Sam Sims

It has always been quite a challenge to analyse written text. One popular approach for ‘document analysis’ is to do a lexical analysis, for example by counting particular words. Another approach is to take documents and then analyse the content manually with coding and theming. The former approach is quite scalable, but gives little insight into the actual content of long documents. The latter approach is very time-consuming and therefore not feasible with large collections of text.

What do court cases, speed dating, baseball pitches and school inspections have in common? They all involve humans making repeated judgements about whether something meets a certain standard: reasonable doubt, marriage potential, foul throws, and inspection grades. Prior research suggests that human judgments can be influenced by prior judgements. This is known as sequential bias. For example, we might judge court cases relative to our expectations.

A significant proportion of school inspections in England are conducted by contractors – many of whom are staff employed by a school, often in a school leadership role. These individuals are privy to certain inside knowledge and training that are not available to most schools. For instance, they will receive regular training about the inspection framework, and what inspectors should (and should not) look for when they are judging a school.