Hi TeachLingers,
Having pestered my students for years to test their research data for statistical
significance, I suddenly wondered why I'd never interrogated their grades in the same
detail! I started today by comparing my grades with the grades of the internal second
marker. I just suddenly realised that our decisions over whether a difference in our
grades warranted adjustment had so far been a bit unscientific.
Running a statistical significance test used to require a fair amount of training
(that separated the wheat from the chaff in my A-level biology class!) but nowadays
it's really trivially easy with one of a number of free online utilities, e.g.
http://graphpad.com/quickcalcs/ttest1.cfm.
I'm also thinking that this could be of use for other purposes, e.g. to compare
different yearly cohorts to track improvement of a module, or to compare a single
student's grades across the years of their degree to track their progress. There are
lots of other possibilities I'm sure.
Has anyone used statistical analysis on grades before? What were the effects? Were
those effects... significant?
Dave
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Dr. Dave Sayers
Senior Lecturer, Dept Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University | www.shu.ac.uk
Honorary Research Fellow, Cardiff University & WISERD | www.wiserd.ac.uk
[log in to unmask] | http://shu.academia.edu/DaveSayers
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