Flavia Jolliffe

A continuous assessment scheme for statistics courses for social scientists

This paper discusses the pros and cons of assessment schemes used in statistics courses for social scientists. It then goes on to describe the use of essays and of work‐books in continuous assessment. Essays would be on social science topics, but with a statistical or quantitative content. Examples for the work‐books would use real data of relevance to the students’ main studies, be fairly open‐ended, and discussed in classes, so that students would write up attempts at them in a work‐book in a similar manner to writing up practical work. The scheme described is thought to have advantages over other assessment schemes, to provide motivation to students, and to have an important part to play in the teaching process.

An investigation into regional differences in educational performance in the National Child Development Study

The National Child Development Study (NCDS) is used to investigate factors which affect childrens educational performance over time. Multilevel modelling techniques are used on a subset of the NCDS to investigate variation in educational performance in 11 regions in the UK, and in local education authorities within these regions. Social characteristics of the NCDS members are also analysed. Differences between regions and education authorities are found to be negligible, the main source of variation in achievement being due to differences in social background.

The Same but Different – How to Introduce Variation within Computing Assessment Tasks

In this article, suggestions are made for introducing an individual element into formative assessment of the ability to use computer software for statistics.