Course description
Overview
Are you working in Student Analytics?
Ever been asked for the margin of error on a percentage?
Or if your percentage is different from the benchmark?
Or if the percentage of student retention for this year is different from that for last year?
This one-day course provides participants with hands-on experience of analysing their own type of records for data-driven planning and confidently interpreting numerical results for reports to policy makers and committees, or for returns to the Higher Education Statistics Agency.
Presentations, demonstrations and hands-on computer practicals will be based around the free statistical software R. Note the course does not focus on teaching R, but on the use of supplied R functions to perform statistical analyses of interest. Formulae are kept to a minimum; instead, we concentrate on results, their interpretation and reporting in plain language.
Duration
1 day
Delivery Mode
All training is online and will be delivered live between 09:00 and 17:30 (GMT/GMT+1). The delivery platform is Zoom, which may be freely accessed. Questions may be asked using Zoom's chat box. Note our online courses are delivered by a team of two presenters, meaning at least one presenter is always available to provide additional support. During presentations the team member who is not speaking can take questions in addition to the presenter.
Who Should Attend?
Administrators in educational establishments working in Policy, Planning and Strategy units; Data and Insight units; Business Intelligence units; those involved in extracting actionable insights from student records and in reporting to policy makers or committees; those involved in producing returns to the HESA. Anyone in these positions will benefit greatly from this course.
No previous experience of the R software is required.
How You Will Benefit
By the end of the course you will be familiar with basic statistical methods for making sound assessments, and extracting actionable insights. You will also be able to appreciate HESA guidelines on the statistical importance of your results.
What Do We Cover?
- Estimation: standard errors and confidence intervals for percentages
- Comparing a percentage to a benchmark: one-sample z-test
- Comparing two percentages: two-sample z-test
- Comparing more than two percentages: chi-square test.
The course will make use of our R functions which will be made freely available. Note the course does not focus on teaching R, but on the use of the supplied R functions to perform statistical analyses covering the above syllabus.
Software
Practical work will be done in R.
Note:
- For practical work, participants must download and install the R software. This must be done prior to the start of the course
- Practical work is based on the Windows operating system.
Extra Information
The content of this course is identical to that of Statistics for University Administrators. The only difference is the R statistical software is used instead of Excel. R has two advantages:
- It is a free dedicated statistics package and can be used for other analyses
- It is a widely used software which will be maintained by the R Foundation for many years to come.
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