Applying what you have learned.... When politicians make claims that we need to

Question

Applying what you have learned.... 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. At the end of your post, state whether you would conclude that the program will increase scores nation-wide.

Note that it is a separate question of whether it is "worth it" to effect change by taking money from people in the form of taxes to pay for a program. Other than (optionally) saying that you think the statistics can or can not answer such a question, the "worth it" question is not part of this discussion.

Explanation / Answer

Answer:

Questions or comments pertaining to the statistical claim made by the politician:

1. What Sample size was used

2. What kind of sampling technique was used: e.g simple random sampling, quota sampling, stratified sampling, cluster sampling?

3. How non-response issues were handled?

4. What is the population size from which sample is drawn?

5.What is the degree or level of confidence for the estimates?

6. What was the nature of data that was collected and what was the acceptable sampling error?

Since the amount of information required to draw meaningful inference is not available, therefore its difficult to accurately predict the nationwide score.

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