Ventana software support forum

Hi there, I've recently been trying to simulate the effect of Student/Teacher ration on educational performance.

I have a converter that is called "Student/Teacher ratio" and it links to a second converter called "Quality of Learning". I'm having difficulty with the equation in the "Quality of Learning" converter. I would like to say that as the Student/Teacher ratio goes down then the Quality of Learning will go up.

I think i mite be able to use an IF statement for this but my knowledge of programming languages is limited. Any help would be greatly appreciated

Thanks

Here's one very simple equation that fits the bill:

Q of Learning = k/(Student teacher ratio)

The bigger student teacher ratio gets, the smaller Q of Learning gets. k is an arbitrary constant that translates the units from students/teachers to quality. This is better than using an IF statement, because it's a continuous relationship. You'd have a hard time writing an IF statement that could handle all possible student-teacher ratios.

This might be less than satisfactory, because the shape of the relationship is not very flexible. You could try other equations, or switch to a lookup. For example, you might create an S-shaped relationship, to capture the idea that a ratio of 3:1 is almost as good as 1:1, but quality falls off quickly between 10:1 and 30:1, and thereafter 200:1 is not much worse than 100:1.

Tom