'School performance tables', an alphabetical list of secondary schools along with aggregates of their pupils' performances in national tests, have been published in the UK since 1992. Inevitably, the media have responded by publishing ranked 'league tables'. Despite concern over the potentially divisive effect of such tables, the current government has continued to publish this information in the same form. The effect of this information on standards and on the social make-up of the community has been keenly debated. Since there is no control group available that would allow us to investigate this issue directly, we present here a simple mathematical model. Our results indicate that, while random fluctuations from year to year can cause large distortions in the league-table positions, some schools still establish themselves as 'desirable'. To our surprise, we found that 'value-added' tables were no more accurate than tables based on raw exam scores, while a different method of drawing up the tables, in which exam results are averaged over a period of time, appears to give a much more reliable measure of school performance.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 4. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 15 August 2014.
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#11,458,120
of 34,359,530 outputs
Outputs from Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
#8,841
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Outputs of similar age
#57,173
of 193,083 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
#26
of 46 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,359,530 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 65th percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 12,411 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 43.3. This one is in the 27th percentile – i.e., 27% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 193,083 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 69% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 46 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 43rd percentile – i.e., 43% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
