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DA7. Validate Politian Claim

Statement

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.

solution

According to the question statement, the nationwide score average is 70; this represents the mean of the entire population. Also, the chosen sample size is 4, with score values equal to [70.5, 71, 72, 72.5], and each score has [0.5, 1, 1.5, 72.5] differences from the population average, respectively.

There are lots of questions that circulate in the one’s head regarding this information; some of them are listed below:

  1. What are the scores of other schools not listed in the chosen sample?
  2. What would happen if we randomly selected a bigger sample size from the population?
  3. How did these four schools get selected to represent the sample?
  4. Do these four selected schools relate to each other in any form? Or do they get selected independently?

Putting the question statement in mind, the sample size presented in the argument is very small and can not give an informative decision on behalf of the entire population. The claimant did not provide any informative data about how they selected their sample, which questions its representation of the population. The means in the chosen sample vary significantly in such a small sample.

We conclude from the discussion above that one can not build an informative analysis of the stated problem. Until having full access to the entire program data and analyzing it, one can not evaluate the effectiveness of this program.

Since the proof is on the claimant’s side, one can conditionally conclude that this program is “not worth it” until analyzing all data regarding this program.

Note: this conclusion is based on a logical assessment of the problem statement, and does not need any references, except the statement itself.