| Abstract: | An urgent need is for some overall unit of educational benefit, and it is here proposed that such be established by certain scaling techniques. Groups of judges are asked to render overall evaluations on “students” of specified characteristics. Their evaluations are studied for correlation with the student traits, and the resultant coefficients, loaded with latent and applied values, become defensible weights to describe other students' overall educational advancement. The general unit so developed, when normalized for the target population, may be termed a “benefit T-score”, or more simply “bentee”. Recursive features of the scaling process, applicable at different levels of generality, should provide for a shift from value-space to test-space, and from societal to expert opinion. Discovered weightings should illuminate differing values of lay and professional groups within society. And the bentee could provide an objective function suitable for optimizing in management-science techniques, now largely neglected in curriculum and administration. |
