Training Curricula for Open Domain Answer Re-Ranking

In precision-oriented tasks like answer ranking, it is more important to rank many relevant answers highly than to retrieve all relevant answers. It follows that a good ranking strategy would be to learn how to identify the easiest correct answers first (i.e., assign a high ranking score to answers that have characteristics that usually indicate relevance, and a low ranking score to those with characteristics that do not), before incorporating more complex logic to handle difficult cases (e.g., semantic matching or reasoning). In this work, we apply this idea to the training of neural answer rankers using curriculum learning. We propose several heuristics to estimate the difficulty of a given training sample. We show that the proposed heuristics can be used to build a training curriculum that down-weights difficult samples early in the training process. As the training process progresses, our approach gradually shifts to weighting all samples equally, regardless of difficulty. We present a comprehensive evaluation of our proposed idea on three answer ranking datasets. Results show that our approach leads to superior performance of two leading neural ranking architectures, namely BERT and ConvKNRM, using both pointwise and pairwise losses. When applied to a BERT-based ranker, our method yields up to a 4% improvement in MRR and a 9% improvement in P@1 (compared to the model trained without a curriculum). This results in models that can achieve comparable performance to more expensive state-of-the-art techniques.Comment: Accepted at SIGIR 2020 (long

Preferences of fourth grade children for certain social studies activities.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Pathways to College Preparatory Advanced Academic Offerings in the Anchorage School District

There are many ways a child in the Anchorage School District (ASD) can access advanced course offerings. To a parent these pathways may seem complex. ASD offers options for gifted and highly gifted students at the elementary and middle school level, and accelerated, and enriched learning opportunities such as honors and advanced placement courses at the secondary level. These opportunities, though linked, are not the same, nor do they necessarily follow from one to another in a straight path. Moreover, pathways to and through these opportunities can be quite different. Offerings are different at the elementary, middle and high school levels, with differing qualifications and eligibility. And, some of the programs are only offered in a few particular schools. This variety provides lots of flexibility. It also creates a complex path of choices and decisions. In all of these pathways and choices, active advocacy by a parent is necessary to ensure that their child receive the best and most appropriate opportunities. In this report we describe the many advanced and accelerated learning opportunities available in Anchorage elementary, middle and high schools, and the ways students can access these opportunities. We provide visuals including figures, tables and text to highlight the pathways to and through advanced offerings from Kindergarten to 12th grade. This document is based upon publicly available information. We have combined information from the ASD gifted program website the ASD High School Handbook, the ASD High School Program of Studies guide, and minutes of the ASD Board meetings. We also spoke with staff in the gifted program at ASD. Individual school-level issues that are outside of ASD policy and procedures have not been included. This report focused on the services, programs and schools within the Anchorage School District that service as pathways to college preparation and advance academic course offerings. As we describe in more detail in this report, there are very different offerings and paths at the elementary, middle and high school. In general, there are gifted and highly gifted programs at the elementary and middle school level, and a highly gifted program at the high school level. At all school levels, the highly gifted programs are offered at a limited number of schools. In high school, all students (including those in the highly gifted program) have the opportunity to take honors and advanced placement classes. Math is not included in the middle and high school gifted program. Math instead is a curriculum progression. Advanced math opportunities usually start in 6th grade, when students can choose placement into math courses that are a higher than the usual level. Opting for advanced math in 6th grade puts a student on track to reach Algebra I in 8th grade and calculus in 12th. At the elementary school level ASD operates gifted programs in all schools and a highly gifted program in one. There are also alternative and optional schools, which offer accelerated and enriched learning environments. If a student is in the highly gifted or gifted program in elementary school, he or she usually transitions to gifted and highly gifted middle school programs. In middle school these programs 3 include gifted language arts and science classes. Students who were not a part of the gifted program in elementary school can access the middle school gifted program, by testing in. Many optional and alternative programs provide enriched and accelerated classes to all students in them. For high school students there is a greater variety of advanced offerings. Starting in 9th grade there are honors and Advanced Placement (AP) courses, Credit-by-Choice options, and optional programs within the high schools and alternative schools. Students in the middle school gifted and highly gifted program have the opportunity to transition into the high school Highly Gifted Program. The following table provides a look at advanced offerings at different school levels. Each of these offerings is discussed in the report.Introduction / Glossary of Terms / Elementary Level / Middle School Level / High School Level / Highlights / Future Research Question

Pathways to College Preparatory Advanced Academic Offerings in the Anchorage School District

Prepared for: CITC’s Anchorage Realizing Indigenous Student ExcellenceThere are many ways a child in the Anchorage School District (ASD) can access advanced course offerings. To a parent these pathways may seem complex. ASD offers options for gifted and highly gifted students at the elementary and middle school level, and accelerated, and enriched learning opportunities such as honors and advanced placement courses at the secondary level. These opportunities, though linked, are not the same, nor do they necessarily follow from one to another in a straight path. Moreover, pathways to and through these opportunities can be quite different. Offerings are different at the elementary, middle and high school levels, with differing qualifications and eligibility. And, some of the programs are only offered in a few particular schools. This variety provides lots of flexibility. It also creates a complex path of choices and decisions. In all of these pathways and choices, active advocacy by a parent is necessary to ensure that their child receive the best and most appropriate opportunities. In this report we describe the many advanced and accelerated learning opportunities available in Anchorage elementary, middle and high schools, and the ways students can access these opportunities. We provide visuals including figures, tables and text to highlight the pathways to and through advanced offerings from Kindergarten to 12th grade. This document is based upon publicly available information. We have combined information from the ASD gifted program website the ASD High School Handbook, the ASD High School Program of Studies guide, and minutes of the ASD Board meetings. We also spoke with staff in the gifted program at ASD. Individual school-level issues that are outside of ASD policy and procedures have not been included. This report focused on the services, programs and schools within the Anchorage School District that service as pathways to college preparation and advance academic course offerings. As we describe in more detail in this report, there are very different offerings and paths at the elementary, middle and high school. In general, there are gifted and highly gifted programs at the elementary and middle school level, and a highly gifted program at the high school level. At all school levels, the highly gifted programs are offered at a limited number of schools. In high school, all students (including those in the highly gifted program) have the opportunity to take honors and advanced placement classes. Math is not included in the middle and high school gifted program. Math instead is a curriculum progression. Advanced math opportunities usually start in 6th grade, when students can choose placement into math courses that are a higher than the usual level. Opting for advanced math in 6th grade puts a student on track to reach Algebra I in 8th grade and calculus in 12th. At the elementary school level ASD operates gifted programs in all schools and a highly gifted program in one. There are also alternative and optional schools, which offer accelerated and enriched learning environments. If a student is in the highly gifted or gifted program in elementary school, he or she usually transitions to gifted and highly gifted middle school programs. In middle school these programs 3 include gifted language arts and science classes. Students who were not a part of the gifted program in elementary school can access the middle school gifted program, by testing in. Many optional and alternative programs provide enriched and accelerated classes to all students in them. For high school students there is a greater variety of advanced offerings. Starting in 9th grade there are honors and Advanced Placement (AP) courses, Credit-by-Choice options, and optional programs within the high schools and alternative schools. Students in the middle school gifted and highly gifted program have the opportunity to transition into the high school Highly Gifted Program.Introduction / Glossary of Terms / Elementary Level / Middle School Level / High School Level / Highlights / Future Research Question

Curriculum Learning

Humans and animals learn much better when the examples are not randomly presented but organized in a meaningful order which illustrates gradually more concepts, and gradually more complex ones. Here, we formalize such training strategies in the context of machine learning, and call them “curriculum learning”. In the context of recent research studying the difficulty of training in the presence of non-convex training criteria (for deep deterministic and stochastic neural networks), we explore curriculum learning in various set-ups. The experiments show that significant improvements in generalization can be achieved. We hypothesize that curriculum learning has both an effect on the speed of convergence of the training process to a minimum and, in the case of non-convex criteria, on the quality of the local minima obtained: curriculum learning can be seen as a particular form of continuation method (a general strategy for global optimization of non-convex functions).The authors thank NSERC, CIFAR, and MITACS for support

Florida Technological University, Course Descriptions, Bulletin Supplement, January 1974

FTU course descriptions, effective January 1974. This booklet supersedes the listing shown in the 1973-1974 bulletin

Classroom assessment and education: challenging the assumptions of socialisation and instrumentality

The opportunity offered by the Umea Symposium to probe the intersection of quality and assessment immediately brings into focus a wider issue – that of the quality of education which assessment aspires to support. Prompted by recent research into formative assessment in Scottish primary school contexts, the paper explores how formative assessment has become associated with an overly benign understanding of learning which misrecognises the possibility of undesirable learning and does not seem to address the inherently political nature of education. Having illuminated the potential inequities of formative assessment practices, the paper then asks what role formative assessment might play to support an understanding of education that is not simply about the transmission of traditional social norms, but also aspires to illuminate their social construction and their political nature

Florida Technological University: Course Descriptions, Bulletin Supplement, Fall 1971

Fall 1971 Course Descriptions. This booklet supersedes the listing shown in the July 1971 Bulletin