Gathering & analyzing data on student activity

Gathering & Analyzing Data on Student Activity CEP 822

Created by: Jean-Claude Aura Date: September 2009

For Lab 4, I’ve decided to gather data from 2 distinct sources and analyze them: Lab 1 (Nell) and Labs 1- 3. The questions I wish to address are the following:

Lab 1: How many people believe Drs Lovell and Olson’s research on Nell was ethically appropriate, and how many don’t.

Lab 1-3: What’s each participant’s level of participation? (Calculated as the number of replies sent by a participant compared to the total number of replies sent by all participants.)

Lab 1

Data Collection

The data were gathered from the different discussions led by 13 participants during session 1 (excluding replies). Some of the data were straightforward, i.e. the participants clearly stated whether they thought Lovell and Olson’s research was ethically appropriate or not. The rest of the data (from 2 participants only) are inferred, i.e. the participants tackled the issue without explicitly wording their thoughts either about Lovell or about Olson. Here, I took the liberty to assume the conclusions based on the insinuations made by the participants. Lovell: 7 participants (or 53.8%) approved of his method, while 6 (or 46.2%) did not.



Olson: 5 participants (or 38.5%) approved of her method, while 8 (or 61.5%) did not.

The results above represent Lovell’s and Olson’s approaches as 2 separate study cases. It would also be interesting to see how many people approve of both Lovell and Olson’s research as representing one study case. Lovell and Olson got respectively 7 and 5 positive votes for the way they conducted their research, totaling 12. They got respectively 6 and 8 negative votes, totaling 14. The success of their research when considering both their approaches is summarized below:



Data Analysis

When considered separately, Lovell’s approach is 4% above the mean value of ethical appropriateness, while Olson’s is 12% below. In other words, Lovell’s approach is considered more acceptable than Olson’s. However, when considering Lovell’s and Olson’s approaches as one study case, it is regarded as 4% below ethical appropriateness.

Conclusion

Had Lovell conducted his research alone, he would have received more appraisal than criticism. It’s Olson’s approach that made the research ethically inappropriate. So, Lovell would be better off alone



Lab 2

Data Collection

The data were collected from 17 participants during the first 3 sessions. They represent the number of posts each participant has posted during the weekly discussions. Although the discussions were led in groups (4 in total), the data collected don’t show the number of entries per group. They represent the overall level of participation of each participant across the 3 sessions and 4 groups. For reasons of anonymousness, the participants’ names have been substituted with numbers. These numbers don’t represent the participants in alphabetical order. The chances of participants putting up a post are equal. Everyone has equal access to the site and can put up as many posts as they can.

Data Analysis

The chart shows a wide spread of data. Thus, finding the Mean won’t help assess the average number of a participant’s posts, or his participation level. Let’s take a look. Total number of posts 197 Mean = --------------------------------------------------------- = --------------------------------- = 11.6 Total number of participants 17



This number fairly depicts the participation level of participants 3,4,8,12 & 17. But what about the outliers, such as participants 5 & 15(among others)?

Let’s see if the Median works out better. For that, let’s put the data in numerical order. As there are 17 participants, the Median is the 9th value in the chart, that is the value of participant 3, which is 10. Again, the median distorts the facts, which was to be expected for such a wide data spread.

Let’s try the InterQuartile Range (IQR).

Group 1: Participants 15,6,11 & 14: Median = 4 (Q1) Group 2: Participants 9,16,7,1,3,12,17,8 & 4: Median = 10 Group 3: Participants 13,2,10 & 5: Median = 18.5 (Q3) IQR = Q3 – Q1 = 18.5 – 4 = 13.5 (Now that’s better) but …



Let’s see what the Standard Deviation (S) has to reveal.

Let’s see how many standard deviations each participant is from the mean. This is represented

by the Z-score, or standardized score, as the distance from (mean) per standard deviation. So, if we want to know how many standard deviations participant 14 is from the mean, we get: If we plot the number of posts and the Z scores on the x axis simultaneously, we can easily compare where each participant stands.

Gathering & analyzing data on student activity

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