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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries
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To: elmatador who wrote (67217)8/11/2005 3:05:16 AM
From: Seeker of Truth  Read Replies (2) of 74559
 
Measuring performance in education is usually not straightforward. Suppose a history teacher in North America has a class with a large number of Brazilians and other South Americans. In that case she or he might spend 20% of the time talking about the conquest of most of the Western Hemisphere by the Portuguese and Spanish, how they treated the native peoples,subsequent import of African slaves, struggle for independence,domination by the US, struggle against that, etc. etc. So the students in that class would do correspondingly poorer on the standardized history exams because these have only a 6% weighting on Latin American history. Such specializations occur with all subjects, even science. Every teacher has aspects that they love most to teach because the have the greatest understanding of them or because they consider those aspects the most important, giving them a weighting greater than those on the standardized tests and therefore decreasing the exam performance of their students on the rest of the stuff.
High school students in Japan and South Korea do about the best in the world in standardized math. tests. However this appears to be because they assiduously memorize many different specific types of problems and their standard solution methods. They are unfortunately correspondingly poorer at solving a problem of a type that they have not previously encountered.
Putting the matter differently, it's hard to measure educational performance with most standard exams.
Also the poorer teachers tend to "teach for the exams" whereas the best teachers want to teach the subject in the best way and tend to ignore what's been on the standard exams lately. The poorer teachers often in desperation make a special study of what appears most frequently on the tests and teach those haphazardly.
Measurement can be done, but the results are often more than a little fuzzy.
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