How Much is Learning Measurement Worth? Assessment Costs in Low-Income Countries

Timely and credible data on student learning has become a global issue in the ongoing effort to improve educational outcomes. With the potential to serve as a powerful diagnostic tool to gauge the overall health and well-being of an educational system, educational assessments have received increasing attention among specialists and the media. Though the stakes are high, relatively little is known about the cost-benefit ratio of various assessments compared to other educational expenditures. This paper presents an overview of four major types of assessments — national, regional, international and hybrid — and the costs that each has incurred within 13 distinct contexts, especially in low-income countries. The findings highlight broad variation in the total cost of assessment and the cost-per-learner. This underscores the importance of implementation strategies that appropriately consider scale, timeliness, and cost-efficiency as critical considerations for any assessment

Learning First: A Research Agenda for Improving Learning in Low-Income Countries

In 2011, the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at the Brookings Institution spearheaded the development of a common policy agenda on global education entitled A Global Compact on Learning: Taking Action on Education in Developing Countries. The report recommended a call to action for a diverse group of international stakeholders to come together to work toward achieving quality education for all. As a part of this larger policy agenda, CUE works with various scholars and organizations to address the many issues within the scope of the Global Compact on Learning

Exploratory studies to inform full-scale evaluations of complex public health interventions: the need for guidance

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Predicting lung cancer recurrence from circulating tumour DNA. Commentary on 'Phylogenetic ctDNA analysis depicts early-stage lung cancer evolution'

No abstract available

An Efficient End-To-End Model for the Kepler Photometer

The Kepler Mission is designed to characterize the frequency of Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of solar-like stars in the solar galactic neighborhood by observing >100,000 main-sequence stars in a >100 square degree field of view (FOV) and seeking evidence of transiting planets. As part of the system engineering effort, we have developed an End-To-End Model (ETEM) of the photometer to better characterize the expected performance of the instrument and to guide us in making design trades. This model incorporates engineering information such as the point spread function, time histories of pointing offsets, operating temperature, quantization noise, the effects of shutterless readout, and read noise. Astrophysical parameters, such as a realistic distribution of stars vs. magnitude for the chosen FOV, zodiacal light, and cosmic ray events are also included. For a given set of design and operating parameters, ETEM generates pixel time series for all pixels of interest for a single CCD channel of the photometer. These time series are then processed to form light curves for the target stars and the impact of various noise sources on the combined differential photometric precision can be determined. This model is of particular value when investigating the effects of noise sources that cannot be easily subjected to direct analysis, such as residual pointing offsets, thermal drift or cosmic ray effects. This version of ETEM features extremely efficient computation times relative to the previous version while maintaining a high degree of fidelity with respect to the realism of the relevant phenomena