The influence of students distribution on their grades

This position paper defends the opinion that the distance of students to the professor in the classroom is directly related to their grades. This opinion is based on the results obtained in a large experiment performed during two academic years in various degrees, courses and semesters of two engineering schools. The experiment collected and processed data about the distribution of students in lectures and their final grades. Our results quantitatively confirm that grades can vary up to 14% depending on the distance to the professor.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish MEC under grant TIN2008-06622-C03-02 and by the Generalitat Valenciana under grant PROMETEO/2011/052. Salvador Tamarit was partially supported by the Spanish MICINN under FPI grant BES-2009-015019.Herrero Cuco, C.; Llorens Agost, ML.; Oliver Villarroya, J.; Silva Galiana, JF.; Tamarit Muñoz, S. (2013). The influence of students distribution on their grades. En Proceeding ITiCSE '13 Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). 316-316. https://doi.org/10.1145/2462476.2465575S31631

Student Outcomes at University in Autsralia: A Quantile Regression Approach

Students’ success during their first year at university is largely influenced by their university entrance score. Personal characteristics and secondary school characteristics also impact on success. This paper uses quantile regression to investigate how the effects of these factors vary along the grade distribution. It finds that the factors which influence grades have a more pronounced impact on the success of low-achieving students than on that of high-achieving students. These results have implications for student selection and also for the way scholarships may be used to attract talented high school students.

Microeconometric analysis of individual and institutional determinants of education and occupational choice

Natalie Obergruber prepared this study while she was working at the ifo Center for the Economics of Education. The study was completed in March 2018 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It consists of four distinct empirical analyses – two on the determinants of education and two on the determinants of occupational choice. For both choices, individual and institutional determinants are investigated. The econometric analyses are based on panel data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), historical census data of the Statistical Office of the German Empire, historical maps and studies from Sering 1897, Verein für Socialpolitik 1883, Grossherzogliches Ministerium des Inneren 1883, Miaskowski 1882-1884, Fick 1895, and Krafft 1930 which are combined with modern data from the German Statistical Office and the BBSR. This study analyses which individual and institutional factors (causally) influence individuals in their educational career and in their choice for an occupation. Chapter 2 explores consequences of parental separation for cognitive skill development of children. In the year before parental separation occurs children are negatively affected in their cognitive skill development. Chapter 3 investigates the consequences of an institutional reform in the German school system which awards high track school drop outs with lower track school degrees if they accomplished 9th grade. After the reform students are less likely to switch between schools and tracks and surprisingly are more likely to successfully finish the high-track school and enter university. Chapter 4 predicts the choice of math-intensive occupations by school grades. School grades are affected by students' ability and tastes and may furthermore contain pure signals of achievement (based on rank in class). We find that the strong association between grades and math intensity of occupations is completely explained by individuals' differences in tastes. Chapter 5 shows that occupational choice is influenced by the distribution of land, a store of wealth in an agricultural society. We find that areas with more equally distributed land started to industrialize earlier particularly in innovative manufacturing

Investigating the educational value of social learning networks: a quantitative analysis

The emergence of Education 2.0 enabled technology-enhanced learning, necessitating new pedagogical approaches, while e-learning has evolved into an instrumental pedagogy of collaboration through affordances of social media. Social learning networks and ubiquitous learning enabled individual and group learning through social engagement and social distribution of knowledge. Nevertheless, these developments have not been supported with extensive studies focusing on quantifying the impact of technology-enhanced learning on students’ progress and achievement. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how a quantitative overview of Facebook’s influence on students’ progress can be incorporated in a proposed e-moderation model of teaching and learning. Design/methodology/approach The approach is based on extending Salmon’s (2003) e-moderation model, which provides an emphasis on the theoretical perspectives that support socially situated learning environments of social networks such as Facebook. The findings revealed that students’ grades were positively influenced by the complementary use of Facebook on their courses of study. Findings The use of a social learning network also triggered a significant increase in student participation in learning activities delivered over Facebook. Research limitations/implications The main research limitations were due to the fact that a single social network was chosen for conducting the experiments. Furthermore, the investigation was narrowed down to a selected range of sessions offered to college and university students as part of their course. Originality/value The paper’s contribution is twofold, as it offers an original set of guidelines for conducting social learning network experiments and provides valuable quantifiable findings on the educational value of such networks

Investigating the educational value of social learning networks: a quantitative analysis

The emergence of Education 2.0 enabled technology-enhanced learning, necessitating new pedagogical approaches, while e-learning has evolved into an instrumental pedagogy of collaboration through affordances of social media. Social learning networks and ubiquitous learning enabled individual and group learning through social engagement and social distribution of knowledge. Nevertheless, these developments have not been supported with extensive studies focusing on quantifying the impact of technology-enhanced learning on students’ progress and achievement. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how a quantitative overview of Facebook’s influence on students’ progress can be incorporated in a proposed e-moderation model of teaching and learning. Design/methodology/approach The approach is based on extending Salmon’s (2003) e-moderation model, which provides an emphasis on the theoretical perspectives that support socially situated learning environments of social networks such as Facebook. The findings revealed that students’ grades were positively influenced by the complementary use of Facebook on their courses of study. Findings The use of a social learning network also triggered a significant increase in student participation in learning activities delivered over Facebook. Research limitations/implications The main research limitations were due to the fact that a single social network was chosen for conducting the experiments. Furthermore, the investigation was narrowed down to a selected range of sessions offered to college and university students as part of their course. Originality/value The paper’s contribution is twofold, as it offers an original set of guidelines for conducting social learning network experiments and provides valuable quantifiable findings on the educational value of such networks

The PeerRank Method for Peer Assessment

We propose the PeerRank method for peer assessment. This constructs a grade for an agent based on the grades proposed by the agents evaluating the agent. Since the grade of an agent is a measure of their ability to grade correctly, the PeerRank method weights grades by the grades of the grading agent. The PeerRank method also provides an incentive for agents to grade correctly. As the grades of an agent depend on the grades of the grading agents, and as these grades themselves depend on the grades of other agents, we define the PeerRank method by a fixed point equation similar to the PageRank method for ranking web-pages. We identify some formal properties of the PeerRank method (for example, it satisfies axioms of unanimity, no dummy, no discrimination and symmetry), discuss some examples, compare with related work and evaluate the performance on some synthetic data. Our results show considerable promise, reducing the error in grade predictions by a factor of 2 or more in many cases over the natural baseline of averaging peer grades.Comment: To appear in Proc. of ECAI 201

Supporting mediated peer-evaluation to grade answers to open-ended questions

We show an approach to semi-automatic grading of answers given by students to open ended questions (open answers). We use both peer-evaluation and teacher evaluation. A learner is modeled by her Knowledge and her assessments quality (Judgment). The data generated by the peer- and teacher- evaluations, and by the learner models is represented by a Bayesian Network, in which the grades of the answers, and the elements of the learner models, are variables, with values in a probability distribution. The initial state of the network is determined by the peer-assessment data. Then, each teacher’s grading of an answer triggers evidence propagation in the network. The framework is implemented in a web-based system. We present also an experimental activity, set to verify the effectiveness of the approach, in terms of correctness of system grading, amount of required teacher's work, and correlation of system outputs with teacher’s grades and student’s final exam grade

Public School Choice And Integration: Evidence from Durham, North Carolina

Using evidence from Durham, North Carolina, we examine the impact of school choice programs on racial and class-based segregation across schools. Theoretical considerations suggest that how choice programs affect segregation will depend not only on the family preferences emphasized in the sociology literature but also on the linkages between student composition, school quality and student achievement emphasized in the economics literature. Reasonable assumptions about the distribution of preferences over race, class, and school characteristics suggest that the segregating choices of students from advantaged backgrounds are likely to outweigh any integrating choices by disadvantaged students. The results of our empirical analysis are consistent with these theoretical considerations. Using information on the actual schools students attend and on the schools in their assigned attendance zones, we find that schools in Durham are more segregated by race and class as a result of school choice programs than they would be if all students attended their geographically assigned schools. In addition, we find that the effects of choice on segregation by class are larger than the effects on segregation by race

I\u27ll show you mine, if you show me yours : a brief and preliminary examination of parental report cards

This article examines the recently introduced phenomenon of parental report cards,taking a preliminary look at some of the reasons,both real and perceived, behind the concept. Increased parental involvement in the education of children is as universally applauded as apple pie and motherhood. Educators and parent-teacher organizations have, for years, encouraged greater involvement on the part of parents—encouragement that in the past seldom ventured beyond simple and generic letters from a principal or superintendent or, in some instances, a more personalized letter from a teacher. Parents have long been urged, but have never actually been required, to participate in their children’s education. Although the time has not yet come for compulsory parental education and/or actual report cards assessing the amount of commitment parents show toward their children’s education, symbolic report cards have begun to appear, in which parents are asked to assess their own performance as parents