1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of teaching and more particularly to a system and method for measuring the efficiency and the effectiveness of the educational process and systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Teaching is a skill and an art. Being such, it is often difficult to measure the quality of education that has occurred. Teachers, professors, instructors and the like have varying attributes such as education, subject matter knowledge, personalities, styles, emotions, drive, speech patterns, etc. In addition, teachers contend with classes of varying size that affect their ability to interact with students in the classroom, and in any help sessions. Likewise, their students also have varying attributes such as prior education, personalities, styles, emotions, drive, attention patterns, study skills, etc. It is often hard to measure, let alone predict the outcome of a learning experience involving a subject, a teacher, a set of students and a time frame because of the complex interactions among this myriad of attributes.
Often, teachers are rated, and perhaps paid, based upon years in teaching. Although there may be some correlation between years in teaching, teaching ability and teaching effectiveness, there is no absolute direct relationship and, therefore, this evaluation method falls short.
In recent times, standardized tests have been used to measure the level a group of students have achieved on specific subjects or a broad range of knowledge. Many of these tests have been deployed to help colleges and institutions evaluate new student prospects, for example, the SAT and GRE exams. Most, if not all states, such as California, Florida, Ohio and New York, have standardized tests for evaluating the overall achievement of a group of students such as an entire grade level within a particular school. Such tests are used to evaluate the school and the overall school's ability to teach. Although still in use at the time of filing, this system has inaccuracies due to student demographics, teacher attributes, public pressure, etc., but especially because of several features of the present invention that are missing from such evaluations.
The prior art has several examples of methods for measuring teaching success. For example, U.S. patent Publication 20050297505 to George describes a method of teaching success. This method may help students generate and achieve goals, but it does not measure the efficiency or effectiveness of the teacher or of the educational system.
U.S. patent Publication 20040157201 to Hollingsworth, et al., describes a method for evaluating educational effectiveness. This method uses “time on task” and “instructional effectiveness” to evaluate educational effectiveness, but does not measure overall efficiency and effectiveness of the educator, nor the process employed by the educational system.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,789,047 to Woodson describes a method for evaluating an instructor using data captured during an electronic course (online) such as attendance and response time to questions. It does not measure before and after results and time spent.
What is needed is a system and method that will measure the efficiency and effectiveness of the educational system at several levels so that potential improvements can be identified and implemented.
In one embodiment, a system for measuring efficiency of educational activities is disclosed including a computer with software running on the computer for accepting inputs indicating an amount of effort expended and accumulating these inputs into an accumulated effort. Software is provided for accepting inputs indicating an educational goal such as credit-hours gained, a knowledge level of a group of students before the teaching activities are performed, and for accepting inputs indicating a knowledge level of the group of students after the teaching activities are performed, measuring the incremental progress toward the new educational plateau. Software is also provided for calculating the educational efficiency based upon the difference between the knowledge level of the group of students before the educational activities and the knowledge level of the group of students after the educational activities divided by the accumulated effort which may include non-classroom work such as homework preparation, study time, and time researching issues.
In another embodiment, a method for measuring educational efficiency and effectiveness of an educator and a group of students toward an educational goal is disclosed including measuring both the amounts of effort expended during educational activities and accumulating the direct costs of teaching (teacher wages and classroom and laboratory supply costs into an accumulated cost. The knowledge level of the group of students is measured before the teaching activities and measured after the teaching activities. The educational efficiency and effectiveness are calculated based upon the difference between the knowledge level of the group of students before the teaching activities and the knowledge level of the group of students after the teaching activities divided by the accumulated effort and direct teaching cost, including teacher wages and the costs of classroom and laboratory supplies.
In another embodiment, a computer readable medium tangibly embodying a program of instructions, the program of instructions configured to for measuring teaching efficiency and effectiveness of an educational system employed for teaching a varying sized group of students is disclosed including computer instructions for measuring amounts of effort and cost expended during teaching activities and computer instructions for accumulating the amounts of effort and cost expended during teaching activities into an accumulated effort and the accumulated expenses associated with providing the classroom opportunity such as teacher wages, classroom and laboratory supplies, and administrative, teacher wages, classroom and laboratory supplies, operations and maintenance expenses, as well as related costs such as transportation. Computer instructions are provided for measuring the knowledge level of the group of students before the teaching activities and for measuring the knowledge level of the group of students after the teaching activities. Furthermore, computer instructions are provided for calculating the teaching efficiency and effectiveness based upon the difference between the knowledge level of the group of students before the teaching activities and the knowledge level of the group of students after the teaching activities divided by first the accumulated effort, and then by the expenses associated with providing the educational opportunity described previously.
The invention can be best understood by those having ordinary skill in the art by reference to the following detailed description when considered in conjunction with the accompanying drawings in which:
Reference will now be made in detail to the presently preferred embodiments of the invention, examples of which are illustrated in the accompanying drawings. Throughout the following detailed description, the same reference numerals refer to the same elements in all figures.
Referring to
In general, the hard disk 140 may be used to store programs, executable code and data persistently, while the CDROM 150 may be used to load said programs, executable code and data from removable media onto the hard disk 140. These peripherals are meant to be examples of input/output devices, persistent storage and removable media storage. Other examples of persistent storage include core memory, FRAM, flash memory, etc. Other examples of removable media storage include CDRW, DVD, DVD writeable, compact flash, other removable flash media, floppy disk, ZIP®, laser disk, etc. In some embodiments, other devices are connected to the system through the system bus 120 or with other input-output connections. Examples of these devices include printers; mice; graphics tablets; joysticks; and communications adapters such as modems and Ethernet adapters.
Referring to
Next, teaching proceeds 14 and during such, the amount of effort and cost is accumulated 15. The amount of effort is a measure of work expended by the students and educator and includes some or all of classroom time, study time, homework time, discussion group time, educator time spent grading, preparation, research, tutoring, etc. Costs are those expenses associated with providing the educational opportunity being evaluated, and for some measures may be partial costs. If the curriculum is not complete 16, the steps of teaching 14 and accumulating effort and costs 15 are repeated until the curriculum is complete 16. Once complete, the students are again tested using a post-test 18. The post-test is, necessarily, similar in scope but preferably not identical to the pre-test and therefore provides a measurement of how much the students learned during the teaching steps. Subtraction of the pre-test results from the post-test results provides a measurement of basic learning. It represents the fraction of the educational goal; for example the course credit hours mastered in the course measured. This measurement of basic learning is just that—how much more the students know now than they knew before the course began. This raw measurement does not take into account either the amount of time expended or the monies expended to achieve this increment of learning. The basic learning (post-test scores minus pre-test scores) is divided by the accumulated effort 20 to provide a measurement of educational efficiency. Likewise, the basic learning (post-test scores minus pre-test scores) is divided by the accumulated cost 22 to provide a measurement of educational effectiveness.
For example, consider two United States Department of Commerce classes, one of 15 students and another of 8 students, learning the Japanese language. The subject matter is taken in this example as two (2) college-level credit-hours. In Japanese 101, one must first learn the Katakana and Hiragana characters used as a phonetic alphabet. Both classes are tested before any teaching occurs to see how many of the Katakana and Hiragana characters are recognized by the students. Referring to
Assuming a teacher salary allocated to this course of $400 per student per credit hour and no other costs, the cost effectiveness is determined by dividing the efficiency by the cost to arrive at a value of 0.1215 credit-hours/hr/$1000.
Referring to
If methods of the prior art were applied to these scores, it would have looked like the second set of students started with slightly more knowledge and finished with slightly more knowledge than the first group, but nothing would indicate which teacher performed better at teaching and motivating each class. Moreover, much of any difference would be masked by the difference in class size. For the second class, as per the present invention, the measured gain in knowledge (90%-25%) is multiplied by the learning goal of two (2) credit hours and is divided by the work effort of 36 hours to determine the teaching efficiency 320. In this example, teaching efficiency is 2×(0.90−0.25)/36, or 0.036. The effectiveness is calculated as in the first instance. Because of the smaller class size, even though the teacher wage rate is constant, the per student cost increases to $750 per student per credit hour. The effectiveness for the second class thus is 2×(0.90−0.25)/36/750 giving an effectiveness of 0.0481 credit-hours/hour/$1000.
Both classes finished knowing roughly the same measured number of Hiragana and Katakana characters and both are adequately prepared to move on to the next level of Japanese learning. By simply comparing the post-test results of the first educator (85%) to the second educator (90%), it would appear that the second class (or perhaps teacher) out performs the first, a result the present invention shows to be incorrect. The present invention provides a superior method for purpose of comparing educators, educational environments, curriculum, teaching methods, etc. Using the teaching efficiency and effectiveness measures make it clearer that the first class's educational experience was superior despite a lower post-test score.
The efficiency and effectiveness results might lead one to conclude that the teacher for the second class was substantially inferior. An advantage of the present invention is that an externality such as class size can be isolated analytically. When the results are adjusted for class size the efficiency and effectiveness are 0.043 and 0.107 per credit hour/hr/$1000, indicating that the teacher for class 2 is somewhat less capable but not nearly as much as might be inferred from the unexamined initial data. There are also potential effects of additional effort required by the second class if the teacher is less effective and students spend more hours for studying and preparing homework. These students may have less time to devote to other class work, extra curricular activities, etc. They may perform less than optimal in sports, other classes, social experiences, etc.
Referring to
Referring to
The expenses attributable to the educational experience that are measurable in dollars include the cost of educator salaries, resource costs, equipment costs, facility costs, travel expense, training or seminar fees, and other education related expense.
The following are examples of expense measurements at an individual class level:
As an example at the class level, the total class level expense is the total of the classroom teaching expense, the classroom supply expense, the laboratory teaching expense, the laboratory supply expense and the development expense. Therefore, the class level teaching effectiveness according to the present invention is the net classroom instructional improvement divided by the total class level expense.
The following are examples of effort measurements at a grade level reflecting, for example, all classes in one particular grade across a school such as all sophomores in a given high school:
As an example at the grade level, the total grade level expense (effort) is the total of the grade classroom teaching expense, the grade classroom supply expense, the grade laboratory teaching expense, the grade laboratory supply expense and the grade development expense. Therefore, the grade level teaching effectiveness according to the present invention is the total classroom instructional improvement for the grade divided by the total grade level expense.
The following are examples of effort measurements at a school level reflecting, for example, all classes in all grades across a given school such as all grades/classes in a given high school:
As an example at the school level, the total school level expense (effort) is the total of the school classroom teaching expense, the school classroom supply expense, the school laboratory teaching expense, the school laboratory supply expense, the school administrative expense and the school development expense. Therefore, the school level teaching effectiveness according to the present invention is the total school instructional improvement for the entire school divided by the total school level expense.
The following are examples of effort measurements at a school system reflecting, for example, all schools in a geographic area such as all public schools in New York City:
As an example at the school system level, the total school system level expense (effort) is the total of the school system teaching expense, the school system supply expense, the school system teaching expense, the school system laboratory supply expense, the school system administrative expense and the school system development expense. Therefore, the school system teaching effectiveness according to the present invention is the total school system instructional improvement for the entire school system divided by the total school system level expense.
Equivalent elements can be substituted for the ones set forth above such that they perform in substantially the same manner in substantially the same way for achieving substantially the same result.
It is believed that the system and method of the present invention and many of its attendant advantages will be understood by the foregoing description. It is also believed that it will be apparent that various changes may be made in the form, construction and arrangement of the components thereof without departing from the scope and spirit of the invention or without sacrificing all of its material advantages. The form herein before described being merely exemplary and explanatory embodiment thereof. It is the intention of the following claims to encompass and include such changes.