Children's development at the start of school in Scotland and the progress made during their first school year: An analysis of PIPS baseline and follow-up assessment data

Footnotes

1. A percentile indicates the percentage of children whose scores fall below a given value. Children whose scores were on the 50^th percentile at the start of Primary 1 were in the middle of the range: the median. If we look at the progress that they made over this year, their development increased to the equivalent of children who started school at the very top of the range (the 95^th percentile).

2. A regression of attainment against age at the start of Primary 1 indicated how much growth there was in attainment for every month of maturation. This was used to produce measures of months of change.

3. http://www.cem.org/pips-baseline/introduction

4. The scores were normalised before the correlations were calculated.

5. All assessments have an error of measurement. They give an indication of the uncertainty around the estimates of a child's level of ability. The 95% confidence interval shows the range around a score within which we are 95% confident the true score lies.

6. This was based on subtracting the start score from the end scores using the normalised start scores as the base.

7. As before each central box represents the range of scores of the middle 50% of pupils in the sample. The line in the middle of the box shows the score of the median pupil in the sample. The top and bottom whiskers encompass almost all cases and just a few outliers are shown above and below.

8. A percentile indicates the percentage whose scores fall below a given value. Children whose scores were on the 50^th percentile at the start of Primary 1 were thus in the middle of the range.

9. This is schools which were one standard deviation above the mean school compared with those one standard deviation below on the progress measures.

10. Statistically what is referred to as "progress" in this report is often referred to as "residuals".

11. They were calculated using a series of regression controlling for prior score and the square of the prior scores. The coefficients for age, sex and SIMD were used to prepare the table.

12. As for the cognitive measures multiple level models with the controls used for the previous table were used. The figures show the difference between schools a standard deviation (SD) above and below the school mean.

13. It is worth noting that even if a figure is significant one year and not the next this does not imply that there was a statistically significant difference between the two years.

14. All of the data were used to regress each standardised score against age and the residuals were retained. These residuals (differences from expected score for age) were compared to zero in one sample t-tests for the two relevant age categories.