Value-Added Modeling: The Challenge of Measuring Educational Outcomes

Provides an overview of value-added modeling, a method of measuring the effectiveness of teachers and schools by tracking student test scores at the beginning and end of the year. Outlines its history, merits, uses for teacher education, and challenges

Spartan Daily, April 16, 2009

Volume 132, Issue 40https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/10577/thumbnail.jp

Successful writing

No abstrac

Robustness

The standard theory of decision making under uncertainty advises the decision maker to form a statistical model linking outcomes to decisions and then to choose the optimal distribution of outcomes. This assumes that the decision maker trusts the model completely. But what should a decision maker do if the model cannot be trusted? Lars Hansen and Thomas Sargent, two leading macroeconomists, push the field forward as they set about answering this question. They adapt robust control techniques and apply them to economics. By using this theory to let decision makers acknowledge misspecification in economic modeling, the authors develop applications to a variety of problems in dynamic macroeconomics. Technical, rigorous, and self-contained, this book will be useful for macroeconomists who seek to improve the robustness of decision-making processes.decision-making, uncertainty, statistical models, control techniques, economic modeling, dynamic microeconomics, misspecification

Communicating environmental sustainability within New Zealand news media and Wellington educational institutions A 60-credit Journalism Project presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Journalism at Massey University

As a country, New Zealand produces only about 0.17 percent of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, per person, New Zealand is the fourth-highest emissions contributor globally (Sims, 2015). With the growing need to change lifestyle habits in order to lower emissions and reduce future costs involved with adapting to climate change impacts, it seems essential the public be well-informed and resourced in order to face the future. In order to meet the New Zealand Government’s environmentally-driven goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 30 per cent below the 2005 levels by 2030, the overall population needs to practise environmentally sustainable lifestyles around the country. This research aimed to explore how environmental sustainability is communicated by key influencers in New Zealand, educational institutions and news media. This is illustrated through a long-form journalism article on how educational institutions in Wellington are helping young people develop environmentally sustainable life-practices crucial to their future resilience and survival. This study is informed by interviews to help understand how a select number of educational institutions of various levels integrate environmental sustainability in their classroom; how this topic is communicated to students; and how New Zealand government agencies and local authorities support such efforts in educational institutions. Through interviews with New Zealand environment reporters and a critical analysis of environment reporting, this research discusses the power the media has in terms of climate change action and how journalists in New Zealand have coped with the challenge of covering environment in the context of a restructuring news industry. Without a strong presence of information-sharing through the education system and news media, New Zealand may not be ready to face the impacts of climate change

No stratification without representation

Sortition is an alternative approach to democracy, in which representatives are not elected but randomly selected from the population. Most electoral democracies fail to accurately represent even a handful of protected groups. By contrast, sortition guarantees that every subset of the population will in expectation fill their fair share of the available positions. This fairness property remains satisfied when the sample is stratified based on known features. Moreover, stratification can greatly reduce the variance in the number of positions filled by any unknown group, as long as this group correlates with the strata. Our main result is that stratification cannot increase this variance by more than a negligible factor, even in the presence of indivisibilities and rounding. When the unknown group is unevenly spread across strata, we give a guarantee on the reduction in variance with respect to uniform sampling. We also contextualize stratification and uniform sampling in the space of fair sampling algorithms. Finally, we apply our insights to an empirical case study.Accepted manuscrip