Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
The third aspect for this experiment consisted of the test's main goal: to
decide the priority order of parishes to receive cash investment, in order to
combat health problems such as child mortality. To measure how effective
the map was in supporting this decision process, the list of 23 parishes was
presented and subjects were asked to point out which ones must have
priority for financial resources allocation. Additionally, there was one
question (grouped with the 14 true/false ones) also related to this more
complex reasoning process, since it required a considerably larger number
of comparisons to be made. This question was evaluated together with the
parish ranks and was called “p15”.
For this third step, correct answers were related mainly to two factors:
first, with the importance users gave to each one of the three health indica-
tors; and second with the evolution of these indicators over the years.
Thus, a rank to evaluate parishes was created and they were ordered by
priority, resulting in the following severity criteria: Critical (parishes with
maximum priority, mainly related to rising or high child mortality levels);
Urgent (parishes with high priority, related to at least one of the indicators
being high or rising); High priority parishes (related to the absence of
desirable indicators reducing to the goal of zero, for more than one indicator);
Medium priority (related to the absence of desirable indicators reducing to
zero goal, for only one indicator); Low priority (parishes that achieved the
zero goal or are very close to that).
According to these criteria, the analyst's choices were weighted (
Table 1
).
Positive weights applies to the considered desirable choices, zero weights
were applied to no-data locations and negative weights applied to wrong
assumptions, which happens when parishes had no problems with the
measured health indicators. Also negative weights were considered in order
to prevent guessing, since there were no express instructions about the
maximum or minimum number of parishes to be chosen. The maximum
score for this stage is 16 points - related to the priority rank - equivalent to
choosing the four critical situation parishes or three of them together with
all of the urgent ones. The minimum score is 0, even if the analyst picks up
only low priority parishes. Additionally, there is 1 point related to the
'p15' question, giving a total of 17 points, equivalent to a 100% perform-
ance in the map reasoning task.
Finally, observations about the test were taken, based on commentaries or
conversations during the experiments, in order to discover more informa-
tion about the way students dealt with the whole activity.
