On Fri, 27 Jul 2012, Andrew McGlashan wrote:
NAPLAN is a total joke. They TEACH kids how to pass NAPLAN and forget about anything else when NAPLAN testing is close. So, kids learn how to do the tests, not how to do anything else.... and that makes the results worthless.
People aren't responsible for something these days. They are accountable. So we have to count.. Anyway, a while ago I rad a blog written by someone with interest in statistics who used available school-related data to find correlations between various factors. http://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=log#id360 Here is the best correlation he could come up with: "Per-capita income, on the other hand, matters. The percentage of students receiving lunch subsidies matters even more. In fact, this last factor (the precise calculation I used was adding the percentage of students receiving free lunch and half of the percentage of students receiving partially subsidized lunch) is the single best predictor of quant score that I've found so far. This is depressingly unsurprising: poverty at home is hard to overcome: hard enough for individuals, and even harder in aggregate." Then he tries to find other correlations: "But OK, even if the variations are small, they're there. So surely this is where those aspirational metrics like spending must come into play. Throwing money at students in school may not be able to counteract poverty at home, but doesn't it at least help? No. Students per Teacher? No. AP classes? No. Percentage of minority students? No. .. But charter schools do better relative to expectations, right? Nope." So.. the tests are measuring the financial status of the students' families;-) Regards Peter