Thursday, October 9, 2014

Surely that will improve teaching ratings!



The FT reports that the UK government will start a randomized trial to see whether starting the school day later would improve teenagers' performance. 

I'd wish I could have been part of such a trial when I was younger. Starting school at 7:10am (off-topic: never understood the :10 start) in Brazi wasn't nice. It made me have to wake-up at 6am.

Randomized trials such as this one are a great way to test the impact of the effects of proposed policy before they are rolled out to the rest of the country. Just like the idea behind testing the effectiveness of new medicines, here they randomize schools that will get the treatment (i.e. that will start the school-day earlier) and compare it to those with similar characteristics that will carry on as before (i.e. the control group).

Here are a couple of interesting links with more on randomized trials:

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