Saturday, September 10, 2011

Analyzing Student Data in a Spreadsheet

For the most part my experience with Goolge Sheets was smooth. I did the averages quickly and used the bottom right hand corner of the cell to efficiently copy the formula into the remainder of the cells. For the requirement about using only the students who were under average my original idea was to create a filter to filter out any students who’s average was under the 192 class average. This worked really well at first but unfortunately when I made a chart out of the selected cells, the chart included the data that had been sorted out by the filter. I then tried to sort the data from lowest to highest and delete the averages that fell below 192 and fortunately this method was successful. The chart was also fairly easy after I realized that I needed to switch the axis in order to make it more meaningful. The only hold-up that I had with the chart was when I attempted to change my vertical axis range, to make the graph more readable, the chart remained the same regardless of the numbers that I inserted.





Above is a chart that I made of how below average students progressed through the final five tests. Data for this chart can be found here. As an instructor, I would be pleased with the overall trend of the below average students. With the exception of Katherine’s dramatic loss in points from test 7 to test 8, and Queen’s slight loss from test 9 to test 10, all students progressed fairly linearly throughout the tests. If I had Queen, and especially Katherine in my class, I would ask them what they thought was difficult about their respective tests, or what outside factors (lack of sleep, didn’t study as hard, hungry, other things in their lives, etc.) may have influenced their scores.

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