39 research outputs found
Study of the mechanisms for flame stabilization in gas turbine model combustors using kHz laser diagnostics
Record Linkage of Anonymous Data by Control Numbers
This paper describes a concept which enables to compare anonymous data and to fulfil the complex requirements of data protection in the processing. 1. Introductio
Mechanistic and Organistic Analogies in Economics: The Place of Game Theory Some notes on H. Thoben's article
Experimental study of signal trapping of OH laser induced fluorescence and chemiluminescence in flames
Transinstitutionelle Informationssysteme in der integrierten Versorgung - zehn Fallanalysen
Benchmarking by cross-institutional comparison of student achievement in a progress test
OBJECTIVE To determine the effectiveness of single-point benchmarking and longitudinal benchmarking for inter-school educational evaluation. METHODS We carried out a mixed, longitudinal, cross-sectional study using data from 24 annual measurement moments (4 tests x 6 year groups) over 4 years for 4 annual progress tests assessing the graduation-level knowledge of all students from 3 co-operating medical schools. Participants included undergraduate medical students (about 5000) from 3 medical schools. The main outcome measures involved between-school comparisons of progress test results based on different benchmarking methods. RESULTS Variations in relative school performance across different tests and year groups indicate instability and low reliability of single-point benchmarking, which is subject to distortions as a result of school-test and year group-test interaction effects. Deviations of school means from the overall mean follow an irregular, noisy pattern obscuring systematic between-school differences. The longitudinal benchmarking method results in suppression of noise and revelation of systematic differences. The pattern of a school's cumulative deviations per year group gives a credible reflection of the relative performance of year groups. CONCLUSIONS Even with highly comparable curricula, single-point benchmarking can result in distortion of the results of comparisons. If longitudinal data are available, the information contained in a school's cumulative deviations from the overall mean can be used. In such a case, the mean test score across schools is a useful benchmark for cross-institutional comparison