MODELLING THE AVERAGE SCORES OF NATIONAL EXAMINATION IN WEST JAVA

Formal education in Indonesia is commonly divided into stages such as preschool, primary school (SD), Secondary School (SMP-SMA), and universities/colleges. Indonesian government has been taking serious efforts on how to improve the quality of education in Indonesia. The roadmap for continous improvement of education quality can be designed based on the results of National Examination (UN) taken regularly by high school students. This research was aimed at exploring informations on how the scores of UN can be linked with other explanatory variables. A panel data which consists of average scores of UN for all public senior high schools (SMA Negeri) in West Java Provinces during 2011-2013 and other related variables such as total scores of accreditation, regional domestic product, human development index, scores of school’s facilities and its infrastructure, scores of school’s educators, average scores of final school exams, were used in this research. The average scores of UN in this case were dependent on variations between high schools and time periods as well as other explanatory variables in which the effects were either fixed or random. The data of this research was modelled with linear mixed models and using the Generalized Estimating Equation (GEE) approach. Both linear mixed models and GEE have been commonly used to analyse the panel data. This paper showed that the GEE provided a model of better performance than the linear mixed models in explaining the variability of the response variable which was the average scores of UN. The GEE also showed significant correlation between explanatory variables and the response. Key words: fixed effects, GEE, linear mixed model, national examination, random effects