FEW DUTCH WOMEN AT THE BLACKBOARD
There is a low percentage of women teachers in the Netherlands compared to other countries. In most of the other countries, the majority of teachers are women. However, if we include the figures for inspectors and school principals, the proportion shrinks considerably and women are in a minority everywhere.
Percentage of women teachers (kindergarten, elementary, and secondary).
A second document task involving this same chart directs the reader to identify the country other than the Netherlands in which women teachers are in the minority. This item falls in the middle of Level 2 and received a difficulty value of 234. This task was made a bit more difficult than the first because rather than searching for a country and locating a percentage, the reader had to know that minority means less than 50 per cent. Then they had to cycle through to identify the countries in which the percentage of women teachers were less then 50 per cent. In addition, they had to remember the condition “other than the Netherlands”; otherwise they might have chosen it over the correct response. As a result, type of match was scored as moderately difficult; type of information as easy because the requested information is a country or place; and plausibility of distractor as relatively easy because there are distractors associated with the requested information.
A somewhat more difficult task, with a difficulty value of 295 and falling in the middle of Level 3 directs the reader to look at charts involving fireworks from the Netherlands and to write a brief description of the relationship between sales and injuries based on the information shown. Here the reader needs to look at and compare the information contained in the two charts and integrate this information making an inference regarding the relationship between the two sets of information. As a result, it was judged as being relatively difficult in terms of type of match. Type of information also was judged to be relatively difficult because the requested information is asking for a pattern or similarity in the data. Plausibility of distractor was scored moderately difficult primarily because both given and requested information is present in the task. For example, one of the things that may have contributed to the difficulty of this task is the fact that the sales graph goes from 1986 to 1992 while the injuries graph goes from 1983 to 1990. The reader needed to compare the information from the two charts for the comparable period time.