Psychological Testing Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words - 1

Psychological Testing - Term Paper Example ent Obama’s speech in The New York Times, author Trip Gabriel briefly discussed the President’s remarks regarding the â€Å"high stakes† tests and the incited reaction from a couple of bloggers. The President remarks on how much focus is given to these tests at the expense of the curriculum. According to the article, President Obama said, â€Å"Too often, what we’ve been doing is using these tests to punish students or to, in some cases, punish schools.† A blogger for Education Week remarked that the President is going against his own government’s policies on standardized tests that involve having students go through several tests in a school year. However, the Department of Education maintains its stand on the expansion of testing. They claim that these are actually means to ease the pressure on teachers, because instead of year-end tests that normally put the blame on schools if the results are bad, students will be tested for their own pro gress more than once a year (Gabriel, â€Å"Bloggers Challenge President†). The issue here is not merely the number of tests a student has to go through, but the test itself. However, increasing the number of tests in a year increases the issues in these tests as well. Even author Alfie Kohn in his book â€Å"The Case against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools† explains his opposition to standardized testing. The issues surrounding the tests are abound, yet articles that give adequate information on the tests are lacking. Most of the publicly available articles offer generic information on the tests, but do not really describe the content. Sometimes, the content of the test might surprise the students and their parents (Harlen, 2002, p.141). For example, in another article from The New York Times last March 16 by Jacques Steinberg entitled â€Å"For SAT Test-Takers, Is ‘The Situation’ the Right Answer?,† the peculiarity of a test question is discussed. The essay prompt asked the students to

Political science (you can find the topic from sources) Essay

Political science (you can find the topic from sources) - Essay Example Anti-Federalists were alarmed that the Constitution would demolish civil liberties and genuine democracy if the states yield significant power to the new national government. They asserted that representation should be fair in all terms of directness and intimacy, with the government representing as many interests as possible. Politicians must then be substantively like the people they represent. They may not necessarily be the political elite, but instead, ordinary people who were educated enough to participate in political affairs. Anti-Federalists based this assertion the logic that those who were more responsible were less self-interested and those who knew their accountability were less prone to corruption. The people were more responsible than the political elite because they were more in touch of the realities of their local communities. They were less prone to corruption because they would be less vulnerable to damaging their representation to the local populace where they ca me from. The Anti-Federalists, furthermore, intended to have an outcome where there were small constituencies with many representatives, where the axis of power is on the states or local bases, not the national base of collectivity or community of interest. They wanted strong powerful states, not a powerful national government. These powerful states could make decisions regarding their political, social, and economic affairs without intrusion or intervention from the national government. With these goals, outcomes, and processes, Anti-Federalists were leaning more toward descriptive and participative forms of representation. The Federalists believed, on the contrary, the representation is a nationally-determined public good. They did not reject the states’ rights to representation, though they focused on a political arena of substantive representation. The states could represent themselves in Congress and to some extent, in Senate, but they should not be concentrated on their state