447,554 research outputs found
Breaching the standardised assessment boundary: Assessment for learning as a field of exchange
The introduction of the Australian curriculum, the use of standardised testing (e.g. NAPLAN) and the My School website are couched in a context of accountability. This circumstance has stimulated and in some cases renewed a range of boundaries in Australian Education. The consequences that arise from standardised testing have accentuated the boundaries produced by social reproduction in education which has led to an increase in the numbers of students disengaging from mainstream education and applying for enrolment at the Edmund Rice Education Australia Flexible Learning Centre Network (EREAFLCN). Boundaries are created for many young people who are denied access to credentials and certification as a result of being excluded from or in some way disengaging from standardised education and testing. Young people who participate at the EREAFLCN arrive with a variety of forms of cultural capital that are not valued in current education and employment fields. This is not to say that these young people’s different forms of cultural capital have no value, but rather that such funds of knowledge, repertoires and cultural capital are not valued by the majority of powerful agents in educational and employment fields. How then can the qualitative value of traditionally unorthodox - yet often intricate, ingenious, and astute - versions of cultural capital evident in the habitus of many young people be made to count, be recognised, be valuated? Can a process of educational assessment be a field of capital exchange and a space which breaches boundaries through a valuating process? This paper reports on the development of an innovative approach to assessment in an alternative education institution designed for the re-engagement of ‘at risk’ youth who have left formal schooling. A case study approach has been used to document the engagement of six young people, with an educational approach described as assessment for learning as a field of exchange across two sites in the EREAFLCN. In order to capture the broad range of students’ cultural and social capital, an electronic portfolio system (EPS) is under trial. The model draws on categories from sociological models of capital and reconceptualises the eportfolio as a sociocultural zone of learning and development. Results from the trial show a general tendency towards engagement with the EPS and potential for the attainment of socially valued cultural capital in the form of school credentials. In this way restrictive boundaries can be breached and a more equitable outcome achieved for many young Australians
Towards general capabilities through technology : assessment for learning as a field of exchange
The introduction of the Australian curriculum, the use of standardised testing (e.g. NAPLAN) and the My School website have stimulated and in some cases renewed a range of boundaries for young people in Australian Education. Standardised testing has accentuated social reproduction in education with an increase in the numbers of students disengaging from mainstream education and applying for enrolment at the Edmund Rice Education Australia Flexible Learning Centre Network (EREAFLCN). Many young people are denied access to credentials and certification as they become excluded from standardised education and testing. The creativity and skills of marginalised youth are often evidence of general capabilities and yet do not appear to be recognised in mainstream educational institutions when standardised approaches are adopted. Young people who participate at the EREAFLCN arrive with a variety of forms of cultural capital, frequently utilising general capabilities, which are not able to be valued in current education and employment fields. This is not to say that these young people‟s different forms of cultural capital have no value, but rather that such funds of knowledge, repertoires and cultural capital are not valued by the majority of powerful agents in educational and employment fields. How then can the inherent value of traditionally unorthodox - yet often intricate, ingenious, and astute-versions of cultural capital evident in the habitus of many young people be made to count, be recognised, be valuated?Can a process of educational assessment be a field of capital exchange and a space which crosses boundaries through a valuating process? This paper reports on the development of an innovative approach to assessment in an alternative education institution designed for the re engagement of „at risk‟ youth who have left formal schooling. A case study approach has been used to document the engagement of six young people, with an educational approach described as assessment for learning as a field of exchange across two sites in the EREAFLCN. In order to capture the broad range of students‟ cultural and social capital, an electronic portfolio system (EPS) is under trial. The model draws on categories from sociological models of capital and reconceptualises the eportfolio as a sociocultural zone of learning and development. Results from the trial show a general tendency towards engagement with the EPS and potential for the attainment of socially valued cultural capital in the form of school credentials. In this way restrictive boundaries can be breached and a more equitable outcome achieved for many young Australians
Turning histories into futures : assessment for learning as a field of exchange
Standardised testing does not recognise the creativity and skills of marginalised youth. Young people who come to the Edmund Rice Education Australia Flexible Learning Centre Network (EREAFLCN) in Australia arrive with forms of cultural capital that are not valued in the field of education and employment. This is not to say that young people‟s different modes of cultural capital have no value, but rather that such funds of knowledge, repertoires and cultural capital are not valued by the powerful agents in educational and employment fields. The forms of cultural capital which are valued by these institutions are measurable in certain structured formats which are largely inaccessible for what is seen in Australia to be a growing segment of the community. How then can the inherent value of traditionally unorthodox - yet often intricate, adroit, ingenious, and astute - versions of cultural capital evident in the habitus of many young people be made to count, be recognised, be valuated? Can a process of educational assessment be used as a marketplace, a field of capital exchange? This paper reports on the development of an innovative approach to assessment in an alternative education institution designed for the re-engagement of „at risk‟ youth who have left formal schooling. In order to capture the broad range of students‟ cultural and social capital, an electronic portfolio system (EPS) is under trial. The model draws on categories from sociological models of capital and reconceptualises the eportfolio as a sociocultural zone of learning and development. Initial results from the trial show a general tendency towards engagement with the EPS and potential for the attainment of socially valued cultural capital in the form of school credentials
Deep Multiple Description Coding by Learning Scalar Quantization
In this paper, we propose a deep multiple description coding framework, whose
quantizers are adaptively learned via the minimization of multiple description
compressive loss. Firstly, our framework is built upon auto-encoder networks,
which have multiple description multi-scale dilated encoder network and
multiple description decoder networks. Secondly, two entropy estimation
networks are learned to estimate the informative amounts of the quantized
tensors, which can further supervise the learning of multiple description
encoder network to represent the input image delicately. Thirdly, a pair of
scalar quantizers accompanied by two importance-indicator maps is automatically
learned in an end-to-end self-supervised way. Finally, multiple description
structural dissimilarity distance loss is imposed on multiple description
decoded images in pixel domain for diversified multiple description generations
rather than on feature tensors in feature domain, in addition to multiple
description reconstruction loss. Through testing on two commonly used datasets,
it is verified that our method is beyond several state-of-the-art multiple
description coding approaches in terms of coding efficiency.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures. (DCC 2019: Data Compression Conference). Testing
datasets for "Deep Optimized Multiple Description Image Coding via Scalar
Quantization Learning" can be found in the website of
https://github.com/mdcnn/Deep-Multiple-Description-Codin
Image analysis and statistical modelling for measurement and quality assessment of ornamental horticulture crops in glasshouses
Image analysis for ornamental crops is discussed with examples from the bedding plant industry. Feed-forward artificial neural networks are used to segment top and side view images of three contrasting species of bedding plants. The segmented images provide objective measurements of leaf and flower cover, colour, uniformity and leaf canopy height. On each imaging occasion, each pack was scored for quality by an assessor panel and it is shown that image analysis can explain 88.5%, 81.7% and 70.4% of the panel quality scores for the three species, respectively. Stereoscopy for crop height and uniformity is outlined briefly. The methods discussed here could be used for crop grading at marketing or for monitoring and assessment of growing crops within a glasshouse during all stages of production
Graded quantization for multiple description coding of compressive measurements
Compressed sensing (CS) is an emerging paradigm for acquisition of compressed
representations of a sparse signal. Its low complexity is appealing for
resource-constrained scenarios like sensor networks. However, such scenarios
are often coupled with unreliable communication channels and providing robust
transmission of the acquired data to a receiver is an issue. Multiple
description coding (MDC) effectively combats channel losses for systems without
feedback, thus raising the interest in developing MDC methods explicitly
designed for the CS framework, and exploiting its properties. We propose a
method called Graded Quantization (CS-GQ) that leverages the democratic
property of compressive measurements to effectively implement MDC, and we
provide methods to optimize its performance. A novel decoding algorithm based
on the alternating directions method of multipliers is derived to reconstruct
signals from a limited number of received descriptions. Simulations are
performed to assess the performance of CS-GQ against other methods in presence
of packet losses. The proposed method is successful at providing robust coding
of CS measurements and outperforms other schemes for the considered test
metrics
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