Skip to main content

Biography

Mario Antonio Martinez has earned the Artium Baccalaureus from Vassar College, the Master of Arts in Teaching from Bennington College, and the Doctor of Philosophy in Curriculum and Instruction from Texas Tech University, where he was a Helen DeVitt Jones Fellowship recipient.  His dissertation advisor was Trenia Walker, with Doug Simpson and Mary Fehr completing his committee. He is currently pursuing the Master of Science in Data Science from Ball State University.
In addition to his formal qualifications, he received specialized training in research from the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, El Paso (TTUHSCEP).  While at the TTUHSCEP he worked collaboratively under a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant, and a Texas Workforce grant.  He has taught in public elementary schools in the United States for six years.  Dr. Martinez has worked at Houston Community College, the Harris County Department of Education, The Tecnologico de Monterrey, and the University of New Mexico.  He currently works for the University of Houston as an institutional research analyst.  He has written as author/co-author in the fields of elementary education, mental health education, and safety science education. His current research is situated at the intersection of data science and higher education.

Popular posts from this blog

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...

Striking a Balance: How Much Should I Cast My own Site Variables, Versus Referring to the Literature When Doing Predictive Machine Learning as a Data Scientist?

 Recently I came back from the TAIR 2025 conference and I was struck by the number of presenters that focused on using either auto machine learning or artificial intelligence in creating models for predictive analytics in higher education. One of the striking things about the works presented is that the independent variables were somewhat similar to each other but yet different from each other enough to raise the question. How much should there be consistency between predictive machine learning models? Or, how generalizable should any given model be? These two questions strike at the limits of what local work should aim towards. One way to look at the issue is the pressing need to look at all available variables locally and use them to forage a way forward at predictions about issues like retention, enrollment, and so forth at the university level. To a certain degree this is a moot point, as some would argue that data science is about creating actionable insights.  That is, u...

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 ...