Politics and pedagogy: a case study in appropriation

During the last half‐century, the view of most governments, supported by the United Nations and other international agencies, has been that as far as possible schooling should be free of charge. Financial factors have not always made this feasible, but the policy has provided an attractive social and political goal. In recent years, financial stringency has bitten more deeply. Most governments still seem to adhere to the old philosophy, but there are signs of a change of heart among some governments and in at least one major international agency. The policy is thus coming under fire on both practical and ideological grounds.     

Acquiring knowledge about human goals from Search Query Logs

A better understanding of what motivates humans to perform certain actions is relevant for a range of research challenges including generating action sequences that implement goals (planning). A first step in this direction is the task of acquiring knowledge about human goals. In this work, we investigate whether Search Query Logs are a viable source for extracting expressions of human goals. For this purpose, we devise an algorithm that automatically identifies queries containing explicit goals such as find home to rent in Florida. Evaluation results of our algorithm achieve useful precision/recall values. We apply the classification algorithm to two large Search Query Logs, recorded by AOL and Microsoft Research in 2006, and obtain a set of ∼110,000 queries containing explicit goals. To study the nature of human goals in Search Query Logs, we conduct qualitative, quantitative and comparative analyses. Our findings suggest that Search Query Logs (i) represent a viable source for extracting human goals, (ii) contain a great variety of human goals and (iii) contain human goals that can be employed to complement existing commonsense knowledge bases. Finally, we illustrate the potential of goal knowledge for addressing following application scenario: to refine and extend commonsense knowledge with human goals from Search Query Logs. This work is relevant for (i) knowledge engineers interested in acquiring human goals from textual corpora and constructing knowledge bases of human goals (ii) researchers interested in studying characteristics of human goals in Search Query Logs.     

An examination of inter-district public school transfers in Wisconsin

Using data for all Wisconsin school districts over the 2003/04 through 2006/07 school years, we evaluate the state of Wisconsin's Open Enrollment (inter-district transfer) program to determine which school district characteristics influence parental transfer decisions. To our knowledge, this is the first study of school choice in a public school setting that evaluates transfer decisions controlling for district characteristics from which the students are transferring. The main result of our research indicates that parents of transfer students reside in districts with high property values but low taxes, and they choose to send their children to higher spending school districts. Other key findings are that parents send their children to districts with lower percentages of minorities, and are more likely to transfer from districts with fewer extracurricular opportunities.     

Building a framework for determining the authenticity of instructional tasks within teacher education programs

We propose a framework for evaluating the degree of authenticity of instructional tasks used within a teacher education program. First, we provide a defense for authenticity as an exemplary aspect of education. Second, we synthesize the theoretical literature on authenticity into conceptual codes. Using these codes, we build our authenticity framework around five criteria: the instructional task (1) is routinely performed by teachers, (2) involves students in a classroom, (3) promotes knowledge of practice, (4) involves self-reflection, and (5) serves formative purposes. We then discuss potential applications of our framework for the individual teacher educator and for program evaluation.