Our Group's final report can be found here!
The topics we are interested in looking at are what social factors impact student performance. Social aspects like parental educational backgrounds or how wealthy a student is can easily influence the way students learn and apply their knowledge, which affects exam performance. Additionally, knowing that UBCO has all types of students from all over the world, we want to try to understand why students do better in school than others. A question we specifically want to explore is, "Do females often do better on standarized tests in comparison to men?" We speculate that the parental level of education column must be related to student performance because students feel obligated and motivated to do better in school. Hopefully through our findings, we can not only help us understand students but it can also help professors understand and sympathize with students to create a better learning environment. Overall, as university students, we think this is an important topic that should be focused on because it allows students to understand each other more, and we can make UBCO a better place.
Our dataset focuses on standardized testing outcomes in three different categories being math, reading, and writing and also looks at other life factors that could have impacts on these scores and may reveal a relationship that exists between testing and circumstances outside of school. Some of the other factors include gender, race/ethnicy, parental level of education, if they eat lunch and if they took a test preparation course. Since our dataset has a variety of variables and lots of data to supplement it, there are many possible outcomes that we can derive from this dataset, and make inferences based on the relationships that exist in this data. In all I hope that through looking at this dataset, we can discover an objective connection that shows that standardized testing might not be the most effective way of proving intellect, especially when many facotrs outside of school can effect how children perform on them.
- Noah Stasuik: Second year computer science major, data science minor at UBCO, hoping to make a difference through code!
- Tina Liu: A second year computer science major and management minors who enjoys playing tennis and badminton.
- Peter Idoko: I am a second year planning to major in Computer Science and minor in Management. I love Basketball and food and hope to make a name for myself.
