Researching Education

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 cou...

One of the great promises of working with RQDA is conceiving of it as computer assisted literature review software. This requires balancing the right amount of coding with text that can be used as warrants and backing in arguments. In theory it is a great idea--using computer assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) for literature reviews, but how do you get the article PDFs into R and RQDA in a human readable format? By this I mean that many empirical articles are written in two column formats, and text extraction with standard tools produces text on the diagonal. Extracting PDF texts under this circumstance can be daunting when using some R packages such as 'pdftools', either with or without the assistance of  the 'tesseract' package. If you are working on a windows based computer, you can install three packages and Java to do the trick. First gather the literature articles that you would like to mark up in RQDA. Put them into a folder, and away you...

One of the great difficulties surrounding how to batch load texts into RQDA is that the package requires imports from .txt files (Huang, 2018). I recently had an issue with this procedure as I was starting a literature review by way of reviewing abstracts in a .bib format. I had taken abstracts from the EBSCO search engine, and from 'rectangulate()' function in the r7283 package, had transformed a bibtext file into an excel spreadsheet with a tidy display of one row per abstract and citiaton information for 140 empirical articles. While the excel file makes for an easy upload into proprietary software, I had never attempted to batch upload this format of text into RQDA. That is, until I came across a how-to artifact from an unknown workshop (click the link to find the original set of instructions) (Rstudio pubs, n.d.). The main pieces of help came from the idea that users could take a spreadsheet, list and make as characters each in a series of column cells, and then ide...

Unlike point-and-click or GUI based statistical programs, the R language requires practice so that programming skills continue to get developed and committed to human memory. Programming skills directly relate to R as a language, and computing languages work when humans use them to solve problems. However, in the process of conducting research, a solo researcher needs to call upon several skills, of which statistical computing is only one. When a solo author pulls together an entire project and begins analyzing data, some skills will be donned and doffed at particular moments in the process, such as statistical computing. Therefore, since programming skills will inevitably be put down and picked back up during the research process, computing practice is essential to refresh the suite of human ability to call upon the R language. At its simplest, R can be thought of as a language of nouns and verbs, with respective activities belonging to each class of language component (Wick...

R and Latex Code in the Service of Exam Questions   The following webpage is under development and will grow with more information. The author abides by the GPL (>= 2) license provided by the "ProfessR" package by showing basic code, but not altering it. The code that is provided here is governed by the MIT license, copyright 2018, while respecting the GPL (>=2) license. Rationale Apart from the limited choices of open sourced, online curriculum building for adult ESL students (viz. elcivics.com), there is a current need to create open-sourced assessments for various levels of student understandings of the English language. While the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (https://www.uscis.gov/citizenship) has valuable lessons for beginning and intermediate ESL civics learners, there exists a need to provide more robust assessments, especially for individuals repeating ESL-based civics courses. This is because the risks and efforts involved in applying ...

Digital Humanities based education Research This is a backpost from 2017. During that year, I presented my latest work at the 2017  SERA conference in Division II (Instruction, Cognition, and Learning). The title of my paper was "A Return to the Pahl (1978) School Leavers Study: A Distanced Reading Analysis." There are several motivations behind this study, including Cheon et al. (2013) from my alma mater .   This paper accomplished two objectives. First, I engaged previous claims made about the United States' equivalent of high school graduates on the Isle of Sheppey, UK, in the late 1970s. Second, I used emerging digital methods to arrive at conclusions about relationships between unemployment, participants' feelings about their  (then) current selves, their possible selves, and their  educational accomplishm ents. I n the image to the left I show a Ward Hierarchical Cluster reflecting the stylometrics of 153...

Digital Text Investigations The digital humanities continues to change the ways in which we draw conclusions about social phenomena. This condition starts from the understanding that for the first time in history, humans can potentially scale the totality of a social phenomenon's appearing. This continuous evolution of study provides new ways to examine data. A key idea in this evolution is the ability to pull together unstructured data and their accompanying metadata as a rejoinder to older forms of content analysis and its related approaches. The JSTOR Data for Research (DfR) arrangement presents such a unique development to work with unstructured data. Subscribers can request large, carefully delineated, corpora for academic investigations. At time of writing there are two options for data requests. The first option allows the subscriber to create search terms, and without a signed contract, scale down the results, and download n-grams (roughly 1-3 combinations are avail...