Sabermetrics, Corsi, and Fenwick are terms that are becoming more popular in the world of professional sports in North America. Baseball was the first major sport to look at traditional statistics in a different way. For hundreds of years scouts across North America have traveled to and watched hundreds of thousands of games in hopes of finding a baseball player who has all the tools to be a major league baseball (MLB) player.
In 2003 Michael Lewis published a book titled “The Art of Winning An Unfair Game” in which he documented and outlined how the Oakland Athletics use sabermetics to field a competitive baseball team. Billy Beane was, and still is, the general manager of the Athletics. Beane embarked on a rigorous statistical analysis of his baseball team and concluded that the less often used statistics of “on base percentage” and “slugging percentage” were better indicators of offensive success than the traditional measures of batting average, stolen bases and runs batted in. By combining these statistical analyses with his tiny (by MLB standards) budget, Beane proceeded to find value in the undervalued players.
This past summer in the National Hockey League there was a feeding frenzy by teams trying to find people who could work with the same level of statics and analytics. The majority of these new hirings in the NHL were bloggers or armchair general managers who had used statistics to analyze their favourite teams. A prime example is Dawson Creek product, Tyler Dellow, who for years has statistically analyzed and criticized his favourite team the Edmonton Oilers on his blog. His ability to apply statistics and analytics in a different way prompted the Oilers to hire him as a consultant to hockey operations in the area of analytics.
All of the cases of analytics and statistical analysis of data in professional sports have one thing in common. Teams are looking for a way to maximize their impact. Impact is something that Dr. John Hattie has studied in education. Using over 800 meta-analyses, Dr. Hattie has looked at how all facets of education impact student learning. In short he has become the Billy Beane of Education.
So what are the traditional indicators in education we use to gauge whether a student is being successful and more importantly how do we define success?
If we say that success in education is different for every student, how can we pinpoint and use the data that will give us the best insight into student success?
What is the “on base percentage” of education?
Josh Kurjata