Standards or semantics for curriculum search?

ABSTRACT

Aligning digital library resources with national and state educational standards to help K-12 teachers search for relevant curriculum is an important issue in the digital library community. Aligning standards from different states promises to help teachers in one state find appropriate materials created and cataloged elsewhere. Although such alignments provide a powerful means for crosswalking standards and curriculum across states, alignment matrices are intrinsically sparse. Hence, we hypothesize that such sparseness may cause significant numbers of false negatives when used for searching curriculum. Our preliminary results confirm the false negative hypothesis, demonstrate the usefulness of term-based techniques in addressing the false negative problem, and explore ways to combine term occurrence data with standards correlations.

REFERENCES

• 1: AAAS (2001) Atlas of Science Literacy. Project 2061. American Association for the Advancement of Science.
• 2: Anne R. Diekema , Jiangping Chen, Experimenting with the automatic assignment of educational standards to digital library content, Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries, June 07-11, 2005, Denver, CO, USA [doi>10.1145/1065385.1065436]
• 3: NSDL (2006) Annual Meeting Schedule. Oct. 18-20, Washington DC. Available: http://nsdl.comm.nsdl.org/.
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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.3 COMPUTERS AND EDUCATION
      K.3.1 Computer Uses in Education

General Terms:
Algorithms, Human Factors

Keywords:
digital library, educational resources, educational standards