text: Pycon US registrations are closed and you didn't make it? Look no further: we are happy to officially announce EuroPython 2012, that will be held in Florence, Italy, on July 2nd-8th! Following last year's success, we are happy to host you again in Italy for an even bigger event. With our projections, we expect **more than 800 partecipants** this year! We also delayed the conference a little on the calendar: by slipping into July, we are moving from high-season to mid-season as Florence tourism goes, and that will surely help a lot for travel arrangements, hotels, and everything that goes around the conference itself. ## Conference structure We carefully analyzed all the feedback forms we received last year, and we are still doing so. We are trying to gather as much feedback as possible, specifically about those areas where we tried something totally different compared to previous EuroPython editions. One of these differences was the structure of the conference: given the low level of attendance on the tutorial days in 2009 and 2010, we went for something radically different: we increased the conference length to 5 full days, and scheduled the trainings in parallel to regular talks. The name change (from "tutorial" to "training") might seem minor to veteran Europythoners, but it helps conveying the basic message that trainings are not just for beginners. The net result has been very positive: training sessions have been very busy on average (a couple of sessions had more people on each one than the total number of attendees at tutorials in 2010!) , and feedback forms say that 62% preferred this format compared to that of previous years. We're thus confirming the same structure: **the conference proper will be from Monday 2nd to Friday 6th, while sprints will be on Saturday 7th and Sunday 8th.** ## Book your flight now! If you know that you're coming (and that includes 79% of the people who filled the feedback forms!), book your flight now! Don't wait for the conference ticket: we will open registrations on March, but the price will be mostly unchanged (no promises yet, but we don't foresee a revolution there). Instead, we would suggest to wait before booking the hotel (or book just away, but make sure to have free cancelation): in fact, we're trying to finalize a **very special concession price for rooms at the conference hotel**. By leveraging the large number of attendees and fixing a big number of rooms immediately, we are hoping to be able to offer room booking (with also integrated room sharing!) within the checkout process on our website. So give us a few weeks to sort out all the details, everything will be ready when the registration is open. ## Have something to share? Start thinking of a proposal! While we are still finalizing the calendar of all the milestones between today and EuroPython, we are surely opening the call for papers as soon as **this week**. So it's a good time to start thinking of a good submission. Whether you are a veteran speaker or a first-timer, we need you, your experience and your willingness to share to make EuroPython the great conference that everyone is awaiting! ## Let's keep in touch We broadcast our announcements on different channels because we know people like it so. Make sure you don't miss anything about EuroPython: you can follow our [@europython](http://twitter.com/europython) account on Twitter, or subscribe to our [RSS feed](https://ep2012.europython.eu/blog/feeds/latest), or to our [low-traffic mailing- list](http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/europython). Pick the channel that suits you best! Happy Pythoning! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/europython/attachments/20120212/1a405f0a/attachment.html>


text:
"My mom said it's really cool, ice cream is really good, hamburgers are good, everything? From when she was a little girl."
Tracie Kam
"If I could be any flavor of ice cream, I would be spinach so no one would eat me."
Josh Hufford
"if you don't like ice-cream, you shouldn't like yourself.. either."
Cadir Lampe
"Wouldn't you rather live 10 years in a bowl of ice cream than 100 years in a bag of rice cakes"
Dr. Danny Crosby
"Summer without ice cream is like winter without a fireplace."
Thea Kristine May
" You can buy ice cream for two cans and hamburger and chips for six cans."
Alan Reed
"Worldly things were of little meaning. She lived for hamburgers, ice cream, pencil and paper."
Carol Adams

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Paul Component's stem cap Camera Mount puts GoPro front-and-center
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Great lid if you're looking for a well-ventilated brain protector that passes all the required impact tests, is easy to adjust, comes in a wide variety of colors and sizes, has a narrow profile, and you can stomach the $230 price tag.
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Light weight, all-in-one design weighs nine pounds, has top speed of 20mph and lasts up to 30 miles.
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text:
Summary Conclusion 1. The current NAEP assessment has served as an important but limited monitor of academic performance in U.S. schools. Neither NAEP nor any other large-scale assessment can adequately measure all aspects of student achievement. Furthermore, measures of student achievement alone cannot meet the many and varied needs for information about the progress of American education.
Summary Recommendation 1. The nation's educational progress should be portrayed by a broad array of education indicators that includes but goes beyond NAEP's achievement results. The U.S. Department of Education should integrate and supplement the current collections of data about education inputs, practices, and outcomes to provide a more comprehensive picture of education in America. In this system, the measurement of student achievement should be reconfigured so that large-scale surveys are but one of several methods used to collect information about student achievement.
NAEP has chronicled academic achievement for over a quarter of a century. It has been a valued source of information about the academic proficiency of students in the United States, providing among the best available trend data on
Below are the first 10 and last 10 pages of uncorrected machine-read text (when available) of this chapter, followed by the top 30 algorithmically extracted key phrases from the chapter as a whole.
Intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text on the opening pages of each chapter.
Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.
Do not use for reproduction, copying, pasting, or reading; exclusively for search engines.
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GRADING THE NATION'S REPORT CARD: Evaluating NAEP and Transforming the Assessment of Educational Progress
Creating a Coordinated System of Education Indicators
Summary Conclusion 1. The current NAEP assessment has served as an important but limited monitor of academic performance in U.S. schools. Neither NAEP nor any other large-scale assessment can adequately measure all aspects of student achievement. Furthermore, measures of student achievement alone cannot meet the many and varied needs for information about the progress of American education.
Summary Recommendation 1. The nation's educational progress should be portrayed by a broad array of education indicators that includes but goes beyond NAEP's achievement results. The U.S. Department of Education should integrate and supplement the current collections of data about education inputs, practices, and outcomes to provide a more comprehensive picture of education in America. In this system, the measurement of student achievement should be reconfigured so that large-scale surveys are but one of several methods used to collect information about student achievement.
NAEP has chronicled academic achievement for over a quarter of a century. It has been a valued source of information about the academic proficiency of students in the United States, providing among the best available trend data on
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GRADING THE NATION'S REPORT CARD: Evaluating NAEP and Transforming the Assessment of Educational Progress
the academic performance of elementary, middle, and secondary students in key subject areas. The program has set an innovative agenda for conventional and performance-based testing and, in doing so, has become a leader in American achievement testing.
NAEP's prominence, however, has made it a victim of its own success. In the introductory chapter, we reviewed the demographic and sociopolitical conditions that have pushed the NAEP program in varied and, in some cases, conflicting directions. Recent demands for accountability at many levels of the educational system, the increasing diversity of America's school-age population, policy concerns about equal educational opportunity, and the emergence of standards-based reform have had demonstrable effects on the program. Policy makers, educators, researchers, and others with legitimate interest in the status of U.S. education have asked NAEP to do more and more beyond its central purpose (National Assessment Governing Board, 1996). Without changing its basic design, structural features have been added to NAEP and others changed in response to the growing constituency for assessment in schools. The state testing program, the introduction of performance standards, and the increased numbers of hands-on and other open-response tasks have made NAEP exceedingly complex (National Research Council, 1996).
In this chapter, we advance the following arguments:
NAEP cannot and should not attempt to meet all the diverse needs of the program's multiple constitutencies. However, a key need that should be addressed by the U.S. Department of Education is providing an interpretive context for NAEP results—helping policy makers, educators, and the public better understand student performance on NAEP and better investigate the policy implications of the results.
The nation needs a new definition of educational progress, one that goes beyond NAEP's student achievement results and provides a more comprehensive picture of education in America. NAEP should be only one component of a more comprehensive integrated system on teaching and learning in America's schools. Data on curriculum and instructional practice, academic standards, technology use, financial allocations, and other indicators of educational inputs, practices, and outcomes should be included in a coordinated system.
Educational performance and progress should be portrayed by a coordinated and comprehensive system of education indicators. The U.S. Department of Education should exploit synergies among its existing data collections and add components as necessary to build a coordinated system. The system should include a broad array of data collected using appropriate methods.
Measures of student achievement necessarily remain important components of the assessment of educational progress. However, the current NAEP achievement surveys fail to capitalize on contemporary research, theory, and practice in the disciplines in ways that support in-depth interpretations of student
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knowledge and understanding. The surveys should be structured to support analyses within and across NAEP items and tasks to better portray students' strengths and weaknesses.
NAEP's student achievement measures should reach beyond the capacities of large-scale survey methods. The current assessments do not test portions of the current NAEP frameworks well and are ill-suited to conceptions of achievement that address more complex skills. Student achievement should be more broadly defined by NAEP frameworks and measured using methods that are matched to the subjects, skills, and populations of interest.
We begin our discussion in this chapter by reviewing information that led to our conclusion that the U.S. Department of Education must address educators' and policy makers' key need for an interpretive context for NAEP's results. We provide examples of the types of inferences —some supportable and some not—that NAEP's constituents draw from the results. We describe the purposes these interpretations suggest, noting those that are poorly served by the current program. To better serve the needs suggested by these data interpretations, we build the case for better measures of student achievement in NAEP and for the development of a broader indicator system on American education. In doing so, we describe the characteristics of successful social indicator systems and discuss possible features of a coordinated system of indicators for assessing educational progress.
In the most recent reauthorization of the NAEP program (P.L. 103-384, Improving America's Schools Act of 1994), Congress mandated that NAEP should:
provide a fair and accurate presentation of educational achievement in reading, writing, and other subjects included in the third National Education Goal, regarding student achievement and citizenship.
To implement this charge, the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) adopted three objectives for NAEP (National Assessment Governing Board, 1996:3):
To measure national and state progress toward the third National Education Goal and provide timely, fair, and accurate data about student achievement at the national level, among states, and in comparison to other nations;
To develop, through a national consensus, sound assessments to measure what students know and can do as well as what they should know and be able to do; and
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To help states and others link their assessments to the National Assessment and use National Assessment data to improve education performance.
NAGB's three objectives call for the collection of data that support descriptions of student achievement, evaluation of student performance levels, and the use of NAEP results in educational improvement. These policy goals presage our discussion of the diverse needs of NAEP's users. This ambitious agenda for NAEP is the crux of the problem we described in 1996 (National Research Council, 1996), that we address in this report, and on which others have commented (National Academy of Education, 1996, 1997; KPMG Peat Marwick LLP, and Mathtech, Inc., 1996; Forsyth et al., 1996; National Assessment Governing Board, 1996). Indeed, the National Academy of Education panel that authored Assessment in Transition: Monitoring the Nation's Educational Progress , (National Academy of Education, 1997) began their report by affirming that, since its beginning, NAEP has accurately and usefully monitored and described the achievement of the nation's youth. However, it stated (pp. vi-vii):
[I]n less than 10 years, NAEP has expanded the number of assessed students approximately four-fold; has undergone substantial changes in content, design, and administration; and has drawn to itself veritable legions of stakeholders and observers. Taken singly, each of these changes represents a notable advancement for NAEP. Taken together, however, they have produced conflicting demands, strained resources, and technical complexities that potentially threaten the long-term viability of the entire program. … NAEP is at a point where critical choices must be made about its future.
As stated in the introductory chapter, recent education summits, national and local reform efforts, the inception of state NAEP, and the introduction of performance standards have taken NAEP from a simple monitor of student achievement trends—free from political influence and notice—into the public spotlight. The speeches of President Clinton, the nation's governors, and state superintendents are punctuated with data on educational outcomes, much of which relies on NAEP results. Newspapers, news magazines, education weeklies, and education journals often carry data collected by NAEP.
In 1994 the Panel on the Evaluation of the NAEP Trial State Assessment of the National Academy of Education (NAE) identified criteria for the successful reporting of NAEP results (National Academy of Education, 1996). Among them was the likelihood that results would be interpreted correctly by NAEP's users. The panel applied this criterion to an examination of the interpretation of NAEP results by policy makers and the press after the 1990, 1992, and 1994
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NAEP administrations. In their most recent review, the NAE panel examined NAEP-related articles in 50 high-volume newspapers across the United States.
The panel reported significant coverage of NAEP results, particularly for states that performed poorly in comparison to other states or in relation to past results. In poorly performing states, discussion emphasized the lackluster performance of students and schools and often went well beyond the capabilities of the data and NAEP's design to attribute blame to various school, home, and demographic variables. The panel's review revealed that many commentators drew unwarranted inferences from the data in attempts to explain the achievement results. For example, in California, where student performance was particularly disappointing, policy makers and reporters claimed that results were evidence of a myriad of sins, including overcrowded classrooms and the state's whole-language reading curriculum. When scores were released, the governor's education adviser declared (National Academy of Education, 1996:120):
California made a horrendous mistake in taking out the phonics and the basic decoding skills from our reading programs, and when you do that, kids aren't going to learn to read anywhere well enough, if at all.
South Carolina's poor showing was attributed to low expectations for student performance; local newspapers reported (National Academy of Education, 1996:122):
South Carolina students ranked near the bottom in a national test of reading skills, as more than half failed to achieve even basic reading levels. … State education superintendent Barbara Nielsen said that the scores come as no surprise. ''I know we need to raise our standards, and we will raise our scores,'' she said. "When children are expected to do more, they will do more."
Elsewhere, poor performance was ascribed to large proportions of English-language learners and transient students, too much television, meager education funding, parents' lack of involvement in children's education, and parents' inability or unwillingness to read to their sons and daughters. In their analysis, the NAE panel observed that some of the variables targeted as sources of poor student performance were absent from the variables measured by NAEP. In other cases, interpretations went beyond the data to bolster commentators' preconceived notions or already established political agendas.
The NAE panel noted that many accounts of the data included suggestions for educational improvement. From the 1994 NAEP data, reporters and policy makers made a variety of suggestions (National Academy of Education, 1996; Hartka and Stancavage, 1997; Barron and Koretz, in press). They called for ambitious education reform, more rigorous teacher training and certification, more stringent academic standards, increased education funding, better identification of student weaknesses, increased resources for early education, and the use of alternative assessments—all inferences that exceed NAEP's design. The NAE panel concluded their analysis by commenting on users' clear need to identify the
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reasons for both good and poor achievement and to try to use this information in the service of educational improvement.
Building on this work, we examined the use of NAEP data following the 1996 release of the mathematics and science assessments. Our analysis relied on reports in the popular and professional press, NAEP publications, and various letters, memoranda, and other unpublished documents gathered during the course of the evaluation. We sought to determine and document the kinds of arguments users made with the most recent NAEP results.
Our analysis of the large body of reports on the 1996 mathematics and science assessments revealed that NAEP data were used by varied audiences to make descriptive statements, to serve evaluative purposes, and to meet interpretive ends. Our observations about these numerous uses of NAEP results parallel those of McDonnell (1994) in her research on state policy makers' use of assessment results, and of Barron and Koretz (in press) in their recent examination of the interpretation of state NAEP results. Specifically, we saw that 1996 results were used to:
describe the status of the education system,
describe the performance of students in different demographic groups,
identify the knowledge and skills over which students have (or do not have) mastery,
support judgments about the adequacy of observed performance,
argue the success or failure of instructional content and strategies,
discuss relationships among achievement and school and family variables,
reinforce the call for high academic standards and education reform, and
argue for system and school accountability.
Table 1-1 illustrates our findings. These illustrations come from the popular press, but they exemplify uses made of NAEP data in the varied publications we examined. Although the source data for some of the statements in Table 1-1 are unclear, what is clear is that the 1996 data were used to support descriptive, evaluative, and interpretive statements about student achievement in mathematics and science. The first column of the table identifies the sources of the reports. The second column includes statements that describe how well American students, subgroups of students, or states performed on 1996 NAEP. In describing the results, column 2 shows that users often drew comparisons—to the past, across states, across population groups—to bring more meaning to the data. The descriptive statements in these and the other reports we reviewed were generally consistent with NAEP's design. The third column gives examples of evaluative
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GRADING THE NATION'S REPORT CARD: Evaluating NAEP and Transforming the Assessment of Educational Progress
TABLE 1-1 Excerpts from Newspaper Reports on 1996 Main NAEP Science and Mathematics Results
Newspaper, Date
Los Angeles Times, 2/28/97
"The nation's schools received an upbeat report card in mathematics, but the bad news continued for California as its fourth-graders lagged behind their peers in 40 states and came out ahead of only those in Mississippi. California eighth-graders performed somewhat better but still ranged behind students in 32 states in the 1996 NAEP. … California's poor students in the fourth grade ranked last compared to similar pupils elsewhere, the state's higher-income students, represented by those whose parents graduated from college, did slightly better but were still 35th out of 43 states."
"[O]nly one in 10 of the state's fourth-graders and one in six of the older students are considered 'proficient' in math, a skill level higher than merely measuring the basics. … Governor Pete Wilson (said) the results were deplorable and intolerable."
"The test found that 54% of California's fourth-graders are not mastering essential basic skills such as measuring something longer than a ruler. … Those findings are likely to fuel criticism that math 'reform' efforts of recent years have not produced gains. … Governor Pete Wilson … said results … point up the need now more than ever to teach basic computational math skills in the classroom'. … State Superintendent Delaine Eastin responded to the poor showing by renewing her call for academic standards that would be both demanding and mandatory, as well as statewide tests to monitor student performance on a system of rewards and sanctions."
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San Francisco Chronicle, 2/28/97
"Nationally, scores rose four points on a 500-point scale for fourth-graders and 12th-graders, and five points for eighth graders. … California math scores improved over 1992 for fourth-graders by one point. … Eighth-graders improved by two points, beating out eight states. … In the 1994 reading test. California fourth-graders tied with Louisiana for worst state but did outperform Guam."
"The good news is California has stopped the downward spiral, (Superintendent) Eastin said. The bad news is we stopped it in the basement."
"The fact that our students are the worst in the nation on average mathematics proficiency should be a wake-up call for every educator, parent, and elected official in our state that the math programs we are currently using just aren't working."
Washington Post, 10/22/97
"Maryland and Virginia finished slightly above the national average … while the District was much lower."
"A rigorous new test of what American students know in science has revealed that many of them are not demonstrating even basic competence in the subject in certain grades. More than 40 percent of high school seniors across the country who took the science exam, and more than one-third of fourth-and eight-graders, could not meet the minimum academic expectations set."
"Education officials said the latest test results presented stark new evidence of a problem in how science is being taught. Too many schools, they contend, still emphasize rote memorization of facts instead of creative exercises that would arouse more curiosity in science and make the subject more relevant to students."
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Newspaper, Date
Washington Times, 2/28/97
"Commenting on the 'intriguing patterns' in the test results, William T. Randall, chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, observed, 'The public schools in D.C. have the lowest-scoring group of black students in the nation and the highest-scoring group of whites."
"[N]early 40 percent of eighth graders still can't perform at a good, solid proficient standard of achievement."
"[The report is] more troubling for what it says about the condition of urban schools … [in that] four out of five eighth graders … performed worse than six years ago on the 1996 NAEP test of mathematical ability. … Eighth graders who can't function at the basic level have difficulty with whole numbers, decimals, fractions, percentages, diagrams, graphs, charts and fundamental algebraic and geometric concepts. … The states with the biggest gains all participated in an initiative funded by the National Science Foundation that allowed them, among other things to focus on the math curriculum and push algebra for all eight graders."
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GRADING THE NATION'S REPORT CARD: Evaluating NAEP and Transforming the Assessment of Educational Progress
statements about student performance in 1996 that primarily relied on NAEP achievement-level results. These accounts speak to the adequacy of students' performance in 1996. (We discuss the validity and utility of the achievement levels in Chapter 5.) The final column of Table 1-1 shows users' attempts to provide an interpretive context for NAEP data. These statements illustrate the need for clearer explication of the data and for possible explanations of the results. The statements in column 4 generally reach beyond the data and the design used to generate them to identify sources of good or poor performance.
In our view, the excerpts in Table 1-1 demonstrate how users hope and try to use NAEP results to inform thinking about the performance of the education system, schools, and student groups. As was observed for earlier administrations, some NAEP users accorded more meaning to the data than was warranted in laying out reasons for strong and weak performance. Others sought to better understand strengths and weaknesses in students' knowledge and skills.
To be sure, it is difficult to gauge and document the impact of statistical data on political and public discussion of education issues. We believe they can play an important role in stimulating and informing debate. Boruch and Boe (1994) argue that estimates of reliance on social science data in political discussion and decision making are biased downward. They say that normal filtering systems contribute to underestimates of the value and impact of statistical data in the policy arena. They explain (p. 27):
National Longitudinal Studies and High School and Beyond data have been used in academic reports by manpower experts . … Those reports have been augmented through further data analysis by the Congressional Budget Office. The results of the Congressional Budget Office reports, in turn, are filtered and given serious attention that leads to decisions and perhaps recommendations by the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Youth Employment Programs (National Research Council, 1985). These recommendations may then lead to changes in law, agency regulations, or policy.
Even NAEP's stewards seek to use NAEP results to more tangible ends. During the May 1998 meeting of the National Assessment Governing Board, board members discussed the inadequacy of some of the current data presentations. NAGB asked NAEP's technical staff from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the Educational Testing Service to explore options for exploiting the policy relevance of NAEP's findings. At the meeting, members noted that current presentations of NAEP results by grade, demographic group, state, and a small number of additional variables do not point policy makers and educators to possible sources of disappointing or promising performance or to their possible policy implications.
To illustrate their concern, board members brought up the oft-cited finding that fourth graders who received more hours of direct reading instruction per week did less well on the 1992 NAEP reading assessment than students who
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spent fewer hours in direct reading instruction (Mullis et al., 1993:126-127). An analogous relationship was reported for fourth and eighth graders on the 1994 U.S. history assessment: students in classrooms with greater access to technology scored less well than students in classes with fewer computers (Beatty et al., 1996:47).
It probably is not the case that reading instruction depresses reading performance or that technology use depresses history knowledge. NAEP test takers with more hours of reading instruction may have received extra remedial instructional services, and students with more computers in the classroom may have attended schools in economically depressed areas where funding for technology may be easier to secure (and where, on average, students score less well on standardized tests). Board members pointed out that current data presentations may prompt faulty interpretations of results, in that the associations suggested by the paired-variable tables (e.g., summaries of NAEP scores by population group or by hours of instruction) may misrepresent complex relationships among related and, in many cases, unmeasured variables. Discussion of the reading and history results, for example, may have been informed by data on types of instructional services provided or the uses made of computers in the classroom. Although, on their own, survey data of the type NAEP collects cannot be used to test hypotheses and offer definitive statements about the relationships among teaching, learning, and achievement, they can fuel intelligent discussion of possible relationships, particularly in combination with corroborating evidence from other datasets. Most important, they can suggest hypotheses to be tested by research models that help reveal cause and effect relationships.
To reiterate, our analysis of press reports, NAEP publications, and other published and unpublished documents suggests that NAEP's constituents want the program to:
Provide descriptive information. NAEP has served and continues to serve as an important and useful monitor of American students' academic performance and progress. NAEP is a useful barometer of student achievement.
Serve an evaluative function. In this role, NAEP serves as an alarm bell for American schools. The establishment of performance levels for NAEP potentially allows policy makers and others to judge whether results are satisfactory or cause for alarm. They are meant to support inferences about the relationships among observed performance and externally defined performance goals.
Provide interpretive information to help them better understand student achievement results and begin to investigate their policy implications . Policy makers and educators need an interpretive context for NAEP to support in-depth understanding of student achievement and to intelligently investigate the policy implications of NAEP results—particularly if performance is disappointing. In fact, as shown in Table 1-1 and elsewhere, in the absence of contextual data,
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Flanagan were able to suggest issues that need to be further probed by researchers, perhaps through natural experiments or randomized studies. Findings from research on possible manipulable sources of differences in achievement on NAEP (i.e., class size) would make an important contribution to education policy.
The pressures to satisfy many audiences and many purposes are not unique to NAEP but characterize the work of the U.S. Department of Education and, in particular, the National Center for Education Statistics. Over the last 15 years, the department and NCES have responded positively and aggressively to requests for better information about the condition of education. NCES has designed and conducted data collections on curriculum and instruction, school organization and governance, student achievement, school finance, and other aspects of schooling.
Historically and currently, however, the data collections exist as discrete entities, ignoring opportunities to reduce resource and response burden and enhance value and usefulness through coordinated sampling, instrumentation, database development, and analysis. In fact, these data collections could serve as important sources of contextual and associative data for NAEP and provide more telling information about educational performance. CSEI, the coordinated system of education indicators we envision, should:
address multiple levels of the education system, with data collected at the system, school and student levels,
include measures of student achievement as a critical component,
rely on mixed methods, including surveys, interviews, observations, logs, and samples of teacher and student work, and
forge links between existing data collections to increase efficiency.
We discuss each of these features in turn.
Addressing Multiple Levels of the Education System
CSEI should include sampling, data collection, analysis, and reporting for multiple levels of the education system, including:
System level. We envision a data system that produces national and state profiles of student achievement and other educational inputs, practices, and outcomes on a trend and cross-sectional basis. Data on school finance and governance, academic standards and curriculum, learning resources, enrollment and inclusion patterns, teacher professional development, and other schooling and student population variables would help describe American education and reveal
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general trends and associations. Many of these data are already resident at NCES.
School level. We envision a system that supports closer examination of the school and classroom practices that covary with learning or signify educational progress in their own right. This should be a multifaceted program that can take advantage of ideas and instrumentation already developed by NCES and the Office of Education Research and Improvement. Work in this area would span the range of existing NCES data collections to more innovative data collections that use emerging technologies to describe schools and classrooms dynamically. Components of TIMSS and of several earlier-mentioned initiatives (e.g., the RAND/UCLA Validating National Curriculum Indicators project, Burstein et al., 1995; Council of Chief State School Officers' SCASS project, Porter, 1996), including video samples and analyses of data extracted from naturally occurring student and teacher work, also suggest possibilities for this investigation.
Student level. We envision a program of longitudinal data collection efforts that support inferences about developmental patterns of achievement and learning variables. Examples of current NCES efforts include the High School and Beyond Survey and the National Education Longitudinal Study. NCES recently explored links between NAEP and the longitudinal studies, but links are not yet in place. The longitudinal designs provide better support for inferences about sources of achievement gains and decrements. Because longitudinal designs follow individual students over time, they provide a better—although not unambiguous —basis for tracing cause and effect.
Integrating Measures of Student Achievement
Measures of student achievement should be a critical and integral component of CSEI. As we view the system, the measures of student achievement should include:
International assessments, such as TIMSS. These capture natural variation in schooling practices and support for learning outside the school, thus providing a comparative base for U.S. performance and making the associative data more informative.
Longitudinal measures, such as the National Education Longitudinal Study and the new Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. These collect information from individual students over time and, again, support stronger inferences about the relationship between education and achievement.
New paradigm NAEP. In CSEI, we conceptualize NAEP as a suite of national and state-level student achievement measures. We propose that NAEP's student achievement measures be reconfigured in some significant ways. In our view, the NAEP process of assessment development should be based on a new paradigm, one that does not assume that all (or most) of the measures of achievement
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should be configured as large-scale assessments and in which the assessment method is selected to match both the knowledge and skills of interest and the testing purpose. In this new paradigm NAEP, we envision assessment frameworks that define broader achievement domains than those described in the current main NAEP frameworks. This broader conceptualization of achievement would include the kinds of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary knowledge, skills, and understanding that are increasingly expected to be outcomes of schooling, such as solving complex problems in a subject area, using technological tools to solve a multidisciplinary problem, and planning and carrying out tasks in a group situation. We discuss this conceptualization of student achievement in more detail in Chapter 4.
This new paradigm NAEP would continue to rely, in part, on large-scale survey assessments for the subjects assessed frequently enough to establish trend lines. Throughout this report we refer to this trend component of new paradigm NAEP as core NAEP. Our conception of core NAEP in CSEI is consistent with many features of the current main NAEP program—based on subject-area frameworks, measured by large-scale survey methods, and reported in relation to performance standards. We discuss core NAEP more fully in Chapter 2 and elsewhere in the report.
New paradigm NAEP would also address other aspects of achievement, using assessment methods tightly matched to assessment purpose. For example, in order to measure achievement in NAEP subjects for which only some students have had instruction, such as economics, smaller-scale surveys targeted only to those students who have had specified levels of instruction would be administered. For assessing aspects of the subject-area frameworks that are not well assessed by large-scale survey assessments, such as performing investigations in science and assessing the broader, cross-disciplinary aspects of achievement described above, collections of students' classroom work or videotapes of students' performances could be analyzed. Throughout this report, we refer to NAEP designs that go beyond large-scale survey assessments to targeted samples and differing methods as multiple-methods NAEP. Multiple-methods NAEP is described in more detail in Chapter 4.
The major components of the measures of student achievement within CSEI are presented in Figure 1-3. The rationale and more detailed descriptions of new paradigm NAEP —both core NAEP and multiple-methods NAEP—are addressed in subsequent chapters of this report.
Relying on Mixed Methods of Data Collection
Student achievement measures should rely on survey and other measurement methods; the same is true for schooling variables. There are important system-, school-, and classroom-level factors not measurable by large-scale survey methods.
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FIGURE 1-3 Measures of student achievement, including new paradigm NAEP. NOTE: TIMSS = Third International Mathematics and Science Study; NELS = National Education Longitudinal Study; ECLS = Early Childhood Longitudinal Study.
Like the TIMSS researchers, we contend that the methods used to generate data for CSEI should be well suited to what one intends to measure and to the units of observation; in addition to survey data collections, the system's architecture should rely on interviews, videotaped observations, logs, and other samples of teacher and student work. If used to examine student performance and to document school and classroom practices, we believe nonsurvey methods can help illuminate student achievement results and portray education more comprehensively. Next, we provide examples of relevant variables and varied methods to help illustrate our view.
Teacher logs, checklists, or weekly reports, for instance, might be used to gather data on the knowledge and skills that are presented to students in the classroom. These methods could be used to examine topic coverage, the time and emphasis given to individual topics, targeted mastery levels, prior knowledge, and teacher expertise. Logs also could be used to document instructional practices and learning resources. Information about presentation formats, student activities, homework, and the use of technology and other instructional aids could be gathered and used to describe classroom practice as an end in itself and to better explore student performance results.
Observations, whether recorded by primary observation reports or on videotape, also could provide important information about school and classroom practice. These could be used to examine many of the same areas addressed by teacher logs. The resulting data would differ in that they would represent actual practice, rather than teachers' perceptions of it. As intimated earlier, videotaped observation methods were successfully used in TIMSS (Peak, 1996). TIMSS researchers developed schema for coding and analyzing observational data (Stigler and Hiebert, 1997). These strategies provide important models for CSEI.
Samples of student and teacher work or classroom artifacts could also be
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collected to examine and enrich the portrayal of lesson content and student activity. Analyses of textbooks, curriculum guides, lesson plans, assignments, tests, and student projects and portfolios could be conducted to cross-check content and obtain a clearer picture of students' classroom experiences. Sampling intervals would need to be determined; coding schemes would be needed. Classroom artifacts might be collected in conjunction with observations or interviews.
Interviews of administrators, teachers, and students could be used to collect information about teaching and learning and improve understanding of student achievement results. Again, interviews could be used to gather data about curriculum, instructional practice, educational resources, school organization and governance, teacher professional development, and student performance. Interviews are helpful in learning about topics for which there is widely differing terminology and to further probe ideas and gather illustrations in ways not possible using forced-choice formats.
In the volume of research papers that accompanies this report James Stigler and Michelle Perry (1999) discuss these methods and describe their advantages and disadvantages, logistical hurdles and costs, and strategies for integrating nonsurvey-based methods into a coordinated indicator system.
Making System Design Efficient
As we noted earlier, the design of an efficient and informative system of indicators will rely on the U.S. Department of Education's ability to capitalize on potentially powerful synergies among its discrete data collection efforts. Several recent NCES initiatives provide a good foundation for the coordinated system. Some were previously mentioned, including the appointment of the NCES Special Study Panel on Education Indicators (1991), work on the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (1995-1998), and the NCES-sponsored workshop entitled From Data to Information (Hoachlander et al., 1996).
From Data to Information provides important direction for the system we propose. Conference organizers sought to ''consider more careful strategies that will permit integrated analysis of the interrelationships among education inputs, processes, and outcomes'' (Hoachlander et al., 1996:1-3). They noted that, although existing surveys do an admirable job of providing nationally representative data on important education issues, they do not support analyses that "might increase knowledge about what works and why" (p. 1-3). Participants laid out three objectives; they said NCES should "(1) expand the amount and type of data it collects, (2) adopt a wider range of data collection and analytic methods, and (3) function within the tight resource constraints that are certain to affect almost all federal agencies" (p. 1-3). During the conference, speakers and NCES staff provided suggestions for tracking educational reform to the year 2010; measuring opportunity to learn, teacher education, and staff development; enhancing survey and experimental design to include video and other qualitative designs; and making
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linkages to administrative records for research. They challenged NCES to transform "quantitative facts about education into knowledge useful to policy makers, researchers, practitioners, and the general public" (p. 1-24).
Building on this and other NCES efforts, several analysts have discussed the integration of education datasets and documented factors that will help or inhibit data combination in the U.S. Department of Education; here, we describe the work of Hilton (1992) and Boruch and Terhanian (1999). These analysts detailed the purposes of varied data collections, the methods employed, sampling strategies used, the units of observation and data collection, the levels of analysis and inference supported by the datasets, the time of data collections during the school year, the periodicity of the efforts, and types of designs (cross-sectional or longitudinal) employed.
In 1992 Hilton conducted research for the National Science Foundation that examined the feasibility of combining different sources of statistical information to produce a "comprehensive, unified database" of science indicators for the United States. His goal was to capitalize on extant data on the education of scientists, mathematicians, and engineers. Hilton reviewed 24 education statistics databases. Early in his work, he determined that eight databases potentially could be combined to characterize the nature and quality of scientific training; these included NCES's National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) of 1972 and 1988, the Equality of Opportunity Surveys, cross-sectional data on tests like the SAT, and NAEP.
Hilton eventually decided that links could not be forged to create a comprehensive science database. Factors preventing data combination, he stated, were a paucity of common variables across datasets; differences between surveys in the way variables like socioeconomic status and race and ethnicity are operationally defined; differences in sampling designs, measurement methods, and survey administration procedures; and inattention to the use of comparable conventions across datasets to enable linking.
Starting with Hilton's analyses, Robert Boruch and George Terhanian, in a paper in the volume that accompanies this report entitled "Putting Datasets Together: Linking NCES Surveys to One Another and to Data Sets from Other Sources" (Boruch and Terhanian, 1999), examined past linking efforts and suggested a hierarchical model for effecting future links. They laid out a conceptual framework for data combination that calls for designation of a primary dataset and making intended links by augmenting the primary data.
Boruch and Terhanian prompt designers to consider respondents from the primary data collection to be the primary sample and to consider samples from the same population, but from other data collections, as augmentations to the main sample. Similarly, they suggest that variables from secondary datasets should augment those from the primary data collection; they cite information derived from students' high school transcripts as an example of augmentation data. They discuss appending additional time panels for the primary sample,
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adding data from relatives of primary sample members, adding data from different levels (aggregate or nested) of the education system, enriching the primary dataset with data from different measurement modes (video surveys, for example), adding a new population to the dataset, and replicating the primary sample dataset with a sample of different or the same population using identical measures.
The authors also discuss four NCES datasets that are likely candidates for linkage: the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88), the Common Core of Data (CCD), and NAEP. They begin by stating that SASS, NELS:88, CCD, and NAEP should be linkable at the district level; and that SASS, NELS:88, and CCD are linkable at the school level. They conclude their examination, however, by stating that, although not incompatible, the surveys do not fit together nicely like pieces of an interesting "education puzzle." They state that, in some cases, for example, elements from one dataset have to be combined to match elements in another; in others, missing data in one dataset limit the number of cases matching to a second. They also cite as an impediment to linking the length of time taken to compile and make available individual NCES datasets.
Boruch and Terhanian suggest that a mapping of variables (and operational definitions) be developed across datasets to make possible linkages obvious and to suggest potentially useful standardization for future data collections. They suggest that NCES adopt a survey design strategy that fosters linkages and calls for pilot studies to test useful strategies.
We extend their call for pilot studies by suggesting that studies focus on the ways that the sampling schemes, construct definitions, instrumentation, database structures, and reporting mechanisms of individual databases can capitalize on the strengths of the other data collections. Once developed, CSEI should change so that its structure, links, and components are informed and improved by experience and the system's findings over time. Better understanding and analysis of the data that are collected also should lead to improved measurement and database design. Domain and construct definitions, sampling constraints, data collection designs, instrumentation, accommodations, analysis procedures, and reporting models also should improve as information from the field and from large-scale survey data collections suggest questions of interest for small-scale observational or experimental studies; knowledge derived from the smaller studies should be funneled back into the large-scale data collections.
The development and implementation of CSEI calls for careful consideration of alternatives and careful planning. At a minimum, development of the system's conceptual and structural framework calls for:
the conduct of a feasibility study to determine likely costs for development,
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implementation, maintenance, and management of the coordinated system,
development of a conceptual framework for the system that delineates issue areas and specifies the levels of the education system and educational performance that should be characterized,
specification of key variables that should be tracked,
identification of data elements already resident at NCES and the U.S. Department of Education,
for these elements, analysis of factors that aid or complicate linking, including similarities and differences in data collection objectives, sample definition, variable definitions, measurement methods, periodicity, confidentiality conventions, and design,
identification of data elements not collected by NCES or the U.S. Department of Education and determination of other data sources (other government statistical agencies or new data collections) with development of domain definitions for relevant variables not already measured,
specification of (and, if necessary, research about) measurement methods for the new schooling variables,
development of a plan for effecting the links,
development of a plan for organizing and housing the data,
specification of timelines for data linking and data availability,
development of a plan for reporting the data, and
design of mechanisms for revisiting, reviewing, and strengthening the system.
The organizational responsibility for planning and conducting this work should be accorded to NCES. This effort is consistent with their congressional charter, which calls for the collection and reporting of "statistics and information showing the condition and progress of education in the United States and other nations in order to promote and accelerate the improvement of American education" (National Education Statistics Act of 1994, 20 U.S.C. 9001 Section 402b).
In conducting this work, NCES should seek advice from several research and practitioner groups, including the:
Institute on Student Achievement, Curriculum, and Assessment,
National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing,
National Center for Improving Student Learning and Achievement in Mathematics and Science,
National Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement,
National Research and Development Center on English Learning and Achievement,
National Center for History in the Schools,
national disciplinary organizations, such as the National Council of Teachers
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of Mathematics, the International Reading Association, the National Science Teachers Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the National Council for the Social Studies,
Institute on Educational Governance, Finance, Policy Making, and Management,
National Center for Research on the Organization and Restructuring of Schools,
National Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy,
National Center on Increasing the Effectiveness of State and Local Education Reform Efforts,
National Association of State Test Directors, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and the Council of the Great City Schools, and
NAEP's subject-area standing committees and NCES's Advisory Council on Education Statistics.
The development and implementation of CSEI will be challenging. These research and practitioner groups can help expand deliberation about the conceptual and structural framework of the system. They can help evaluate and refine system plans and operations.
Commendably, the U.S. Department of Education and NCES already have paved the way for a more efficient indicator system. Previous efforts and those currently under way provide important building blocks for the activity we propose. Much of the groundwork for CSEI has been laid. Unfortunately, despite the number of researchers, panels, and conferences that have issued calls for development of a coordinated system of education indicators, none provided cost and time estimates for developing, managing, and refining the system, nor did we uncover sufficiently parallel work in other statistical agencies to support estimation. Thus, the cost of implications of changing from NCES's current structure to the proposed coordinated system are not well understood, and they would undoubtedly be highly dependent on the design of the new system. We surmise that the costs of integrating the existing NCES data collections would be considerable and that this work would require funding in addition to NCES's current congressional budget authorization. It seems reasonable to conjecture that the cost of maintaining the system, once in place, may not differ significantly from current costs, since the system may not require significant new data collections. And it is possible that economies would result as currently separate data collections are combined and instrumentation, procedures, and data collections merge. With these economies, we would anticipate increases in the quality and utility of the systems' products. We therefore believe that consideration of costs and the source of any necessary new funding should be an integral part of further discussions about the proposed system. A feasibility study to determine possible designs and likely costs for development, implementation, maintenance, and management of the coordinated system should be conducted. The U.S. Department of
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Education and the National Center for Education Statistics should quickly begin this study.
In this chapter, the committee has made the case that:
The NAEP program cannot and should not attempt to meet all the diverse needs of its multiple constituencies; however, a key need that should be addressed by the U.S. Department of Education is providing an interpretive context for NAEP results. NAEP's measures of student achievement should be reconceptualized to help policy makers, educators, and the public better understand strengths and weaknesses in student knowledge and skills.
A more comprehensive picture of American education and educational progress is needed. Examinations of educational performance and progress should be based on a broad array of indicators that includes, but goes beyond, measures of student achievement. Other indicators of educational inputs, practices, and outcomes should be included in a coordinated system of education indicators. Data on curriculum and instructional practice, academic standards, technology use, financial allocations, and other important variables should be gathered using mixed methods of data collection.
The system's student achievement measures should reach beyond test-based indicators. Large-scale assessment methods ignore portions of the current NAEP frameworks and are ill-suited to conceptions of achievement that address more complex skills. Academic achievement should be more broadly defined and measured using methods that are matched to the subjects, skills, and populations of interest.
NAEP's current instruments fail to capitalize on contemporary research, theory, and practice in the achievement areas in ways that support in-depth interpretations of students' capabilities. Instrumentation should be restructured to support analyses within and across NAEP items and tasks to better portray student performance.
The U.S. Department of Education should undertake efforts to build a coordinated system. The system could inform educational debate by raising awareness of the complexity of the system and providing a basis for hypothesis generation about educational success and related school, demographic, and family variables.
After data are reported, educators, policy makers, and other public figures will discuss and debate the meaning of the data and their potential policy implications; this public deliberation will be evaluative; and it will speak to the quality and utility of the effort. It will yield information that should be fed back into the system. The system's structure, links, and components should be informed and
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improved by experience, public debate over results, and the system's findings over time.
The subsequent chapters of this report demonstrate how the descriptive, evaluative, and interpretive purposes of NAEP's users would be met under our proposal for new paradigm NAEP and its inclusion in a coordinated system of education indicators.


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John Lewis 3 ply Napkins, Pack of 20, Jade, White
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In this Disney comedy that bears a suspicious resemblance to The Mighty Ducks, the down-trodden cynical young misfits of a run-down Texas town, devastated by the closing of its one major industry, find renewed hope and spirit at the hands of a plucky British foreign-exchange teacher who introduces them to soccer. When British elementary school teacher Anna Montgomery arrives in the dusty town and first meets the depressed and frequently angry youths, she…Read More
Immaturity and poor sportsmanship once again find their firmly established place in children's athletics (at least among the adults) in this sports comedy.…Read More
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New Cottage Style: Decorating Ideas for Casual, Comfortable Living : BHG offers decorating ideas to achieve a cottage look that's clean, simple, and light. The secrets to creating harmony and simplicity with paint, furniture, fabrics, and accessories are revealed, and examples are given for projects in the country, the woods, suburbia, and oceanfront locations.
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Total Drama Island
This article describes a work or element of fiction in a primarily in-universe style. (July 2011) |
Total Drama Island | |
The Total Drama Island logo.
Country of origin | Canada |
No. of episodes | 28 (including special and review) |
Broadcast | |
Original channel | Teletoon |
Original run | July 8, 2007[1][2] | – November 29, 2008
Season chronology | |
← Previous
— |
First season of the Total Drama series.
List of Total Drama episodes |
Total Drama Island (sometimes shortened to TDI) is a Canadian animated television series which premiered in Canada on Teletoon on July 8, 2007 and on June 5, 2008 in the U.S. on Cartoon Network. This is the first season of the Total Drama series and has 27 episodes, each 22 minutes in duration[3] with a special 44 minute episode at the end. The season is mostly a parody of the series Survivor, which consists of twenty-two campers in an elimination-based competition. On the Cartoon Network airing in the United States, some content has been removed from the episodes by censors in order to keep the rating open to a younger audience; for example, putting in words instead of long bleeps, for the episodes "That's Off the Chain" and "Trial by Tri-Armed Triathlon". The fourth season, Total Drama: Revenge of the Island is also shown in the same location except with a new cast. Christian Potenza hopes to have 10 seasons total.[citation needed]
Total Drama Island sets in a fictional titular reality show that follows the competition of twenty-two teens at Camp Wawanakwa, a fictional island located in an unspecified area in Muskoka, Ontario. The campers participate in competitions to avoid being voted off the island by their fellow campers. At the end of the series, the winning contestant will win CA$100,000. The competition is hosted by Chris McLean, who is assisted by the camp's chef, Chef Hatchet.
At the beginning of the season, the twenty-two teen campers are placed into two groups of eleven, the "Screaming Gophers" and the "Killer Bass". In each episode, the teams participate in a challenge, in which one or more campers can win invincibility for their team. The losing team is called to the campfire at night, where they vote one of their members off the island. The camper with the most votes is eliminated from the competition. At this campfire, McLean passes out marshmallows to the campers who have not been voted off, while the one who does not get a marshmallow must walk down the Dock of Shame to the Boat of Losers, which will take them away from the island and they will "never, never, never, ever, ever, ever, come back, ever" according to Chris (this was proved a lie in "No Pain, No Game", when he brought Eva and Izzy back into the game).
About halfway through the season, the teams are disbanded, after which the challenges continue; the winner of each challenge then only receives invincibility for him or herself, whereupon a camper without invincibility is voted off the island. This process of elimination continued on until two players remains on the island. These two players, Gwen and Owen, were then subject to a final contest. At the end of the season, Owen wins the competition, while Gwen ends up being the runner-up. Total Drama Island is a parody of the reality show Survivor. Host Chris McLean is very similar to Survivor host Jeff Probst.[4]
Total Drama Island is a Canadian animated television series which premiered on July 8, 2007, on the Teletoon channel. This season has 26 episodes, each 22 minutes in duration, and two special episodes.[5] It was the third Cartoon Network show outside of Adult Swim and Toonami to have the U.S. rating of either "TV-PG" or "TV-PG-D", and a parental-guidance warning after every commercial break and at the beginning of the show (the first two being Sunday Pants and IGPX; its rating in Canada for most episodes is "G", or else "PG").
Season | Episodes | Country | Network | First air date | Last air date |
1 | 28[6] | Canada | Teletoon | July 8, 2007 | November 29, 2008 |
United States | Cartoon Network | June 5, 2008 | December 18, 2008 | ||
United Kingdom | Jetix | April 1, 2009 | May 6, 2009 |
There are 22 original contestants who competed in Total Drama Island. They are Beth, Bridgette, Cody, Courtney, DJ, Duncan, Eva, Ezekiel, Geoff, Gwen, Harold, Heather, Izzy, Justin, Katie, Leshawna, Lindsay, Noah, Owen, Sadie, Trent, and Tyler. Owen won first place, Gwen second place, and Heather in third.
There are teams in every season of the show. The teams in this season are the Screaming Gophers and the Killer Bass. Here are the members of each team:
- Screaming Gophers: Beth, Cody, Gwen, Heather, Izzy, Justin, Leshawna, Lindsay, Noah, Owen and Trent.
- Killer Bass: Bridgette, Courtney, DJ, Duncan, Eva, Ezekiel, Geoff, Harold, Katie, Sadie and Tyler.
At the start of the series, Katie was on the Screaming Gophers, and Izzy was on the Killer Bass, but Katie and Sadie refused to be on opposite teams due to their hatred of being separated from each other, so Katie and Izzy switched places.
Total Drama Island was developed and produced by Fresh TV. The series was animated at Elliott Animation. The series was directed by Todd Kauffman and Mark Thornton.[7] It is primarily targeted at twelve- to eighteen-year-olds, and the creators, Tom McGillis and Jennifer Pertsch, studied what teenagers liked and disliked about reality television shows in the writing process.[8] McGillis says they used a "countrywide online research project" to determine this demographic's likes.[9] Fresh TV Inc. partners McGillis, Pertsch, Elliott and Irving produced the series.[10] The budget for the series was $8 million.[11] It was animated in Flash,[7] at Elliott Animation's studio in Toronto.[10] Every cast and crew member on Total Drama Island had to sign a confidentiality agreement not to disclose who the winner was.[12] All the characters were designed by Kauffman.[13] An early name for the series was Camp TV.[14] Voice actors from the FreshTV series 6teen have lent their voices for Total Drama Island: Christian Potenza, who played the character Jude on 6teen, played the role of host Chris McLean. Potenza said that the best part of the job was that his character could not be voted off the show.[15] Emilie-Claire Barlow plays a recurring role as Chrissy on 6teen and plays Courtney on Total Drama Island. Barlow stated that Courtney was her favorite character that she had ever played.[16] Other voice actors from 6teen include Julia Chantrey as Eva; Drew Nelson (Kai) as Duncan; Megan Fahlenbock (Jen) as Gwen; Adam Reid (Wayne) as Justin; Stephanie Anne Mills (Kirsten) as Lindsay and Katie; and Rachel Wilson (Melinda Wilson) as Heather.
Total Drama Island has received critical acclaim. Carole Bonneau, the Vice President of programming of Teletoon Canada stated that Total Drama Island, along with FreshTV's 6TEEN were "consistently top performers" for audiences of ages 6–11, and also helped to bring in older viewers as well.[17] When Total Drama Island aired on the American Cartoon Network, it performed very well; The Toronto Star reported that, "in some ages groups [Total Drama Island showed] a 500 per cent ratings increase in [its] time slot."[9] On December 11, 2008, Total Drama Island garnered 3.5 million viewers.[18] That year, the series was the top "regularly scheduled Thursday night program at 9 p.m. on all television throughout third quarter among boys 2-11, 6-11 and 9-14," according to the Animation World Network.[19] On Memorial Day weekend of 2009, a marathon of Total Drama Island increased viewership in age groups 2-11, 6-11, and 9-14, each by 20% or more compared to the same week in 2008.[20] Common Sense Media gave the show 4 out of 5 stars, calling it a "[c]lever cartoon reality show spoof".[21] The series was nominated for a Gemini Award for "Best Animated Program or Series", shared by Tom McGillis, Jennifer Pertsch, George Elliott and Brian Irving.[22] As of 2011, Total Drama Island has aired in over 188 countries.[23]
Debi Enker of The Age gave a negative review of the season's last episode, calling the art and design and writing "lamentable."[24]
DVD releases[edit]
A DVD was released by Cartoon Network on August 18, 2009 in the United States. It contains all of the 27 episodes (including TDI Rundown) of season one of this series in a 4 disc set, for a total of 594 minutes long. In addition, its bonus features (entitled as X-tras) are the audition tapes of twenty two campers, as well as Izzy's second audition tape and her exclusive interview with Chris. In Australia, Total Drama Island is on Region 4 DVD as separate volumes. This series of discs contains the widescreen version with uncut scenes and original dialogue, as seen on Teletoon and ABC3. In reviewing the DVD for season, Matthew Price of The Oklahoman wrote that while the show started out "unbelievably slowly," the series became more interesting as campers began getting voted off. Price also praised the parody of reality shows.[25] In another review of the DVD, Jeffrey Kauffman of DVD Talk wrote that the character development was compelling and that the parody of reality shows were very funny.[26] Mac McEntire of DVD Verdict praised the character development as well, but noted that the show sometimes sinks to "lowbrow gross-outs".[27] Both Kauffman and McEntire recommended the series DVD.
Total Drama Island Interactive[edit]
Total Drama Island Interactive is an online game marketed in conjunction with the television series. It was produced by Xenophile Media. By registering a free account, the player could play games using a customizable avatar to earn points for marshmallows. Marshmallows are used as money in the game so the player can buy in-game items. The player who earned the most points had their avatar make a cameo appearance in the season finale.[28] The games were based on the challenges in the show.[29] Total Drama Island Interactive was nominated for an Interactive Emmy Award in 2007.[28] However, the website is currently no longer available, and has been replaced by Total Drama Online.[30]
See also[edit]
- ^ "Elliott Animation – Productions – Total Drama Island".[dead link]
- ^ "Total Drama Island: GOPHERS vs. BASS".[dead link]
- ^ "Elliott Animation - Productions - Total Drama Island".
- ^ Aaron Sagers (September 1, 2009), "Pop 20: If Facebook were a dinner party", The Monitor
- ^ "Elliott Animation – Productions – Total Drama Island".
- ^ http://www.tv.com/shows/total-drama-island/episodes/
- ^ a b admin (June 29, 2007), "Title Drama Island", Cold Hard Flash, retrieved December 25, 2010
- ^ Playback Staff (May 15, 2006), "Total Drama Island ribs reality TV", Playback, retrieved December 25, 2010
- ^ a b Raju Mudhar, "Canadian cartoon show sucking 'em all back in", The Toronto Star, retrieved December 25, 2010
- ^ a b Playback Staff (May 15, 2006), Total Drama Island: And So It Begins, retrieved December 25, 2010
- ^ Annalisa D'Aprile, "L'Isola di cartone che prende in giro i reality", Kata Web (in Italian), retrieved December 25, 2010
- ^ Teletoon (Jun 24, 2007), "From the creators of the award winning series 6teen, the number one show on Teletoon, comes a truly unique reality show for kids", Channel Canada, retrieved December 25, 2010
- ^ Total Drama Island: Final 4[dead link]
- ^ admin (March 27, 2006), "Neptoon's Promo Washes Ashore", Cold Hard Flash, retrieved December 25, 2010
- ^ Krissie Rutherford (November 3, 2006), "Newest role is 'every guy's dream' – Gemini-nominated Oakville actor has written his own dream role", Oakville Beaver
- ^ Asma Khaliq (March 1, 2007), "Up close with a familiar voice: From Sailor Mars to Timmy's ads, Emilie-Claire Barlow is someone you've definitely heard", The Toronto Star, retrieved December 25, 2010
- ^ "Teletoon orders new series for fall", Media in Canada, retrieved December 22, 2010
- ^ Gary Levin (December 18, 2008), "Nielsens: Dallas, 'Boston' score key ratings wins", USA Today, retrieved December 25, 2010
- ^ Annemarie Moody (October 2, 2008), "Ratings Highlights For Cartoon Network, Disney Channel, Nickelodeon", Animation World Network, retrieved December 26, 2010
- ^ Bill Gorman, "Cartoon Network's Total Drama Island Earns Double Digit Increases", TV by the Numbers, retrieved December 25, 2010
- ^ "Total Drama Island", Common Sense Media, retrieved December 22, 2010
- ^ "Fresh TV Inc. Celebrates Three Gemini Nominations for Top Rated Shows", www.channelcanada.com (ChannelCanada.com), 2008-08-27, retrieved 2009-03-21
- ^ Stinson, Scott (13 October 2011). "Stinson: CanCon on the Croisette at Mipcom". The Globe and Mail (Toronto ON). Retrieved 14 October 2011.
- ^ Debi Enker (June 10, 2010), "Total Drama Island", The Age: 36
- ^ Matthew Price (September 25, 2009), "DVD Reviews", The Oklahoman
- ^ Jeffrey Kauffman (August 18, 2009), "Total Drama Island: The Complete Series", DVD Talk, retrieved December 25, 2010
- ^ Mac McEntire (August 19, 2009), "Total Drama Island: The Complete Series", DVD Verdict, retrieved December 26, 2010
- ^ a b "Xenophile Media and Fresh TV Receive International Interactive Emmy(R) Award Nomination for Total Drama Island – Totally Interactive!", Canada Newswire, March 6, 2008
- ^ "BellFund Annual Report: 2006", BellFund, 2006, retrieved December 26, 2010
- ^ http://www.totaldramaonline.com/
External links[edit]
- Official Total Drama Island Blog
- Total Drama Island Interactive
- Total Drama Island.com
- Fresh TV announces Total Drama: The Musical
- Total Drama Island at the Internet Movie Database
- Total Drama Island at TV.com


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centennial »
Centenarian Luncheon
Share On May 10th, 2013, over 40 Winston-Salem residents who were or would be at least 100 years young in 2013 were invited to a celebration honoring their lifetime achievements in Downtown Winston-Salem. In
Read More »Weekend concert part of centennial party
Share The City of Winston-Salem is throwing a birthday party in Corpening Plaza Saturday, May 11 with a free concert, activities, food and merchandise vendors and historical displays. The Party in the Plaza will
Read More »100 years later
Share Winston-Salem is holding a big birthday party this weekend. It was 100 years ago that the towns of Winston and Salem merged, added a dash and became the city we call home. A
Read More »Centennial Parade seeks esteemed residents and businesses
Share The Centennial Parade Planning Committee is inviting residents and business owners in Winston-Salem to participate in the Centennial Celebration Parade, and to nominate others who they deem worthy of the honor. Five hundred
Read More »'What Have You Done for Me Lately?'
Share Those of you who are still election weary from last year may not be pleased that another round of contests will be decided this year. Unfortunately, many don't hold municipal elections in the
Read More »


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Doris and Dorthy Dodson were born in the Mary Gates Hospital on Lakeshore Drive, in Port Arthur on December 4, 1918. They grew up on 6th street and graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in 1937. Their parents had an apartment house, a service station and their dad also worked for Gulf Oil.
Doris attended Port Arthur Business College and worked at Woolworth, Gulf Oil, The Fair Store and Dryden's Department store. Doris married Curtis Hammock in October 1944 and they had two children, Mike who lives with his wife Faranghise and son Alex, in Denver, Colorado and Shawn who lives with her husband, Dan Sanders, in Huffman, Texas. Doris lived in Port Arthur until 2000 and then moved to Beaumont. Doris volunteered as a pink lady at Park Place Hospital in Port Arthur for 16 years and is still doing volunteer work at Herman Memorial Baptist in Beaumont.. She has always been very active in the Church of Christ. Doris has one grandchild.
Dorthy attended Port Arthur Business College and worked for Smith Maye Motor Company. She married Rexford Anderson in June 1941. They lived in Beaumont where they raised a son and daughter. She has been active in the Church of Christ all of her life. She now lives with her daughter, Donna Jo, since losing Rex this past May. Dorthy's son, Rex, Jr., is a neurologist and lives in Abilene, Texas with his wife Mary. Dorthy has two grandchildren and one great granddaughter.
The twins remain close and live one block from each other in Beaumon
Submitted by Shawn Hammock-Sanders
Readers' Corner
November 28, 2008
When 90 is twice as nice
- Readers' Corner
- Smith performs with prestigious 105 Voices of History Choir
Beads land at Nederland Chamber coffee at Port Arthur News
Wanda and Roland Mendoza arrived in sequins to promote Mardi Gras, Wanda Hollier touted the Nederland Heritage Festival and Don Pumphrey urged people to speak out at Golden Triangle Days in Austin. - Nederland band members earn spots in region/area bands
- Too Sexy for My Coat The Port Arthur Weight Watchers office got support for the I? Too Sexy for My Coat drive.
- SLIDESHOW: Readers submit snow pictures
- Kirk the Cook prepares feast Kirk the Cook from sent this photo of him preparing his family's Thanksgiving feast from his iPhone.
- When 90 is twice as nice Doris and Dorthy Dodson were born in the Mary Gates Hospital on Lakeshore Drive in Port Arthur on Dec. 4, 1918.
- View from the sidelines
- The News hits the high life
- The News hits Vegas with nurses
- More Readers' Corner Headlines


text:
My eye got caught by this Monday morning tweet:
@EyeOnCFB B1G ADs discussing 9-game and possibly a 10-game conference schedule.
First off, I still think the B1G logo is goofy and I don't like using it. More importantly, here's the link to Brian Bennett's ESPN.com story from which this news was gleaned.
It discusses how the league is weighing future football schedules with a 14-team Big Ten, and notes the schedule imbalance with the proposed nine-game schedule, since half the teams would play five home games and the other half four. Not fair.
The story said some league athletic directors have confirmed a 10-game schedule is under discussion.
"I would like to go to nine or 10," Ohio State AD Gene Smith said.
Ten would be not just interesting, but amazing. It would mean the league was serious about league play. It would also mean all 14 members would have to find two rum-dums to play at home every year in the nonconference to give them the seven home games they all insist they need for financial reasons, so be it.
Which would be the end of compelling nonconference games. But how many in 2012 were all that compelling?
You had the three games against Notre Dame. There was Michigan's game against Alabama. Four games were played against Pac-12 teams. Michigan State played Boise State. And Iowa faced state-rival Iowa State.
A 10-game schedule, if ever implemented, would mean the end of Big Ten teams playing Notre Dame. It would also kill off the Iowa State-Iowa series.
I can't imagine any Big Ten teams other than maybe Northwestern and Indiana giving up a seventh home game for any reason. And league schools do have a lot of interesting nonconference series lined up, like Ohio State against Oregon and Texas. Michigan will play Arkansas home-and-away later this decade. Nebraska has series lined up with Tennessee and Oklahoma. Michigan State has — get this — Oregon in 2014 and 2015, and Alabama in 2016 and 2017. The Spartans also play Notre Dame in 2016 and 2017.
So the 10-game league schedule is just talk.
Mike, you're probably right about the 10-game league schedule being little more than lip service. But with all the money schools are apparently raking in from the BTN, I'm not convinced there's a valid financial argument for 7 home games EVERY year. But then what does logic have to do with anything these days?
And Iowa should be embarrassed by its upcoming schedules when other Big Ten teams (you're right about that goofy conference logo) are scheduling the likes of Alabama, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Texas, Oregon, Arkansas. Mr. Barta and Mr. Ferentz ought to be ashamed of themselves — for the pansy schedules and just about everything else related to the Hawkeye football program.
The B1G needs to stop letting Ohio State & Michigan, being the "TEXAS" of their conference. It has been along time since the BIG TEN was OSU-UM and the Littlle 8. After all, these programs are two of the three B1G football programs that have been on NCAA probation the past two years.
A more appropriate logo for the conference would be B$G.


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