Search

Following the introduction of performance management in Italian universities, Business intelligence has become a strategical means to use administrative data in support of governance and decision-making processes. The aim of this paper is to show the important role played by a decision support system inside an organization by evaluating the outcomes of the fair tuition fee policy of the University of Bari, in favour of low-income students, stated as a priority in its mission. A longitudinal analysis is carried out on the cohort of first-year students enrolled in the academic year 2015–2016, searching for a predictive model of their performance given some explicative variables. The usefulness of adopting a periodic monitoring system, investigating data by means of suitable statistical techniques (logistic regression, survival analysis, Cox regression model), allows to early detect those factors to be modified in order to achieve optimal results with respect to student expectations and quality of higher education.

It is well known that, in classification problems, the predictive capacity of any decision-making model decreases rapidly with increasing asymmetry of the target variable (Sonquist et al., 1973; Fielding 1977). In particular, in segmentation analysis with a categorical target variable, very poor improvements of purity are obtained when the least represented modality counts less than 1/4 of the cases of the most represented modality. The same problem arises with other (theoretically more exhaustive) techniques such as Artificial Neural Networks. Actually, the optimal situation for classification analyses is the maximum uncertainty, that is, equidistribution of the target variable. Some classification techniques are more robust, by using, for example, the less sensitive logit transformation of the target variable (Fabbris & Martini 2002); however, also the logit transformation is strongly affected by the distributive asymmetry of the target variable. In this paper, starting from the results of a direct survey in which the target (binary) variable was extremely asymmetrical (10% vs. 90%, or greater asymmetry), we noted that also the logit model with the most significant parameters had very reduced fitting measures and almost zero predictive power. To solve this predictive issue, we tested post-stratification techniques, artificially symmetrizing a training sample. In this way, a substantially increase of fitting and predictive capacity was achieved, both in the symmetrized sample and, above all, in the original sample. In conclusion of the paper, an application of the same technique to a dataset of very different nature and size is described, demonstrating that the method is stable even in the case of analysis executed with all data of a population.

La presente indagine fornisce informazioni sulla customer satisfaction dei servizi offerti da Sanitaservice ASL FG s.r.l.. Lo studio consente di confrontare l’andamento del fenomeno relativo agli anni 2017 e 2018 e di analizzare i punti di forza e di debolezza per ogni servizio e per le singole dimensioni esaminate. La ricerca ha coinvolto i direttori amministrativi e/o sanitari, i primari di tutti i reparti e, ove presenti, i caposala o coordinatori infermieristici della ASL Foggia. Dal confronto fra i dati relativi al 2017 e quelli relativi al 2018 risulta evidente un incremento della soddisfazione del personale ASL FG rispetto ai servizi erogati da Sanitaservice ASL FG s.r.l..

The standardized learning tests, proposed in recent years in Italy by INVALSI, represent valuable tools for evaluating the educational system and provide policy guidance to policy makers. This work aims to describe an adequate assessment methodology of schools in terms of effectiveness measured as added value, providing some results concerning the regional differences in Italy, and highlights some problems related to these assessments. To do this we appropriately used multilevel regression models. The empirical results highlight the backwardness of the southern regions than in northern parts of the country, only in small part due to a different economic and social composition, but they show the presence of some southern classes getting surprisingly positive results.

International audience; En France, le calcul de deux indicateurs simples (les proportions de cadres et d’ouvriers-employés parmi les actifs diplômés du supérieur âgés de 25-54 ans) à l’échelle des arrondissements (330 unités territoriales) montre le lien qui existe entre, d’une part, l’augmentation de la proportion de diplômés du supérieur au sein de la population active et, d’autre part, la difficulté croissante et de plus en plus inégale selon les territoires de l’accès aux fonctions de cadres pour ces derniers. La mise en oeuvre de cette méthode à l’échelle des 110 provinces italiennes révèle que c’est également le cas en Italie. Mais, sur le plan méthodologique, l’importance des migrations internes sud-nord révèle aussi lagrande sensibilité des deux indicateurs utilisés aux migrations. Les résultats ne peuvent alors être correctement interprétés sans une analyse démographique des effets de sélection induits par les migrations. Toutefois, loin de fragiliser les résultats pour la France, la mise en évidence des limites de ces indicateurs les conforte au contraire.