Education | Conforming Assessment

Fighting Urban Sprawl

February 9, 2011 by admin Leave a Comment

A lot of cities all around the country have gotten to the point where the city proper can no longer support the local population who wants to work and play there. As such, the city will inevitably sprawl out into endless suburbs. Of course, there are still going to be people who live within the city. Since schools are built where children are, this leads to something which approximates segregation, as minorities tend to live closer to where they work (within the inner city), and the more affluent people live further out and go to different schools. The poorer schools cannot afford the best teachers or the best equipment, so their standardized test scores and grade point averages tend to sag terribly. However, cities can fight this urban sprawl, by efficiently utilizing the structures they have, and having them professionally managed. Urban sprawl is a problem because of what it ends up doing to a lot of less privileged students. However, it can be prevented to a point, if the structures which often end up sitting vacant are used more effectively as both housing and businesses, and occasionally even as charter schools. A good property manager can do wonders with even a mediocre property, because of the unique skill set that they bring to the table. For example, if you live in Texas, look into an Arlington property management company to transform your property. A good property manager can take a property most of the world condemns, and turn it into a useful structure for a variety of different purposes. When it comes to hiring contractors and placing solid tenants, a great property manager can turn real estate garbage into gold. They can even end up helping out the effort to plan cities, so that they can avoid a lot of sprawl in the first place. They can even the odds between the schools in the suburbs and the ones in the inner city.

Filed Under: Education, Standards Tagged With: Property management, Real estate, Urban sprawl

Creative Teaching Methods Improves Teaching Atmosphere

February 8, 2011 by admin Leave a Comment

Teachers have found that allowing for creative teaching methods creates a better atmosphere for learning. Creative teaching methods can mean a wide variety of things, including the following: reenacting scenes from a play, parodying a type of writing, memorizing tables and phrases to a tune, and using visual blocks for math and science. While these methods vary, they are proven to create a better learning environment.

One literature teacher assigned her junior high students to not only read Edgar Allen Poe’s famous poem, “The Raven,” but to write a parody of the poem—meaning they would keep the meter and stanza length and structure of the poem. This had students more closely examine the poem, demonstrated to them how to mark its meter, as well as allowed them to come up with their own creation. This aspect of learning brought together history, literature analysis, as well as writing and creativity.

Using visual aids for science has long been practiced in the classroom, but using visual aids for math is much less common, particularly with older elementary children. However, the program Math-U-See works under the impression that students learn better when terms are no longer in the abstract but have a concrete aspect to them. This method uses small squares representing hundreds, tens, fives, and ones. This allows students who become confused when dealing with numbers the ability to catch up to their other classmates, as well as have a fuller understanding of the basic building blocks of mathematics instead of simply memorizing methods without comprehending how they work.

Other methods also use additional parts of a child’s brain, creating a fuller learning experience. This is what memorizing phrases to the tune of a song does. The words are easier to remember when sung, so many teachers choose tunes for their students for not only the alphabet, but for times tables and the periodic table of elements. These methods are so effective for children because they engage a child’s mind more fully than other methods, and are also a change of pace during the day that makes it more exciting and interesting.

Filed Under: Assessment, Education Tagged With: Education, Student, Teaching method

Parent Involvment Leads to Better Grades

February 3, 2011 by admin Leave a Comment

Recent studies have strongly suggested that children receive much better grades when their parents take an interest in their education. When a parent shows interest in their child’s education, the child is much more likely to not only be interested in what he or she is learning, but to work harder towards a good grade. Here are some things you can do to encourage your child:

Ask them about their school subjects. If they are taking a history class, ask several questions to get a full understanding of what they are learning. Ask them about their favorite subject, which they may talk about more easily. Showing interest in what they are learning will show them not only that you are interested in them and want them to suceed, but may also renew their own interest in these subjects.

Help them with their homework. While you certainly do not want to do their work for them, sit with them and try to help them through it as a tutor would when dealing with a difficult subject. You can also help them with class projects by hearing their ideas, helping them get the supplies they need, and encouraging them to finish strong.

Encourage their interests. Once you have been asking about what they are learning, you may get an idea what they are interested in. If you have a daughter than loves to write poetry, get her a book on writing poems, or a rhyming dictionary, or even a book of poetry. This will show your children that you are listening to what they have to say and you believe in them.

A parent does not need to be extremely intelligent to encourage their child, but must only show an interest in what their child is learning. Parents who simply try to discover what their child’s interests are and work to give them opportunities to flourish in these areas are more likely to raise a successful and confident child. Parents must not minimize the impact they have on their children, and should make the best effort to allow their child to flourish.

Filed Under: Education, Standards Tagged With: Child, Learning, Parent

Sensible Regulation Without International Governance

January 25, 2011 by admin Leave a Comment

The International Organization for Standardization is a great regulatory model because it is able to introduce standards to the international business community without requiring a government oriented body to do so. Other sorts of regulation are rooted in some type of local or national government. Thus, the pursuit of international standards is delicate from the point of that we have no comprehensive form of international government. Fortunately or unfortunately, this situation does not allow for any global mandatory regulation of business practices. However, the beauty of ISO standards is that they are sensible and very well researched suggestions that may help establish consumer confidence in certified businesses that choose to participate in conformity assessment.

After all, if we just want to guarantee quality as we trade across borders, why would we need to seek some form of international governance to do so? It just doesn’t make sense. Full fledged government intervention would in most cases make for an enormous and highly inefficient hassle. The goal of ISO standards and regulations is so often to neutralize these types of inefficiencies. ISO standards strive to make international trade more reliable and attainable to organizations. The ISO also does not at this time involve itself with aggressive forms of enforcement. However, it does enforce its standards in numerous ways only to ensure that certified businesses continue to maintain their commitment to standardization.

In the end, the ISO is a private creator of international standards. It produces important regulations that positively influence business practices all over the world. In addition to making our workplaces more efficient and safer, the ISO has helped our ability to trade more freely than ever before. Businesses with ISO certification appeal to consumers out of confidence. Similarly, the ISO itself appeals to governmental and non-governmental organizations for being a reasonable international body of standardization.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: Business

Conformity Assessment to Stimulate Innovation

January 22, 2011 by admin Leave a Comment

While it is very clear that conformity assessment is widely beneficial in most areas, there are many legitimate questions to be asked with regard to its impact on business and technological innovation. In some sense, the very notion of standardization does seem to conflict with the creative spirit of individualistic freedom. This is an area where the International Organization for Standardization uses its best judgement. The ISO is aware that some types of regulation can stifle the creativity of markets. This is not the intent of standardization itself. However, where the ISO is perhaps shortsighted of an issue, the commitment to ISO regulations is always voluntary and doing so will in most cases only benefit the participating organization.

Very rarely does the ISO implement a standard that could be potentially stifling to innovations of all sorts. There are many information technology standards that deal with media formats and standardized computer products. Technological standards are something that has always been contentious as pieces of technology have been defined by their duplicatable formats and media types. In this situation, any format chosen as an international standard format will perhaps run the risk of stifling the development of any other competing formats. On the other hand, if no uniform format is chosen, this would defeat the very purpose of standardization as a means to widely disseminate this valuable technology to potential consumers all over the world.

In most other areas that do not deal with the technological establishment of formatting standards, there is very little the ISO can do to really stifle technological or business innovations. This is of course unless you consider the intentional pursuit of poor business practices to be some form of innovation. Standardization may force businesses to get creative.

In the end, there are numerous benefits to conformity assessment. Standardization is meant to be a generally positive experience for everyone even though it may inspire people and businesses to adapt to certain new criteria.

Filed Under: Assessment, Education Tagged With: Business, International Organization for Standardization, Standards

Reaching the Top, in Spite of it All

November 29, 2010 by admin Leave a Comment

Standardized testing is a slippery slope at times. On the one hand, you have people who think that because their test scores are a certain way they either don’t have to try anymore or they confirm that they are in fact the cream of the crop. But on the other hand, you also have people who think that the mediocrity of their test scores (since, by definition most students are going to be in that broad group known as “somewhere in the middle”) means that they are just mediocre people by nature. While this is true in some senses of the word, it may not be reasonable to put such measurements on people.

After all, everyone has both strengths and weaknesses. And for some people, their greatest strength lies in aligning themselves with people who have strengths which they personally lack. True, not everyone is Henry Ford, who sued someone for libel and won his case by calling in his various experts on any given topic on which he might be questioned. Wouldn’t it be lovely to just hire people who know pretty much any kind of information you might ever want to have available to you? There’s a very good reason why onlinembarankings.com is accessible to anyone, after all.

No matter where you fall in the spectrum on standardized tests, you can achieve pretty much anything you can imagine yourself doing. If you think of yourself as an underachiever, then that’s what you’ll be. If you think of yourself as someone who performs at the optimal level all the time, then you have a destiny of being amazing ahead of you. How you see yourself is infinitely more important than what your aggregate skills and aptitudes are on one given day. The problem every educational system is going to have to deal with is, how do we identify the skills of our students?

Filed Under: Cause & Effect, Education Tagged With: Education, Henry Ford, Standardized test