Saturday, August 2. 2008
Bad at math
Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry
No Trackbacks
Comments
Display comments as
(Linear | Threaded)
I can't quite read the article, but there's at least a couple defenses. First, it could be that the papers readers aren't expected to immediately understand "normal distribution".
Alternatively, it could be that weak is a classification outside of the relative distribution. Perhaps weak schools fail to cover certain topics while strong schools cover extra topics. Sorry I can't come up with anything less relative, but you get the idea.
I can see two possible explanations here.
First of all, they talk about schools, not students; it makes sense for students to follow a normal distribution, but schools should have consistent quality of education.
Second possibility: you've correctly interpreted their description, just not their mindset. The news and by extension the general public do not accept that intelligence varies between people. Most will usually accept that above-average intelligence exists, but they won't accept the flip-side of that.
The center of the normal distribution does not need to be the same as the quality level 'average'. Also the width of the distribution may be different: for language education 12% is below average and 18% is good (IIRC).
Basicaly, I guess, we expect every school to perform at least quality level 'average'.
Another point that we might take from this is that the standard deviation (closely related to the statistical 'variance') is large. Of course deviations from the mean are no surprise by itself, but a large deviation can be. In particular when the deviations differ amongst school subjects for a single school, we can this as an indication that not the quality of the students but the quality of the teachings are the most significant factor contributing to the size of the deviation.
A twisted comparison with vegetable gardens: the difference in pumpkin size for gardens around the country is likely to vary as soil type, ground water level and weather influence growth. When two different gardeners operate within the same plot, but the pumpkin size of one exceeds that of the other significantly, then this might indicate the quality of care by the gardener is more important than the location.
Quicksearch
Blogroll
Syndicate This Blog
Licence
