Communicating uncertainty in school value-added

Governments around the world operate value-added systems that attempt to monitor the effectiveness of their schools for accountability, improvement, and other purposes. These systems compute value-added scores of the educational effectiveness of their schools, often together with 95% confidence intervals to communicate their statistical uncertainty. However, the notion of statistical uncertainty is hard for policy makers, practitioners, and the public more generally to understand. In this interactive page, we explore a range of static and dynamic visualizations for better communicating the uncertainty in value-added scores. This work extends earlier research we have published in Journal of Royal Statistical Society: Series A and Fiscal Studies and we hope that it prompts a debate so that value-added systems around the world ultimately improve the way they communicate this fundamentally important aspect of value-added scores to their users.