was once again extraordinarily punitive, this time extending far beyond traditional criminal punishments and including new “civil penalties” for people convicted of drug crimes. The new Anti-Drug Abuse Act authorized public housing authorities to evict any tenant who allows any form of drug-related criminal activity to occur on or near public housing premises and eliminated many federal benefits, including student loans, for anyone convicted of a drug offense. The act also expanded use of the death penalty for serious drug-related offenses and imposed new mandatory minimums for drug offenses, including a five-year mandatory minimum for simple possession of cocaine base—with no evidence of intent to sell. Remarkably, the penalty would apply to people with no prior criminal convictions. The severity of this punishment was unprecedented in the federal system. Until 1988, one year of imprisonment had been the maximum for possession of any amount of any drug. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) were mixed in their assessment of the new legislation—some believed the harsh penalties were necessary, others convinced that the laws were biased and harmful to African Americans. Ultimately the legislation passed by an overwhelming margin—346 to 11. Six of the negative votes came from the CBC.90 The
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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In advance of the class, he asked students to fill in a quick survey in which he asked them to describe their own experiences with one of these three uses of statistics. He tells the students that he has read their answers, as well as their student profiles, and asks for volunteers to talk about what they wrote. Several hands go up, and he picks Juliana, a student from Brazil, interested in education. She starts to talk about a program she helped to run in Brazil which assessed whether improvements in teacher training had a causal effect on test scores. As she is talking, her words appear on the big screen, in big quotation marks, along with her photo. The class laughs, and as she looks up she realises she has become a celebrity.
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David Franklin (Invisible Learning: The magic behind Dan Levy's legendary Harvard statistics course)
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The fact that we all learn is both good and bad for our ability to assess learning. Because we were once a student, we make the tacit assumption that we know how to tackle the learning problem.
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Stephanie Ackley Crowe (10X Leader: How Great Leaders Multiply Outcomes through Transformational Learning)
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By embracing Gardner's Multiple Intelligences Theory, educators become architects of personalized learning experiences that honour the unique talents and abilities of every student. Through tailored instruction and diverse assessment methods, classrooms become vibrant ecosystems where each intelligence is valued and cultivated.
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Asuni LadyZeal
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Yet, what do Ritalin and AD/HD have to do with all of this? The devastating effects of untreated AD/HD are well established. Therefore, if Ritalin use is reduced, more students would fail and drop out of school, educational assessment test scores would drop, and behavior problems and drug use would be on the rise—leading to an increase in school suspension and expulsion rates. All of this would create an illusion that public schools have failed, thereby strengthening support for vouchers and school privatization.
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Kimberly Blaker (The Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America)
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The first hints of this emerged in the early and mid-1990s, at the tail end of the crack epidemic. Suniya Luthar is now sixty-two, with an infectious smile, bright brown eyes, and short snow-white hair. Back then, she was a fledgling psychologist working as an assistant professor and researcher in the department of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. She was studying resiliency among teenagers in low-income urban communities, and one of her early findings was that the most popular kids were also among the most destructive and aggressive at school. Was this a demographic phenomenon, she wondered, or merely an adolescent one, this tendency to look up to peers who acted out? To find out, she needed a comparison group. A research assistant suggested they recruit students from his former high school in an affluent suburb. Luthar’s team ultimately enlisted 488 tenth graders—about half from her assistant’s high school and half from a scruffy urban high school. The affluent community’s median household income was 80 percent higher than the national median, and more than twice that of the low-income community. The rich community also had far fewer families on food stamps (0.3 percent vs. 19 percent) and fewer kids getting free or reduced-price school lunches (1 percent vs. 86 percent). The suburban teens were 82 percent white, while the urban teens were 87 percent nonwhite. Luthar surveyed the kids, asking a series of questions related to depression and anxiety, drug use ranging from alcohol and nicotine to LSD and cocaine, and participation in delinquent acts at home, at school, and in the community. Also examined were grades, “social competence,” and teachers’ assessments of each student. After crunching the numbers, she was floored. The affluent teens fared poorly relative to the low-income teens on “all indicators of substance use, including hard drugs.” This flipped the conventional wisdom on its head. “I was quite taken aback,” Luthar recalls.
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Michael Mechanic (Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All)
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An underachievement reversal plan's implementation begins with a trifocal meeting, where it is shared with the student, and an agreement is obtained. This agreement is crucial for ensuring commitment to the plan. The plan should focus on increasing the student's motivation, ability, and attainment levels over time, with regular assessments to track progress and record behavioural changes.
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Asuni LadyZeal
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To reverse student underachievement, a well-structured reversal plan is essential. This usually begins with interviewing the student, parents, or guardians to collect crucial data. This data serves as the foundation for creating a detailed reversal plan, based on the four rules of reversal.
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Asuni LadyZeal
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Despite getting the student’s agreement and collective efforts, the underachievement reversal process may have no guaranteed success. Inconsistencies, such as a lack of belief in progress or conflicting interests, may hinder the underachievement reversal. Regular assessment and attention to behavioural changes are vital for addressing these challenges and refining the reversal strategy.
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Asuni LadyZeal
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Remediation is a dimension of rapid learning that introduces personalized targeted assessments, support and instruction, aiding students in overcoming learning gaps over a period of time.
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Asuni LadyZeal
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Rapid remediation is the go-to approach for swift intervention and targeted support for closing learning gaps and propelling struggling students to grasp concepts at an accelerated pace.
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Asuni LadyZeal
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In rapid remediation, there is a defined timeline, specific goals, and a sense of urgency, making it effective in preparing students for summative assessments or bringing them up to grade level quickly.
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Asuni LadyZeal
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Constant assessments, feedback, and continuous learning all play a crucial role in rapid learning, an approach for acquiring knowledge and developing skills quickly and efficiently.
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Asuni LadyZeal
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In rapid learning, uncovering learning gaps involves assessing what students can't do, what they can do, and identifying areas where additional support is needed. Diagnostic assessments, formative assessments, and teacher observations play a crucial role in this process
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Asuni LadyZeal
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If the experience of beauty was purely of personal significance, why would we desire to share it with others? Could it be that we treat it the way the scientist treats a new finding? That we want a sort of peer review of our assessment? The scientist wants to prove that his experiment was valid and true. Could it be that I wanted the same sort of support when I would play a recording for a fellow student in my dorm room? Was I looking for corroboration? Perhaps we want to know that our discoveries and delights are indeed worthy of being called beautiful. But if that is the case, there must be some sort of standard outside myself we all can relate to.
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Doug Serven (Firstfruits of a New Creation: Essays in Honor of Jerram Barrs)
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My assessment approach focuses on self-evaluation and metacognition. I ask students to write process letters about their work, and I ask them to reflect frequently on their own progress and learning. The most authentic assessment approaches, in my view, are ones that engage students directly as experts in their own learning.
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Jesse Stommel (Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop)
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Assessment plays a crucial role in curriculum delivery, allowing teachers to gauge student progress and adjust their teaching methods accordingly, ensuring that every student has the opportunity to succeed.
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Asuni LadyZeal
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The Indian government’s own draft education policy tells us that the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) rates sixty-eight per cent of our universities as average or below average. Ninety-one per cent of colleges are rated average or below average. These second- and third-rate colleges would have produced generations of average or below average students and scholars.
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Ravish Kumar (The Free Voice: On Democracy, Culture and the Nation (Revised and Updated Edition))
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An effective remediation session includes a well-structured preliminary phase for conducting assessment, defining learning objectives and selecting resources and strategies.
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Asuni LadyZeal
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In remediation the crucial step of assessment and diagnosis, educators unravel the mystery of learning gaps via examining past performances, talking to students and parents, and keenly observing habits and attitudes.
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Asuni LadyZeal
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Assessment and diagnosis lay the groundwork in the preliminary phase, paving the way for effective remediation by setting clear objectives and aligning suitable strategies and resources.
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Asuni LadyZeal