A Triumph of Politics over Pedagogy? The Case of the Ontario Teacher Qualifying Test, 2000-2005
At a time when most American states have embedded an initial certification test into their teacher preparation programs, Canadian educational authorities are faced with a choice: to test or not. One province, Ontario, has experimented with a standardized entry-to-the- profession testing instrument. For three years, 2002-04, teacher candidates were required to take an externally-administered examination, on top of the normal Bachelor of Education requirements, prior to certification. The results were decidedly mixed: politically viable, but pedagogically questionable. Now, the debate has been re-opened, as a new government seeks a more effective form of entry-level assessment for aspiring teachers.
Initial Teacher Certification Testing: Preservice Teachers' Experiences and Perceptions.
The introduction of an initial teacher certification test in Ontario in 2002 was met by a wide range of responses from preservice teachers. This study, based on an April 2002 survey of 535 preservice teachers in a large initial teacher education program, describes the relationships among what the participants knew about the Ontario Teacher Qualifying Test, their previous experiences with other large-scale tests, and their beliefs about and attitudes toward the test. Keywords: preservice teacher education, teacher certification, test preparation, factor analysis. L’introduction d’un Test d’aptitude a la profession enseignante en Ontario en 2002 a suscite tout un eventail de reactions de la part des candidats a l’enseignement. Cette etude, effectuee a la suite d’un sondage mene en avril 2002 aupres de 535 candidats inscrits dans un vaste programme de formation a l’enseignement, decrit les liens entre ce que les participants connaissaient du Test d’aptitude a la profession enseignante de l’Ontario, leurs experiences anterieures avec d’autres tests a grande echelle et leurs croyances et attitudes au sujet de ce test en particulier. Mots cles : formation a l’enseignement, certification a titre d’enseignant, preparation en vue d’un test, analyse factorielle
Automatic classification of TV news articles based on telop character recognition
The purpose of this study is to develop a multimedia database system for TV news video data. TV news video data consist of speech, characters and images. In this study, telop characters are recognized and given to the news articles as indices for classification. At first, telop frames which include telop characters are detected and then the telop characters are extracted and recognized. Through morphological analysis of the recognized telop characters, keywords are extracted which consist of more than two characters. Their keywords are used as indices to classify the TV news articles. We carried out experiments for 30 days of NHK 5 minutes news and obtained 95.4% telop character extraction rate, 81.4% character recognition rate and 83.8% article classification rate. We improved the article classification rate by 43.4% through character recognition improvement from 44.1% to 81.4%.