Automating GPA and Hours for administrative purposes, University of Houston: the 'coogs' package

In the realm of institutional effectiveness, it is often necessary to batch process the hours earned and gpas of both the content area and cumulative area for undergraduates that are applying for particular majors in certain programs of study. Such calculations involve many students applying at one time for majors. Therefore, one can either calculate tens to hundreds of students at a time or automate the process.

To ease the process through automation, I have created a function in R called 'bulkgpa' in the 'coogs' package, available to the institutional effectiveness community at the College of Education at the University of Houston.

The function is a hard worker. It takes three raw files directly from peoplesoft queries and cleanses them by eliminating unneeded columns, duplicated rows, and eliminates classes that have drop dates associated with them.

Argument slots are created for raw data excel spreadsheets including transfer classes, transfer hours, UH courses, and the content areas for which content gpa must be calculated. Since different classes qualify for content gpa based on content areas, the fourth argument slot makes available user input to specify the content area for the content gpa calculation. Below is a list of possible options. When typing in the content area, case and spelling should be observed from the list below.

core-ec-6

art-ec-12

dance-6-12

math-4-8

math-7-12

elar-4-8

elar-7-12

chemistry-8-12

LOTE-spanish-ec-12

physics-math-7-12

life-science-7-12

physical-science-7-12

bilingual-generalist-ec-6

science

social-science

sped-ed-12

journalism

Persisting through reading technical CRAN documentation

In my pursuit of self learning the R programming language, I have mostly mastered the art of reading through CRAN documentation of R libraries as they are published. I have gone through everything from mediocre to very well documented sheets and anything in between. I am sharing one example of a very good function that was well documented in the 'survey' library by Dr. Thomas Lumley that for some reason I could not process and make work with my data initially. No finger pointing or anything like that here. It was merely my brain not readily able to wrap around the idea that the function passed another function in its arguments. fig1: the svyby function in the 'survey' library by Thomas Lumley filled in with variables for my study Readers familiar with base R will be reminded of another function that works similarly called the aggregate function, which is mirrored by the work of the svyby function, in that both call on data and both call on a function toward...

Bi-Term topic modeling in R

As large language models (LLMs) have become all the rage recently, we can look to small scale modeling again as a useful tool to researchers in the field with strictly defined research questions that limit the use of language parsing and modeling to the bi term topic modeling procedure. In this blog post I discuss the procedure for bi-term topic modeling (BTM) in the R programming language. One indication of when to use the procedure is when there is short text with a large "n" to be parsed. An example of this is using it on twitter applications, and related social media postings. To be sure, such applications of text are becoming harder to harvest from online, but secondary data sources can still yield insightful information, and there are other uses for the BTM outside of twitter that can bring insights into short text, such as from open ended questions in surveys. Yan et al. (2013) have suggested that the procedure of BTM with its Gibbs sampling procedure handles sho...

The Matrix Literature Review and the 'rectangulate' Function from the r7283 Package

Matrices and Literature Reviews Pulling together a strong literature review continues to be the very foundation of positioning an education researcher's novel contribution to the field. Yet, reviewing literature can be daunting at the outset. This is because organizing the literature review results requires itemizing, tagging, and keeping track of the relevant articles. Organizing 100 + articles takes time, commitment, and can ultimately distract from the task at hand, which is getting a grip on the state of knowledge. To make the task of organizing the literature more straightforward, I have created a computational function that helps lift some of the burden of organizing literature. It takes an exported bibliographic research file (.bib) exported from EBSCO and widens it into a matrix. Transposing the .bib file into a matrix allows the researcher to jump right into the matrix literature review style of reading articles. A matrix literature function for education ...

Researching Education

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