Saturday, October 30, 2010

One plus Blue

I've written before about mixing up dimensions. It seems to happen all the time. Here's an example from a nicely done learning outcomes site I came across. This sort of thing looks good for the casual reviewer, but I imagine isn't much use for actually finding opportunities for improvements.


There's actually a note at the bottom saying that the scales have no relation to one another. And yet they all get added up?

It would help if we used units, even if they were more imaginary than real. For example, is the math score a percentage rate of getting a correct response on some kind of math (obviously not in this case)? If it's a total score, what is the maximum? Is it a rate of learning or an absolute measure? And so on.

Adding them up is clearly absurd, but we do it all the time: that's what grade averages are too.

The graphs were made with Tableau, by the way. It's great for generating reports.

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