Need for educational scores adjusted to socio-economic factors

21 September 2013

OECD(Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) has been releasing a number of statistics on education for many years. In their reports, comparisons are made across different countries in relation to, among many other things, the effectiveness of their national education systems. What we tend to forget, however, is that education is not an isolated factor, meaning that educational performance will depend on a number of socio-economic factors.

I have written about this in the comments to one of my posts on Google+, but the concept is that educational indices should be statistically adjusted to socio-economic factors.

Let me establish an analogy with healthcare: If I am a physician treating very sick patients, the complication rate of my patients will be substantially higher than those of somebody treating otherwise healthy patients. Does that mean that I am a bad doctor? No, simply means that my patients are sicker. Bringing this example back to education, the fact that a developing or emerging country has bad educational indices does not necessarily mean that they have a bad educational policy, but it might mean that they are doing the best possible job they can given the local socio-economic situation.

In order to generate these adjusted educational index, one would have to combine datasets containing information from education, economics, healthcare, and any other sources that might provide insight on factors that might downplay educational performance. Such a Learning Observatory would have to have the ability to combine data in different formats (CSV, JSON, XML, free text, RDF, among others), always keeping in mind what the information needs of educational policy makers might be in order to put together policies aligned with their local situation.

by Ricardo Pietrobon

About Me

My name is Ricardo Pietrobon and I am interested in big data and situated cognition applied to immersive distance education.