Fragmented Testing

A couple things make standardized testing difficult in any given educational setting:

• pressure to pass / excel
• expensive exam-taking and scoring process
• valid test construction
• contested utility

If the pressure leads to undue stress among students or teacher-aided cheating, or if the time lost to test-taking takes too much from the school schedule, or if test writers cannot crank out valid tests fast enough, or if one day of testing simply does not lead to gains, then standardized testing fails to achieve its desired effect on student learning.

An alternative test environment may remove these obstacles. Imagine a fragmented exam schedule instead of the massive 4 hour exams currently administered to students. Periodically throughout the academic year, students would respond to targeted questions benchmarking progress in well-defined fields of study. These questions can be administered via computer on both a scheduled and a random basis; depending on the student’s individual achievement and time passed between questions, the administrator can choose more conceptually complex questions. Following either a minimum number of correct questions or a maximum amount of time spent producing an answer, the administrator can decide whether to advance a student or to begin remedial intervention.

A fragmented standardized exam of this sort may be incentivized through small rewards for each correct answer, say, $1. If a student answers one correct question every school day, they could walk out the last day with $180 in their pocket and a good cache of knowledge – plus the prospect of earning / learning more. Allowing up to ten questions per day, kids could walk away with a small scholarship.

Agora

(Part I. Part II in progress…)

Agora won several Goya Awards for production (set, costume, cinematography, special effects, etc) and its screenplay. The film has received mixed reviews in the United States. Roger Ebert wrote in the Sun-Times,

This is a movie about ideas, a drama based on the ancient war between science and superstition. At its center is a woman who in the fourth century A.D. was a scientist, mathematician, philosopher, astronomer and teacher, respected in Egypt, although women were not expected to be any of those things.

while V.A. Musetto complained in the NY Post,

The story revolves around Hypatia (Rachel Weisz), a real-life philosopher whose proclamations about the sun being the center of the universe ran counter to religious beliefs of the time.

There are a few exciting battle sequences and the sets are lavish, but mostly the film meanders aimlessly for more than two hours.

Then Patrick Goldstein interviewed the director for the Los Angeles Times during Cannes,

At several points during the film, he takes us swooping up and away from Alexandria, allowing the audience to see the world from high above, as if watching from the cockpit of a satellite orbiting the Earth. I asked him why he chose that perspective. “For me, this wasn’t just the story of a woman, but the story of a city — and a civilization, and a planet — so I wanted to find a way visually to capture that. When you see things from a distance, you can see how relative things are. The ideas that so inflame people up close, that feel so scary and menacing, they look very different when you see them from a different perspective.”

The words “center,” “revolve,” “meander aimlessly,” “perspective,” “relative,” as well as other astronomical vocabulary pepper the reviews with various denigrating puns or praises, depending on the critic’s general assumptions concerning film aesthetics. I find it amusing that the reviewers – much like the besieged students in my favorite scene – come close to discovering a correct interpretation of the film’s message, but ultimately fall back on preconceived, fallacious notions.