A model-based method for information alignment: A case study on educational standards

We propose a model-based method for information alignment using educational standards as a case study. Discrepancies and inconsistencies in educational standards across different states/cities hinder the retrieval and sharing of educational resources. Unlike existing educational standards alignment systems that only give binary judgments (either "aligned" or "not-aligned"), our proposed system classifies each pair of educational standard statements in one of seven levels of alignments: Strongly Fully-aligned, Weakly Fully-aligned, Partially-aligned***, Partially-aligned**, Partially-aligned*, Poorly-aligned, and Not-aligned. Such a 7-level categorization extends the notion of binary alignment and provides a finer-grained system for comparing educational standards that can broaden categories of resource discovery and retrieval. This study continues our previous use of mathematics education as a domain, because of its generally unambiguous concepts. We adopt a materialization pattern (MP) model developed in our earlier work to represent each standard statement as a verb-phrase graph and a noun-phrase graph; we align a pair of statements using graph matching based on Bloom's Taxonomy, WordNet, and taxonomy of mathematics concepts. Our experiments on data sets of mathematics educational standards show that our proposed system can provide alignment results with a high degree of agreement with domain expert's judgments.