[Contrib: Evaluation System] Sakai Evaluation system - how do you make sense of 'mean' in Evaluation results?

[Fawei Geng]

Dear all,

When looking at the evaluation results via the web interface, each (rating scale and multiple answer ) question has a 'mean'.  Having had a close look, statistically the 'mean' seems a bit meaningless, or even misleading.

For example I tested a 'rating scale' question.  One question uses 5-point 'Strongly agree to strongly disagree' while the other uses 5-point 'strongly disagree to strongly agree'.   For both question I chose the same answer -strongly agree.  But I got mean =1.0 for the first question and mean = 5.00 for the second question.  This means that the system gives the first answer a value of '1' and the fifth answer a value of '5' regardless.

Does anyone have a better way of using the 'mean' that I am not aware of?

Many thanks

Fawei

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Fawei Geng, FHEA CMALT MBCS
Learning Technology Support Officer
IT Services, University of Oxford
13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN

Blog: http://blogs.oucs.ox.ac.uk/fawei/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/oxford4learning/
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