HCV viraemia is more important than genotype as a predictor of response to interferon in sicily (Southern Italy)

Abstract Background/Aims: To investigate host- and virus-related factors predictive of early and sustained alanine aminotransferase normalization after interferon therapy for HCV-related chronic liver disease, in an area where genotype 1 is highly prevalent. Methods: We studied 100 patients with HCV-RNA positive chronic liver disease (73 chronic hepatitis and 27 cirrhosis) undergoing alpha-interferon treatment. Thirty-four patients had an early response but relapsed, 15 patients remained into sustained response for at least 12 months after therapy, and 51 patients did not respond. Serum HCV-RNA levels were assessed by bDNA (Chiron), and genotype by LiPA (Innogenetics) and by sequencing of t…

Further considerations on a new indicator for higher education student performance

Il presente lavoro si inserisce nel dibattito internazionale sul sistema di voto universitario e sulla sua sintesi come misura della performance di uno studente. Partendo dalla nuova misura proposta in Adelfio et al. (2014), in questo breve articolo si pone l’enfasi sull’importanza della scelta della misura opportuna, soprattutto nella individuazione delle possibili determinanti della performance, utile nella scelte delle opportune politiche di intervento sulla performance della carriera dello studente. Per richiamare il nuovo indicatore proposto e per fare il confronto con quello esistente, si `e fatto riferimento ai Sistema Universitario italiano. This paper joins the international debate…

L'Indagine Campionaria sulle Famiglie nella Provincia di Trapani

Statistics in Education

During the last few decades, educational systems have attracted a great deal of interest because they are closely related to economic and social systems. For example, ‘higher education has been affected by a number of changes, including higher rates of participation, internationalization, the growing importance of knowledge-led economies and increased global completion’ (Bologna Process, 1999). There is a worldwide need to include in the educational language new words and concepts such as assessment, evaluation, accountability, student performance, mobility, competitiveness as part of a new governance system

Using the Rasch model to assess a University Service on the Basis of Students Opinions

In this paper we use the Rasch model (RM) as a tool to measure the perceived quality of student services at the Reception Office of an Italian university faculty. This paper has both a substantive and a methodological aim. The former is concerned with measuring the service quality of the Reception Office, while the latter concerns the definition and validation of an instrument for measuring perceived quality. The sample comprised 273 students enrolled at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Palermo (Aiello F. Il modello di Rasch per la costruzione di uno strumento di misura della qualit`a di un Servizio. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Palermo, Palermo, 2005). The RM is applied to prod…

Indicators and measures for the assessment of university students’ careers

In the Italian University System the problem of student failure and of delaying the degree is causing increasing concern both for universities and for stakeholders. In this paper we compare the teaching performances of the italian universities, and individual cohort data of three Faculties of the University of Palermo, to extract some information useful to policy makers.

Vita quotidiana all'Albergheria

Regression quantiles to assess higher education performance

From 2001 Italian university system has adopted the credits to mea- sure the workload of the students. The weighted mean of marks with credits as weights is used to measure the their performance. In our opinion it does not seem a proper way to measure. We suggest to adopt the median of the weighted marks, because we are considering an ordinale variable, with a non-normal empir- ical distribution, and a®ected by outliers. Then, instead of using an OLS multiple regression, we investigate the determinants of the performance measured by the median using a regression quantile for ordinal response. A real dataset concerning 133 students of the Faculty of Economics of the University of Palermo is …

Modeling confidential data via modified hurdle mixed models

Modelling students' mobility in Italy: an analysis of the determinants by combining individual and aggregated data

The migratory phenomenon consisting in the enrolment of some students in a University different from the one nearest to their place of origin goes under the name of students’ mobility (SM). This phenomenon can be studied for different territorial aggregations, depending on the aims and the availability of data. In Italy several analyses have been carried out to detect the determinants of such a phenomenon. Two approaches are mostly followed. The former considers the analysis of aggregate data (AD) flows, and it is aimed at detecting the characteristics of the Universities and the territories in which they are situated, the latter analyzes the determinants of SM on the grounds of the student…

Studenti in calo e in fuga: quale è il destino degli atenei siciliani?

Negli ultimi anni si è assistito a un notevole decremento delle immatricolazioni in generale, e in Sicilia in particolare, a cui sono anche corrisposte maggiori immatricolazioni di siciliani nelle università del Centro-Nord. Dalle analisi dei dati ufficiali del MIUR è emerso che le variabili con maggiore influenza nei confronti del calo delle immatricolazioni in totale sono i diplomati che non provengono dal liceo e le aree disciplinare sociali e umanistiche. Questi elementi sembrano delineare un panorama universitario in cui non c’è più posto per le lauree “deboli” e gli studenti “deboli”. In questo quadro sconfortante si inserisce la riduzione dei trasferimenti ministeriali che hanno subi…

Social Quality: Strategies to Measurement

Classification trees for multivariate ordinal response: an application to Student Evaluation Teaching

Data from multiple items on an ordinal scale are commonly collected when qualitative variables, such as feelings, attitudes and many other behavioral and health-related variables are observed. In this paper we introduce a method to derive a distance-based tree for multivariate ordinal response that allows, when subject-specific characteristics are available, to derive common profiles for respondents giving the same/similar multivariate ratings. Special attention will be paid to the performance comparison in terms of AUC, for three different distances used as splitting criteria. Simulated data an a dataset from a Student Evaluation of Teaching survey will be used as illustrative examples. Th…

INTRODUZIONE

La qualità della didattica: indicatori semplici o composti?

La valutazione della didattica nell’opinione degli studenti è una pratica ormai consolidata nelle università italiane. Molti strumenti di misura dei risultati della valutazione sono proposti in letteratura, dalla costruzione di indicatori composti al lordo delle caratteristiche degli studenti (valutatori) ad approcci modellistici che, al contrario, tengono conto delle caratteristiche dei valutatori (Rampichini et al. 2000). In questo lavoro la misura dei risultati della valutazione della didattica è condotta su 15451 questionari compilati da studenti di una facoltà dell’Università di Palermo, e le variabili prese in considerazione sono gli item di carattere valutativo. Il primo e più import…

Aspetti del capitale sociale e umano all’Albergheria

IL CAMPIONAMENTO

Questo lavoro fa parte degli approfondimenti metodologici di un volume avente come oggetto di studio gli standard di vita di una piccola comunità residente in un quartiere del centro storico di Palermo. Obiettivo di questo capitolo è illustrare la strategia campionaria adottata per condurre l''indagine. La complessità degli obiettivi, l''eterogeneità delle caratteristiche della popolazione oggetto di indagine e la piccola dimensione dell''area indagata costituiscono gli elementi in base ai quali è stata scelta la tecnica di campionamento. Inoltre, poiché lo scopo primario dell''indagine è stimare la proporzione degli occupati fra i capifamiglia, informazioni supplementari quali la presenza …

Can the Students’ Career be Helpful in Predicting an Increase in Universities Income?

The students’ academic failure and the delay in obtaining their final degree are a significant issue for the Italian universities and their stakeholders. Based on indicators proposed by the Italian Ministry of University, the Italian universities are awarded a financial incentive if they reduce the students’ attrition and failure. In this paper we analyze the students’ careers performance using: (1) aggregate data; (2) individual data. The first compares the performances of the Italian universities using the measures and the indicators proposed by the Ministry. The second analyzes the students’ careers through an indicator based on credit earned by each student in seven academic years. The …

Modelling the timing of divorce in Italy: a survival analysis on regression quantiles

The analysis of marital dissolution in Italy represents a quite interesting and challenging topic from a substantive standpoint; in fact, despite of the decreasing number of marriages and the increasing number of divorces, the traditional family based on the marriage of heterosexual partners is still considered as a fundamental institution of the society. Here we present a censored quantile regression model with additive terms to investigate the determinants of the timing of marital dissolution on a large and substantial sample from a survey carried on in Italy.

Steroidi sessuali e cancro mammario

Il seguente lauoro riguarda uno studio condotto su due gruppi di 40 pazieruti ciascuno afette da carcinoma mammario. Si uuole ualutare l'esposizione steroidea endogena (età al menarca, alla menopausa, parità) ed esogena (contraccettiui orali, terapia ormonale sostitutiua) allo scopo di osseruare l'euentuale associazione con la patologia esPressa. I risubati ottenuti indicano che, relatiuamente all'esposizione endogena, i gruppi sono pressoché sourapponibili, mentre i risultati relatiui all'esposizione esogena ?resentAno considereuoli dffirenze, quindi l'esposizione stessa potrebbe rappresentare un fanore di rischio per la comparsa della neoplasia. Il risultato ua analizzato con riserbo a cl…

Building up adjusted indicators of students' evaluation of university courses using generalized item response models

This article advances a proposal for building up adjusted composite indicators of the quality of university courses from students’ assessments. The flexible framework of Generalized Item Response Models is adopted here for controlling the sources of heterogeneity in the data structure that make evaluations across courses not directly comparable. Specifically, it allows us to: jointly model students’ ratings to the set of items which define the quality of university courses; explicitly consider the dimensionality of the items composing the evaluation form; evaluate and remove the effect of potential confounding factors which may affect students’ evaluation; model the intra-cluster variabilit…

Can the students' career performance be helpful in predicting an increase in universities income?

The students’ academic failure and the delay in obtaining their final degree are a significant issue for the Italian universities and their shareholders. Based on indicators proposed by the Italian Ministry of University, the Italian universities are awarded a financial incentive if they reduce the students’ attrition and failure. In this paper we analyze the students’ careers performance using: 1) aggregate data; 2) individual data. The first compares the performances of the Italian universities using the measures and the indicators proposed by the Ministry. The second analyzes the students’ careers through an indicator based on credit earned by each student in seven academic years. The pr…

Analysing SET over time using multilevel multidimensional explanatory IRT models

This contribution makes an attempt to analyze students' ratings of university teaching on a broad prospective, trying to adjust the final assessment from a wide range of factors which jointly may influence the process under evaluation: academic year peculiarities, course characteristics, students' characteristics and item dimensionality. From a methodological point of view, by setting complex Item Response models as special case of Generalized Linear or Mixed Models a large flexibility is introduced in the specification of ad hoc modelling approaches for the analysis of students' ratings.

LA METODOLOGIA DELLA RICERCA

Un indicatore composto della qualità della didattica: dalle scale ordinali alle metriche di importanza relativa.

Il problema della ponderazione nella costruzione di un indicatore composto, pur essendo determinante per il valore della misura sintetica, non trova ancora risposte soddisfacenti nell’attuale panorama della letteratura dedicata all’argomento. Un tentativo per la costruzione di un sistema di pesi è effettuato sulla base di un modello di regressione lineare multipla attraverso misure di importanza relativa. In presenza di regressori correlati l’usuale output del modello di regressione non è adeguato per fornire tali misure. Si fa ricorso ai metodi per la scomposizione di R2 e, tra quelli riscontrati in letteratura, se ne esaminano due: LMG e PMVD. Questi ultimi, entrambi basati su medie degli…