I'm fascinated with the idea of convergence, and usually thought of it in terms of when China will surpass America. But the idea that all poor countries will catch up within 170 years strikes me as a bit too slow, and I imagine that we should be able to speed that process up.
It's so interesting!! The website for the work on floods, so cool to see researchers going beyond pdfs :)
"What Patel and Sandefur do is administer a test to 2000 Indian school children which combines items from several standardized tests. They can use students’ performance on these items relative to each other to convert the tests scores of hundreds of thousands of students from 80 different countries into a common scale." I don't completly get what they are doing there? Are they using an instrument? (sorry if that's very obvious)
Aha! Smart, so a sample of thousands of students are working as proxy to normalise and compare all the rest of the test. That's a smart method.
I've done some of those standarised tests myself as a student (PISA for example) and I always wondered how do they make sure that I am answering as much as I know. PISA tests where I did them were not counting for my final grade and some of the questions where so tricky that some students where just passing.
Not saying that's the case here - but just leaving the thought there :)
I'm fascinated with the idea of convergence, and usually thought of it in terms of when China will surpass America. But the idea that all poor countries will catch up within 170 years strikes me as a bit too slow, and I imagine that we should be able to speed that process up.
It's so interesting!! The website for the work on floods, so cool to see researchers going beyond pdfs :)
"What Patel and Sandefur do is administer a test to 2000 Indian school children which combines items from several standardized tests. They can use students’ performance on these items relative to each other to convert the tests scores of hundreds of thousands of students from 80 different countries into a common scale." I don't completly get what they are doing there? Are they using an instrument? (sorry if that's very obvious)
They’re giving the students a test combining items from different standardized tests so that they can convert from one to another.
So if students score 80% on items from one test, and 40% on items from another test, they can say the second test is twice as hard.
Aha! Smart, so a sample of thousands of students are working as proxy to normalise and compare all the rest of the test. That's a smart method.
I've done some of those standarised tests myself as a student (PISA for example) and I always wondered how do they make sure that I am answering as much as I know. PISA tests where I did them were not counting for my final grade and some of the questions where so tricky that some students where just passing.
Not saying that's the case here - but just leaving the thought there :)