Index of cognitive skills and educational attainment

Economist intelligence Unit:

The Global Index of Cognitive Skills and Educational Attainment compares the performance of 39 countries and one region (Hong Kong) on two categories of education: Cognitive Skills and Educational Attainment. The Index provides a snapshot of the relative performance of countries based on their education outputs.

The indicators used in this Index are:

- Cognitive Skills: PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS scores in Reading, Maths and Science

- Educational Attainment: literacy and graduation rates

How is the Index calculated?

The overall index score is the weighted sum of the underlying two category scores. Likewise, the category scores are the weighted sum of the underlying indicator scores (see below for the default weights applied). Each indicator score is calculated on the basis of a z-score normalisation process. This process enables the comparison and aggregation of different data sets (on different scales), and the scoring of countries on the basis of their comparative performance.

What is a z-score?

A z-score indicates how many standard deviations an observation is above or below the mean. To compute the z-score, the EIU first calculated each indicator's mean and standard deviation using the data for the countries in the Index, and then the distance of the observation from the mean in terms of standard deviations.

Related: www.wisconsin2.org

Posted by Jim Zellmer at November 29, 2012 5:39 AM
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