Teaching statistics
I haven’t had the time or energy to do any analyses of the National Standards data, but other statistical bloggers haven’t had the same problem.
Luis Apiolaza has some dramatic graphics, such as this one showing the distribution of proportion achieving at or above the maths standard, by decile. The top decile 1 school is below the median for deciles 9 and 10, and the upper quartile for decile 1 is about the same as the lower quartile for decile 4.
Eric Crampton has been doing regression modelling. He’s using Stata rather than R and has fewer pictures, because he’s an economist (but we like him anyway).
Eric comments on the strong decile differences, and notes that these make it hard to be confident about ethnic differences (schools with more Maori and Pacific students do worse, but on reading and perhaps on writing so do schools with more Asian students). He also notes that there’s a lot of variation between schools that isn’t explained by the available socioeconomic data. I’d be interested to know how much of this is random variation based on the limited number of students per school and how much is real variation that could be explained but isn’t.
Both Eric and Luis have put their data files and code where anyone else can easily get them, and they have left the data in much better shape than they found them, for the benefit of anyone else who might want to do some analysis.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
The Asian results seemed more fragile when mucking about. The fun one is proportion of International students – I expect that there what’s going on is that international students do a lot of work in figuring out which is the best school in an area, and their having chosen one says something about its quality. Far more plausible than that increases in the number of international students more than proportionately increase pass rates.
12 years ago