Re-engineering Public Education: Developing New Technologies in Teaching and Assessment

In the nineteen-nineties, I was principal of a middle school when the accountability issue burst into prominence in the state of Alabama in the form of norm-referenced testing as the main tool to evaluate school performance. Designed by well-meaning educators to meet the requirements of Alabama legislation, the accountability program in Alabama was developed to put some teeth into the curriculum. Schools and systems that performed poorly faced state takeover. The Alabama accountability issue was one face of a national movement predicated on the idea that the public schools in the United States have failed egregiously and that more stringent accountability standards will set expectations forcing teachers to do a better job teaching and students to do a better job learning (Houston, 2003). Schools and school systems across the United States were facing the same types of accountability standards and were being evaluated through student performance on standardized tests, criterion referenced tests, or a combination of the two

An Entropy-based Assessment of the Unicode Encoding for Tibetan

This paper presents an analysis of the Unicode encoding scheme for Tibetan from the standpoint of morpheme entropy. We can speak of two levels of entropy in Tibetan: syllable entropy (a measure of the probability of the sequential occurrence of syllables), and morpheme entropy (a measure of the probability of the sequential occurrence of characters or morphemes), the latter being a measure of the redundancy of the language. Syllable entropy is a purely statistical calculation that is a function of the domain of the literature sampled, while morpheme entropy, we show, is relatively domain independent given a statistically significant sample. Morpheme entropy can be calculated statistically, though a theoretical upper bound can also be postulated based on language dependent morphology rules. This paper presents both theoretical and statistical estimates of the morpheme entropy for Tibetan, and explores the Tibetan Unicode encoding scheme in relation to data compression, and other issues analyzed in light of entropy-based language modeling

Automatic Segmentation and Part-Of-Speech Tagging For Tibetan: A First Step Towards Machine Translation

This paper presents what we believe to be the first reported work on Tibetan machine translation (MT). Of the three conceptually distinct components of a MT system — analysis, transfer, and generation — the first phase, consisting of POS tagging has been successfully completed. The combination POS tagger / word-segmenter was manually constructed as a rule-based multi-tagger relying on the Wilson formulation of Tibetan grammar. Partial parsing was also performed in combination with POS-tag sequence disambiguation. The component was evaluated at the task of document indexing for Information Retrieval (IR). Preliminary analysis indicated slightly better (though statistically comparable) performance to n-gram based approaches at a known-item IR task. Although segmentation is application specific, error analysis placed segmentation accuracy at 99%; the accuracy of the POS tagger is also estimated at 99% based on IR error analysis and random sampling

An Entropy-based Assessment of the Unicode Encoding for Tibetan

This paper presents an analysis of the Unicode encoding scheme for Tibetan from the standpoint of morpheme entropy. We can speak of two levels of entropy in Tibetan: syllable entropy (a measure of the probability of the sequential occurrence of syllables), and morpheme entropy (a measure of the probability of the sequential occurrence of characters or morphemes), the latter being a measure of the redundancy of the language. Syllable entropy is a purely statistical calculation that is a function of the domain of the literature sampled, while morpheme entropy, we show, is relatively domain independent given a statistically significant sample. Morpheme entropy can be calculated statistically, though a theoretical upper bound can also be postulated based on language dependent morphology rules. This paper presents both theoretical and statistical estimates of the morpheme entropy for Tibetan, and explores the Tibetan Unicode encoding scheme in relation to data compression, and other issues analyzed in light of entropy-based language modeling

The Use of yig-cha and chos-kyi-rnam-grangs in Computing Lexical Cohesion for Tibetan Topic Boundary Detection

To properly implement a simple Tibetan Information Retrieval (IR) system segmentation of one form or another (n-gram, POS-tagging, dictionary substring matching, etc.) must be performed (see Hackett (2000b)). To take Tibetan indexing to a more sophisticated level however, some form of topic detection must be employed. This paper reports the results of a pilot study on the application to Tibetan of one technique for topic boundary detection: Lexical Cohesion. The resources developed and deployed, the theoretical model used, and its potential applications are discussed

Considerations Regarding leadership Training in a Tofflerian Era of Change

In 1970, sociologist and futurist Alvin Toffler predicted a future characterized by experience and information overload. This overload, said Toffler, would be caused by an exponential increase in the amount of knowledge being produced and our inability to cope with both the volume of information and the rate at which knowledge was being produced. In this article, the authors make the case that we are presently living in a Tofflerian Era that includes constant change in terms of amount of knowledge and the rate at which it is transmitted and collected due to the proliferation of new technologies. In this article, the authors outline the aspects of this era and what those aspects may require of leaders in education and the trainers of those leaders

Document Translation for Cross-Language Text Retrieval at the University of Maryland

The University of Maryland participated in three TREC-6 tasks: ad hoc retrieval, cross-language retrieval, and spoken document retrieval. The principal focus of the work was evaluation of a cross-language text retrieval technique based on fully automatic machine translation. The results show that approaches based on document translation can be approximately as effective as approaches based on query translation, but that additional work will be needed to develop a solid basis for choosing between the two in specific applications. Ad hoc and spoken document retrieval results are also presented

Assessment of Emotional Competencies in Educational Leaders: Applying Daniel Goleman’s Work in Emotional Intelligences as a Means of Evaluating Dispositions Related to the Work of the School Leader

The study of best practices related to educational leadership is an emerging area for universities with programs training leaders in school improvement. Practices taught in educational leadership programs have long been related to the technical issues of school operations with emphasis in the areas of finance, law, organizational theory, and strategic planning. More recently, educational leadership programs have begun to focus on the skills required of a leader of instruction (Hallinger, 2003; Jason, 2001). Among areas of concentration for the instructional leader are assessment, collaboration, professional development, and curriculum design. Although the focus of educational leadership programs has changed, the resulting levels of student achievement in the public schools in reading and mathematics have been reported as lukewarm with younger students improving since 1971, but seventeen-year-olds showing no improvement (Perie & Moran, 2004). Moreover, these student achievement results have been perceived by the public as less than desirable. According to survey results released by the Educational Testing Service in June of 2004, only 22% of adults surveyed gave American schools a grade of B or above (Parents Take Schools, 2004)

From online entries to online results

From online entries to online result