Contributed by: Assessment
of Performance Unit (APU)
This task is one of a series of the APU surveys in
Science of pupils aged 11, 13, and 15. The responsibility for the
science surveys is shared between teams based at the University
of Leeds and Chelsea College, University of London. The surveys
have been carried out annually since 1980 and continued until 1984,
after which a five year research phase began to culminate in another
full survey in 1989.
The surveys are carried out on a random sample of
11 year old pupils in primary and middle schools and of 13 and 15
year olds in middle and secondary schools. The sample is a stratified
random sample of schools in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland
selected to allow performances to be reported for pupils in, for
instance, particular areas of the country or types and age ranges
of schools. Pupils are then drawn at random from each school giving
a total sample of between one and two percent of the population
at each age.
This sample is then subdivided to give a number of
parallel subsamples each of which is given a different test package
thus allowing an extensive testing program to be undertaken. Each
year questions equivalent to a single test lasting 20 to 30 hours
are used. This permits the questions themselves to be representative
of a very broad view of science. However, any individual pupil is
only tested for one hour and sees only a fraction of the complete
test. This survey design, known as light sampling, allows a profile
report to be produced of the performance in science of the population
as a whole rather than for an individual.
Specific technical quality data is currently unavailable
for this task.
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