http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/1998608

Going Beyond the Mean in Educational Evaluation. Paper No. 5184

Evaluations in education often throw away important information because of a penchant for averages. Multiple regression techniques are used to estimate the average effect of policies across schools, and usually school performance is represented by the average score of its students on an achievement test. The author suggests some ways of broadening educational evaluations: (1) to consider "outliers," or exceptional performers among schools; and especially, (2) to consider other statistics of a school's distribution of scores besides the mean, which have an intuitive link to ill-defined but still meaningful educational objectives like equality, mobility, success with exceptional children, and attainment of certain minimum levels of skills. Tables reflecting the author's research are included. (Author/SE).

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