School outcomes:sharing the responsibility between pupil and school

This paper uses a Data Envelopment Analysis based approach to decompose pupil under-attainment into that attributable to the school the pupil attends and that attributable to the pupil. The approach measures pupil attainment in terms of value added. Data on over 6700 A-level pupils from 122 English schools have been analysed. The results suggest that at current levels of school effectiveness a pupil's own application accounts for the major part of any under-attainment, though schools also have scope to improve their effectiveness.The approach also makes it possible to identify target attainment levels a pupil could be set and the extent to which the attainment of those targets necessitates an improvement in the effectiveness of the school the pupil attends and in the pupil's own efforts.

Determining the change of Brillouin frequency shift by using the similarity matching method

We have proposed a similarity matching method (SMM) to obtain the change of Brillouin frequency shift (BFS), in which the change of BFS can be determined from the frequency difference between detecting spectrum and selected reference spectrum by comparing their similarity. We have also compared three similarity measures in the simulation, which has shown that the correlation coefficient is more accurate to determine the change of BFS. Compared with the other methods of determining the change of BFS, the SMM is more suitable for complex Brillouin spectrum profiles. More precise result and much faster processing speed have been verified in our simulation and experiments. The experimental results have shown that the measurement uncertainty of the BFS has been improved to 0.72 MHz by using the SMM, which is almost one-third of that by using the curve fitting method, and the speed of deriving the BFS change by the SMM is 120 times faster than that by the curve fitting method.