One quote that stood out for me was by Emma Goldman, author:”No one has yet fully realized the wealth of sympathy, kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.”
A second quote that I truly have a connection with was by Martin Luther King Jr.: I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
I believe a child’s abilities and emotional intelligence should first be measured in order to determine what a child is able to do and learn, and how their emotions could affect their learning style. Once these are determined, the information they learn can be further assessed using other intelligence tests. Sternberg has taken a more direct approach to changing the practice of testing. His Sternberg Triarchic Abilities Test (STAT) is a battery of multiple-choice questions that tap into the three independent aspects of intelligence–analytic, practical and creative–proposed in his triarchic theory. Sternberg and his collaborators found that triarchic measures predicted a significant portion of the variance in college grade point average (GPA), even after SAT scores and high school GPA had been accounted for. The test also produced smaller differences between ethnic groups than did the SAT. In the next phase of the project, the researchers will fine-tune the test and administer it to a much larger sample of students, with the ultimate goal of producing a test that could serve as a supplement to the SAT.
If more professionals focus on an individual’s abilities, they will be better able to assist them during aptitude or other intelligence tests. They will also be able to determine if the individual would be able to take the test or if it would need to be modified to meet their needs (Kellaghan & Greaney, 2003). In Africa, the use of assessments is to improve the quality of education in African education systems. National assessment activity spread through the whole of Africa during the 1990s. Although information derived from national assessments is obtained from individual students, data are aggregated to provide an assessment of the education system. The primary purpose of such an assessment is to describe how well students are learning. International assessments, which share many procedural features with national assessments, provide comparative data on achievement in more than one country (Kellaghan & Greaney, 2003). Few African countries have participated in them. However, some of the national assessments that have been carried out allow international comparisons. Although classroom assessment has attracted the least attention in proposals to use assessment to improve the quality of education, it is likely to have a greater impact on student learning than any other form of assessment. Advantages and disadvantages of school-based assessment in contributing to grades in public examinations are considered.
Reference:
Kellaghan, T. & Greaney, V. (2003). Monitoring Performance: Assessment and Examinations in Africa. Association for the Development of Education in Africa, 7-9.
I met a friend in college who had experienced a natural disaster. She was from New Orleans and had been uprooted from her home during the time of Hurricane Katrina. She was devastated that she may not be able to return home, and even more saddened that she would be separated from her family. She attended Louisiana State University, and was transferred to North Carolina A&T State University, which is where I attended undergrad. She did a lot of counseling to deal with the pain she endured of being uprooted, and she also had a lot of support from classmates and professors. She was able to cope by getting involved in sports on campus. She was naturally tall and so when she tried out for the volleyball team, she was a shoe-in. She was very talented in volleyball and ended up being the star player two years in a row. I believe she went on a full sports scholarship by the end of her first year for playing volleyball so well. Her involvement on the campus and in sports programs is what she said kept her going day-to-day. I appreciate the fact that she was willing to get help and the drive to want to stay involved so she wouldn’t become depressed.
The country I wanted to look more into that was interesting to me was Haiti. I wanted to focus on another region that experienced a natural disaster similar to New Orleans. The 2010 Haiti earthquake was a catastrophic magnitude 7.0 M earthquake. An estimated three million people were affected by the quake; the Haitian government reported that an estimated 316,000 people had died, 300,000 had been injured and 1,000,000 made homeless. The government of Haiti also estimated that 250,000 residences and 30,000 commercial buildings had collapsed or were severely damaged. Many countries responded to appeals for humanitarian aid, pledging funds and dispatching rescue and medical teams, engineers and support personnel. In the nights following the earthquake, many people in Haiti slept in the streets, on pavements, in their cars, or in makeshift shanty towns either because their houses had been destroyed, or they feared standing structures would not withstand aftershocks. Six months after the quake as much as 98 percent of the rubble remained uncleared. An estimated 26 million cubic yards remained, making most of the capital impassable, and thousands of bodies remained in the rubble. The number of people in relief camps of tents and tarps since the quake was 1.6 million, and almost no transitional housing had been built. Most of the camps had no electricity, running water, or sewage disposal, and the tents were beginning to fall apart. Crime in the camps was widespread, especially against women and girls. Between 23 major charities, US$1.1 billion had been collected for Haiti for relief efforts, but only two percent of the money had been released.
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