The North American Conference on Education 2014

The North American Conference on Education 2014

The North American Conference on Education 2014

Educational outcomes are the infrastructure for the future state competitiveness and
cohesiveness. Evaluation has a strong effect on educational outcomes. This paper
develops a conceptual framework for a more effective method to evaluate
improvement in educational outcomes. The method we develop is based on adjusting
Chernoff faces (Chernoff, 1973) to the educational arena. We
display multivariate educational outcomes in the shape of a human face. The
individual parts, such as eyes, ears, mouth and nose represent values of the variables
by their shape, size, placement and orientation. At the preliminary step, we asked 50
Israeli educationalist and educators to indicate the most important educational
outcomes (for their opinion). At the second step, we proposed a list of facets (that
were generated at the preliminary step) and asked 200 Israeli teachers and experts to
rank them from 1 (most important) to 10 (less important). The highly ranked facets
were included in our model. The proposed model of evaluation suggests an alternative
concept for educational improvement. States that will continue on focusing on a one
facet linear approach might not be able to keep their relative advantage in the rapid
changed global society. The focus on achievements and gain in achievements might
be very costly having a tradeoff between achievements' gain and creativity.

Tyrone Bynoe