Today (like many days) I was faced with a task I was not 100% sure how to do. I had a set of ratings for different evaluators, and had been told by someone who knew better than I that I should be trying to calculate their ‘z-scores’ in order to standardize the numbers.<\/p>\n
As I was about to enter a handy-dandy Google search, I thought – “no wait! Why don’t you see if there are any ‘learning objects’ out there that could teach you what a Z-score is, and how to calculate it.” So I set out in search of my closest learning object repository to see what I could find.
\n
\nOff I went, partly with a real goal of learning about Z-scores, and partly as a bit of an experiment to see what existing repositories had in store for me.<\/p>\n
My first stop was the granddaddy (grandma?) of them all – MERLOT. Maybe not a ‘repository’ per se, but it’s been around for a while and would certainly have some good pointers. And sure enough, a search for the term ‘z-score’ brought back one result which seemed promising.<\/a> The resource that was pointed to was certainly about much more than simple Z-scores, but sure enough it did have a page dedicated to that topic<\/a>. So while there was a bit of deft navigation involved after the fact to locate the actual material concerning Z-scores, at least something relevant came back, which was encouraging. Still, it’s a good thing I didn’t search MERLOT for ‘z-scores<\/u>‘<\/a>(zero results) or ‘z score <\/a>(without the dash)’ (26 results, only one of which appears relevant). And better yet that I didn’t try the federated search<\/a> – which wouldn’t have found the one relevant MERLOT entry, but would have returned 10 entries from SMETE seemingly all related to astrophysics!<\/p>\n But in the spirit of furthering this line of enquiry, I thought I’d try out a few other repositories. Next was one closer to home – CAREO. CAREO’s also been around a while, and has learnt a lot about how repositories should work.<\/p>\n Sure enough, a search on ‘z-score’ does get a hit<\/a>, in fact 5 hits. Problem being that they are all the same resource!<\/p>\n So that it’s clear, I do not mean to pick on these particular repositories. Direct searches on almost all of the repositories listed here<\/a> fared about as well (one exception was this example<\/a>, that provided 2 flash applets with far to much info on the topic).<\/p>\n