BABEL, the Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language generator, is software created by Les Perelman and others [chronicle.com] at MIT. Perelman was a "Director of Undergraduate Writing" at MIT. He has used BABEL to generate nonsense essays and feed them to automated essay grading software. The BABEL output gets high marks with sentences like "Privateness has not been and undoubtedly never will be lauded, precarious, and decent." I think Perelman has a point here. Clever students will no doubt learn to game any such grading system to their benefit. Teachers must question what, if any, benefit an automated essay grading system has.
Back in 2005, Perelman discovered an excellent predictor of score [nytimes.com] on an SAT essay test. It was the length of the essay. No other variable he examined correlated nearly as well with the score. The top scoring essays had many factual errors, too. No matter, according to SAT. The writing quality depends not on the correctness of any facts, according to SAT. Perelman's advice for scoring well is to practice writing fast and make up facts. Perhaps the high scorers can land a job with Fox News?
A paper by Perelman in the Journal of Writing Assessment critiques automatic scoring of essays.
4 out of 5 flipped classroom instructors recommend this blog.
Thursday, May 1, 2014
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Racial, Gender Bias in Mentoring
Heard on NPR Morning Edition today: the depressing results of a study done by Katherine Milkman of the Wharton School of Business and two others. The researchers emailed 6,548 faculty mentors at 258 schools pretending to be students aspiring to earn a PhD. All potential advisors received the same message; only the name of the sender was changed. NPR says the names were all different. The messages said in part "I really admire your work, would you have some time to meet?" Names were purposely chosen to distribute across racial and ethnic identities. All that was measured was how often the profs wrote back agreeing to meet with the students.
Women and minorities were less likely to get responses, relative to caucasian males, and less likely to get positive responses. Caucasian males obtained access 26% more often. Remember, the text of the messages was identical. NPR says the letters were "impeccably written."
Perhaps the most distressing results were that that the gender of the professor had no effect, according to NPR, and that the business professors discriminated the most in favor of white male names like "Brad Anderson."
Evidence Of Racial, Gender Biases Found In Faculty Mentoring [npr.org audio].
Women and minorities were less likely to get responses, relative to caucasian males, and less likely to get positive responses. Caucasian males obtained access 26% more often. Remember, the text of the messages was identical. NPR says the letters were "impeccably written."
Perhaps the most distressing results were that that the gender of the professor had no effect, according to NPR, and that the business professors discriminated the most in favor of white male names like "Brad Anderson."
Evidence Of Racial, Gender Biases Found In Faculty Mentoring [npr.org audio].
Monday, April 21, 2014
Hybrid Pedagogy
Earlier today I stumbled onto hybrid pedagogy, a website for the eponymous open access journal, while reading a post from Rebecca Schuman, a blogger at Slate who covers education. The director, Jesse Stommel, is an assistant professor at UW-Madison. Give their site a whirl if you're into hybrid learning and pedagogy.
Text Set for NSA Mass Surveillance
Text Sets are a tool teachers can use to scaffold instruction for struggling learners. They generally focus on one topic or theme and are a very useful tool for improving comprehension and literacy. Text sets popped into my head when I found this article about the NSA and its mass surveillance. The author does not use the term "text set," but that is what he's proposing to provide context for the journalistic coverage of the NSA following the revelations by Edward Snowden last summer.
Anyone familiar with the Snowden/NSA story has no doubt read an article in which a journalist has compared the NSA to Big Brother in George Orwell's novel "1984." It's a metaphor with legs (is that a meta-metaphor?). Mr. Berlatsky points out that 1984 is not a book that paints the most relevant picture of the current government-sanctioned surveillance of the citizenry. He argues that other works do. He even goes so far as to say that 1984 can "enslave thought." I think he may be referring to the phenomenon of journalists who repeat what other journalists have already tweeted or written, even after a statement has been found to be unsupported by the facts. On The Media is all over this case.
On to the text set, culled from the article. A caveat: this text set might not be appropriate for scaffolding.
Anyone familiar with the Snowden/NSA story has no doubt read an article in which a journalist has compared the NSA to Big Brother in George Orwell's novel "1984." It's a metaphor with legs (is that a meta-metaphor?). Mr. Berlatsky points out that 1984 is not a book that paints the most relevant picture of the current government-sanctioned surveillance of the citizenry. He argues that other works do. He even goes so far as to say that 1984 can "enslave thought." I think he may be referring to the phenomenon of journalists who repeat what other journalists have already tweeted or written, even after a statement has been found to be unsupported by the facts. On The Media is all over this case.
On to the text set, culled from the article. A caveat: this text set might not be appropriate for scaffolding.
- Phillip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
- Franz Kafka, The Trial
- Arun Kundnani, The Muslims are Coming
- Maureen F. McHugh, China Mountain Zhang
to which I would add these nonfiction works:
- Patrick Radden Keefe, Chatter
- Bruce Schneier, Secrets & Lies
- James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace
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