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Understanding Uncertainty in School League Tables *
Author(s) -
Leckie George,
Goldstein Harvey
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
fiscal studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.63
H-Index - 40
eISSN - 1475-5890
pISSN - 0143-5671
DOI - 10.1111/j.1475-5890.2011.00133.x
Subject(s) - league table , ranking (information retrieval) , confidence interval , government (linguistics) , value (mathematics) , league , simple (philosophy) , econometrics , mathematics education , statistics , computer science , actuarial science , psychology , economics , mathematics , information retrieval , classical economics , linguistics , philosophy , physics , epistemology , astronomy
In England, contextual value added (CVA) school performance tables are published annually by the government. These tables present statistical‐model‐based estimates of the educational effectiveness of schools, together with 95 per cent confidence intervals to communicate their statistical uncertainty. However, this information, particularly the notion of statistical uncertainty, is hard for users to understand. There is a real need to make school performance tables clearer. The media attempt to do this for the public by ranking schools in so‐called ‘school league tables’; however, they invariably discard the 95 per cent confidence intervals and, in doing so, encourage the public to over‐interpret differences in schools' ranks. In this paper, we explore a simulation method to produce simple graphical summaries of schools' ranks that clearly communicate their associated uncertainty.