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Homework answers / question archive / When politicians make claims that we need to spend a large amount of money to achieve a goal, the claim is often made without legitimate evidence to support a claim that a given program will have a particular result
When politicians make claims that we need to spend a large amount of money to achieve a goal, the claim is often made without legitimate evidence to support a claim that a given program will have a particular result.
Let's say that a politician wants to implement a nation-wide education program.
The politician gave four examples of schools that used the program:
scores at the schools increased 0.5, 1, 2, and 2.5 points respectively (the nation-wide average of the scores is 70).
The politician gave no additional evidence about the effectiveness of the program.
Your task: What questions or comments would you have pertaining to the statistical claim made by the politician?
You might inquire about the sample, the sampling methods, the full population, the sampling distribution of the mean, and whatever would be useful to more accurately or precisely describe the effectiveness of the program.
The information given by this politician is very vague. The following is a list of appropriate questions that would need to be answered in order to determine the validity of his claim:
1) Are the increases in scores at the given four schools statistically significant compared to the national average?
2) If the increases are statistically significant, at what level?
3) What is the probability that the supposed increases were obtained by chance?
4) What was the average scores at the individual schools before the new program was implemented? Did the scores increase or decrease in comparison?
5) How do the scores of the schools mentioned before the program was implemented compare to the national average? (ie. Were these schools which already had higher than average scores? Lower than average scores?)
6) Is there evidence to assume that the results can be replicated across the nation?
7) Who delivered the program in the schools?
8) Were the individuals who delivered the program representative of the individuals who will deliver the program in the national population?
9) Are the class sizes in the schools that used the program the same as those in the national population?
10) How was the sample of schools obtained? Was the process by random design?
11) Why were there only four selected?
12) Is the cost of changing the program logical compared to other processes/resources that may be implemented which could also increase scores? (i.e. additional support in class, breakfast programs, etc)
