Friday, November 4, 2011

Analyzing Student Data in a Spreadsheet

My learning curve was very steep in beginning this project using Google Sheets.  Honestly, it was a very frustrating process for me.  So frustrating in fact that I called in for back-up (my brother) to help me figure it out.  He is very experienced in using Excel but not Google Sheets.  He ended up very frustrated as well.  I figured out the hard way that when you copy and paste into a new sheet, it doesn't take the formatting along with it.  AHH!  The average formula kept on malfunctioning and therefore after hitting enter would say error instead of an answer even though I was doing EXACTLY what the tutorial video showed.  I finally figured out how to manually fix the problem everytime I needed to average something but only after an hour of working with it.  Another thing that was annoying was that when I pushed any of the function buttons, the program would do this shift thing that set my cursor pointed at the wrong thing.  Good things about the program is that it is free, once I get the hang of it, it could be useful, it got the job done, eventually.

Click on the link below to view the spreadsheets and chart:

Link to Spreadsheet

OR

Scroll down to view the embedded spreadsheets and chart:



Sheet 1 shows all the students' tests from 6-10.  The averages that are highlighted green shows that there are 54% of the students that scored above average.  The red shows that there are 46% of the students that scored below average.
Sheet 2 shows the mean, median, and mode of the students whose scores were below average on tests 6-10.  Their overall test average was 171
Sheet 4 shows all the students who scored above average on tests 6-10.  Their overall test average was 217.
Chart 1 shows all the students who scored below average on tests 6-10.
I would need to gather more information to analyze the data perfectly.  I am not sure what a perfect score is for this data but I can compare the students scores to each other since I don't have a grading scale.  Also, I am not sure if these tests are completely different from each other or if they cover some of the same material.   With that said this is what I know, there are more students above average than below but only a few.  The students who scored below average improved from the first test (test 6) to the last test (test 10).  The average score of the below average students was well below at 171 (ave is 192) which tells me I would need to change some things as a teacher to try and help these students understand and retain what I am teaching them.  If it these were math test scores for an elementary classroom, I would find new and interesting games, worksheets, computer games, visuals, and create hands-on activities.  Things that include repetition, repetition, repetition would be essential.

1 comment:

  1. You just must be cursed on Google Sheets. Dang, it always pains me when the learning curve is too high and things fall apart and frustration sets in. Many of the setbacks and peculiarities you mentioned I've never observed or heard of before ... so just don't know what occurred.

    I'm certain if I spent 10 minutes with you that you'd end up completing the entire projects as fast as you could type. The little pieces simply didn't come together. We'll discuss this in class.

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