Papers by Pallavi Vetury - Iyer
Income/expenditures, individual expenditures such as education, and performance in schools all re... more Income/expenditures, individual expenditures such as education, and performance in schools all relate to systems with defined inputs and outputs and have been formally modeled in accordance with a systems theoretic approach. The Engel’s curves of expenditures on commodities from the Indian National Sample Survey Organization data was hyperbolic limited by a perceived ‘time constant’ associated with commodities while the preferences themselves are ordered hierarchically. School participation (dropouts) as a function of parental income based on available Brazilian data also shows a hierarchical hyperbolic relationship, thereby proving the nature of hierarchy in a naturally ordinal commodity - education. Since the socio-economic influences skew school performance in year-end examinations that demand cramming, retention over the years was tested in a school with a small cross section of 9th grade students uniformly distributed for their previous year’s school grades. The startling findi...
Some degree of conceptualization would clearly occur during past traditional learning even if not... more Some degree of conceptualization would clearly occur during past traditional learning even if not formally realized as concept maps, since conceptual connectivity and progression are intuitively grasped. Can this be measured? The methodology for developing metrics for the ‘solidness’ of past learning has major prospects in the development of educational strategies, as retained learning alone can be true learning; it sheds light on ‘the disconnects’ that throw learning off-gear, when evaluated at a mass level. Here, we outline such a methodology that tantamounts to sleuthing for limits to true learning both in an individual and a group that the practitioners of concept maps may find useful, by reexamining for retention of past learning. Quantitation in retention together with concept maps complete the loop of learning, offering invaluable feedback where it is needed most, i.e., blind spots in learning.
Assessment in schools is restricted to year-end or course-end tests that demand cramming which do... more Assessment in schools is restricted to year-end or course-end tests that demand cramming which does not reflect true learning. The performance in these year-end examinations is skewed by socio-economic factors, besides the psychological stress induced and the resultant, unacceptable malpractices. Long term retention of school learning has not been recognized and developed into a viable alternative to assess what has been grasped by the student. We developed a quantitative design for a rapidly deployable test for long term retention as a viable alternative to assess true learning for the first time. While the data demonstrates drastic falling of retention with years of schooling towards more recent years, it has unique attributes depending on the subjects taught, independent of socioeconomic circumstances and gender, not apparent from the usual school tests. What has been learnt cannot be independent of what was taught and by whom and thus the test holds promise to assess the teacher...
The study focuses quantitatively on ways to assess school education, currently under severe criti... more The study focuses quantitatively on ways to assess school education, currently under severe criticism, in terms the first of its three major components, students, teachers and curriculum,. We developed a novel method to assess long term retention as a measure of true learning in tests that do not involve any cramming and found to our dismay that it falls progressively more towards recent years. Our initial work on poverty showed that consumption on commodities is hyperbolic (as in catalysis) and hierarchic and, that the total income is not fractionally distributed among the commodities, as economists assume; the leftover (residual) income after the more essential items is spent on the commodities of lesser preference. Education is also a naturally ordered commodity and parental income quantitatively determined school dropouts/attendance obeying the same hyperbolic relationship, as we could show. We could thereby affirm the first-ever mechanism for Engels’ three curves of consumption...
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Papers by Pallavi Vetury - Iyer