Professional development resource for teachers

CAST stands for Computer-Assisted Statistics Teaching. It was initially developed as a complete course in introductory statistics.

This module, Assessment CAST, was developed to help teachers get useful information from mark data that they have collected from their classes. It explains some assessment-specific techniques that are not usually covered in an introductory statistics course.

Development of the module was partly sponsored by the New Zealand Ministry of Education as a professional development resource for New Zealand teachers.

Topics covered

The first three chapters, Looking at Marks, Graphical Summaries, and Numerical Summaries, describe simple graphical and numerical summaries of the performance of a class in a single test. These highlight the centre and spread of the distribution of marks in the class and also highlight any unusual marks and clusters of students who perform similarly.

These core techniques are important to properly interpret information provided by other teachers or administrations, since marks are often presented in the form of means, standard deviations and histograms.

The fourth chapter, Marks on Other Scales, describes some methods of manipulating marks to change them into a form that is easier to compare with other classes or to compare with national performance. This chapter also includes a method for scaling marks up or down.