Links for 9/28/09

Robert Connor on assessment

I found myself making the strange hiss sounds of “assessment,” a sound so savagely obnoxious that my friends began to hint that I was opening the gates to the barbarians.

I tried to conciliate them by substituting the term “evidence” for “assessment,” but they were too smart for that. And when I found I needed to investigate the various instruments that had been developed to help measure student learning, it was clear to many friends that I had gone over to the dark side. Terms such as NSSE, CLA, HERI, and CIRP were shibboleths that marked me as one of them.

Alex Tabarrok on US teacher absences.

On a typical school day, 5-6% of teachers are absent, i.e. equivalent to an absence once every 20 days!

Jake has a nice chart showing endowment returns relative to some benchmarks.

The very, very, very scary side of game theory.