Convention for Encoding Grade Level in LRMI - Learning Resource Metadata Initiative

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Message from discussion Convention for Encoding Grade Level in LRMI

Stuart Sutton

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More options Nov 6 2012, 4:06 pm

From: Stuart Sutton <stuartasut...@gmail.com>

Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2012 13:06:17 -0800

Local: Tues, Nov 6 2012 4:06 pm

Subject: Re: Convention for Encoding Grade Level in LRMI

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Hi, Brandt:

This educationLevel vocabulary for the U.S. used by the ASN was developed
as part of a U.S. Department of Education project back in 1996 and has been
used consistently since in a number of projects--e.g., The Gateway for 21st
Century Skills, the ASN, and a slight variant used with the National
Science Digital Library (NSDL) [1]. Sorry, Brandt, but I am afraid I don't
recall the discussions at the level of specific terms. I do recall that
much of the development was done at Syracuse University during a awesome
snow storm.

The initial framing was done by a group of about 20 people led by the U.S.
Department of Ed's ERIC Clearinghouse on Information and Technology and
included a rich cross section of representatives from the Department, state
education departments, digital repositories of learning resources, and a
few K-12 master teachers. The early drafts relied on both the expertise of
the participants and a fairly rich subsequent scan of term usage in
practice. That was followed with evaluation of the emerging vocabulary by
teacher focus groups before usage of the vocabulary began in early 1997.

I would note that from the beginning of this particular educationLevel
vocabulary, the goal was to develop unambiguous identifiers for use by
machines (thus the URI). The human-readable labels were intended to be
just that, labels. When the vocabulary was transitioned from vanilla RDF
to SKOS, there was discussion around not privileging any particular label
for individual concepts by only using altLabel. I guess common sense won
out.

Brandt, sorry I cannot directly address your question.

Stuart

[1] http://nsdl.org/contribute/educationLevel

On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 11:40 AM, Brandt Redd <bra...@redd.org> wrote:
> To Steve's question: I included both options partly because I wanted to
> represent the work that went into #1 before I found out about #2 and also
> to see whether there's concern about the ASN branding embedded in the #2
> URLs (do we prefer something simpler and generic).

> Simon's question relates to Steve's comment that perhaps there should be
> an intermedia folder. Using Steve's proposal, the URL for the framework as
> a whole would be "http://usk12.org/EducationLevel". Using my original
> proposal it would have to be just the bare domain "http://usk12.org"
> which I think is a weakness.

> The ASN framework offers some richness which reflects the effort they put
> into this:

> http://purl.org/ASN/scheme/ASNEducationLevel - The whole scheme that
> Simon asked about.

> And for intermediate levels (or collections of levels)
> http://purl.org/ASN/scheme/ASNEducationLevel/GradesPreKto12
> http://purl.org/ASN/scheme/ASNEducationLevel/Postsecondary
> http://purl.org/ASN/scheme/ASNEducationLevel/VocationalTraining
> http://purl.org/ASN/scheme/ASNEducationLevel/LifeLongLearning

> http://purl.org/ASN/scheme/ASNEducationLevel/ElementarySchool
> http://purl.org/ASN/scheme/ASNEducationLevel/HighSchool
> http://purl.org/ASN/scheme/ASNEducationLevel/MiddleSchool

> Perhaps Stuart can enlighten us whether they debated the merits of
> "PrimarySchool" and "SecondarySchool" vs. the elementary, middle and high
> school choices they made.

> On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 9:59 PM, Simon Grant <asim...@gmail.com> wrote:

>> In each case, what would be the correct URL for the grade level framework
>> as a whole? There may be several reasons why clarity about this might be
>> helpful.

>> Thanks

>> Simon

>> On 6 November 2012 00:33, Steve Midgley <steve.midg...@mixrun.com> wrote:

>>> Hey Brandt,

>>> I like the idea of having some semi-custom (localized) definitions
>>> rooted someplace on the web as you describe.

>>> My first piece of feedback is that if you go for solution #1, that you
>>> add some folders into your path for target URL to give us some ability to
>>> add more stuff to that domain. Eg:

>>> http://usk12.org/EducationalLevel/Grade5 <http://usk12.org/Grade5>

>>> Or something like that - not sure what folders would be key just
>>> indicating what you're defining in front of the actual key seems helpful..

>>> My feedback on deciding between 1 and 2, would be just "what's wrong
>>> with solution #2?" If ASN already has this stuff defined with a long lived
>>> URL, why wouldn't we all just use that?

>>> Best,
>>> Steve

>>> On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 4:26 PM, Brandt Redd <bra...@redd.org> wrote:

>>>> Hi All:

>>>> I'm proposing a convention for encoding US grade levels in LRMI. In
>>>> general and in the spirit of Schema.org, I think that we can establish
>>>> conventions for things like this without the need for a formal standards
>>>> process. I'm asserting this one as a test case.

>>>> *Background:*
>>>> An early draft of LRMI had a property for “Grade Level.” It’s a useful
>>>> feature because it’s valuable to indicate the grade level that educational
>>>> content is targeted at. However, LRMI is an international standard and the
>>>> K-12 Grade system is a US convention. Instead, the EducationalAlignment
>>>> property was designated for handling grade levels (along with everything
>>>> else it does). This makes sense because EducationalAlignment is used for
>>>> alignment with any kind of taxonomy. The CCSS is a taxonomy; so are Lexiles
>>>> and other text complexity measures; and so are the 13 levels from
>>>> Kindergarten to 12th grade.

>>>> The trouble is that the LRMI TWG didn’t publish a recommendation on how
>>>> to encode US grade levels into EducationalAlignment and the people
>>>> developing tagging tools have in some cases used TypicalAgeRange as a proxy
>>>> for grade level.

>>>> TypicalAgeRange is intended to capture subject interests and
>>>> appropriateness, not levels of educational attainment. It’s a concept that
>>>> publishers call “Interest Level” and is typically coded as an age. For
>>>> example kindergarteners tend to be attracted to bright colors and simple
>>>> concepts while you need to be in teens or twenties before political debates
>>>> become interesting.

>>>> *Proposal:*
>>>> So, we need a convention for encoding grade level in LRMI. There is a
>>>> lot of wiggle room and no one approach is necessarily better than another –
>>>> what’s important is that everyone uses the same convention. Here’s an
>>>> example convention based on input from the SLC, AEP and Agilix. (Agilix is
>>>> building a tagging tool for the SLC that is being used by the AEP):

>>>> educationalAlignment:
>>>> alignmentType: educationLevel
>>>> educationalFramework: US K-12
>>>> targetName: Grade 5
>>>> targetUrl: http://usk12.org/Grade5

>>>> Under this convention, Kindergarten would have the name “Grade K” and
>>>> the URL “http://usk12.org/GradeK”. The rest are simple to derive from
>>>> the example above.

>>>> *Custodianship:*
>>>> You'll notice the "usk12.org" domain in the proposal. I grabbed that
>>>> domain to ensure it's available. SETDA <http://setda.org/> has agreed
>>>> to be the custodian and I'll hand it off shortly (assuming this convention
>>>> gains a modicum of traction).

>>>> *Alternative:*
>>>> After the SLC, AEP, Agilix and I came up with the above framework I
>>>> learned that the Achievement Standards Network<http://asn.jesandco.org/>has already developed a similar
>>>> taxonomy here<http://standards.jesandco.org/wiki/ASN_Education_Level_Vocabulary>.
>>>> And it's encoded in SKOS format here<http://s3.amazonaws.com/jestatic/purl/scheme/ASNEducationLevel#>
>>>> .

>>>> Under the ASN framework the above example looks like this:

>>>> educationalAlignment:
>>>> alignmentType: educationLevel
>>>> educationalFramework: US K-12
>>>> targetName: Grade 5
>>>> targetUrl: http://purl.org/ASN/scheme/ASNEducationLevel/5

>>>> The URLs are, of course, different.
>>>> ASN doesn't have a value for educationalFramework so I retained the one
>>>> from my original proposal. ASN uses "Kindergarten" instead of "Grade K" and
>>>> they include "Pre-Kindergarten" where my proposal doesn't include that
>>>> level. They also have values for postsecondary education dividing that into
>>>> lower-division, upper-division and graduate levels.

>>>> Please comment!

>>>> -Brandt

>> --
>> Simon Grant
>> +44 7710031657
>> http://www.simongrant.org/home.html

--
Stuart A. Sutton,
CEO and Managing Director, Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
Associate Professor Emeritus, The Information School
University of Washington

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