A research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities reports the first population estimate of first-attempt legibility for the pens tethered to service counters, together with the improvement target the University has since set against it.
A stratified sample of 3,180 service counters, double-observed across eleven months, puts first-attempt legibility at 78.4 per cent
Until this month nobody had counted them. The pens tethered to service counters across the country have been inspected for decades on the question of whether they are present, and never on the question of whether they work.
A National Baseline for the Tethered Counter Pen, released today by the School of Emergent Priorities, closes that gap with a stratified multi-stage probability sample of 3,180 counters, observed over eleven months by two independent fieldworkers apiece. Some 78.4 per cent of tethered pens produced a legible mark on first attempt, with a confidence interval running from 76.9 to 79.9. A further 13.4 per cent wrote only after priming. At 7.4 per cent of counters sampled, there was no tethered pen to test.
A number nobody has ever had is worth having some while before it is worth improving. The School will be interested to see what a second wave finds once there is finally something to compare it against.
— Dr Ingrid Vasseur, Lecturer and Convenor, Futures in Committee
The study pairs a population sampling frame with an observation protocol designed to survive handover to non-specialist fieldworkers, harmonising measurement across settings that have never before been read on a common scale. Dr Runa Adegoke, who convenes the School’s Strategic Drift Survey, said the instrument was built for repetition rather than for this wave alone: “We were designing something that would still mean the same thing in five years, which is a different exercise from finding out the answer once.”
The University regards the estimate as the quiet groundwork its research strategy exists to underwrite, and the finding has been lodged with the Indicator Commons as a first-wave baseline. A target of 85 per cent first-attempt legibility now sits against it.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.xcxdxw.