asists in context nyacce 2013
DESCRIPTION
Venu's presentation at NYACCE in Albany May 2013TRANSCRIPT
ASISTS in Context
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QR code for presentation
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Data Analysis is like cooking• Steps
– Picking your dish
– Finding the right ingredients
– Cleaning your ingredients
– Preparation
– Using the right tools
– Finishing the dish
– Final touches
– Presenting the final product
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Picking your dish/Picking your question to analyze• Is it an interesting question? Who is asking the
question?
• Do you have the right data to answer these questions? (Tip: it’s not just ASISTS)
• If you don’t have the data, do you know where to get it?
• Do you have the right tools to do the analyses?
• Who is your audience?
• When do you need to be done?
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Sample questions/picking your dish• Should my program focus on ABE or ESL?
• What can my program do to improve retention?
• How can you improve program performance?
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Finding the ingredients (or identifying your data sources)• Questions to ask:
– Does the data have the right information (fields)?
– Do you know what each of the values in the relevant fields stand for?
– Is the time frame relevant to answering the question?
– Is it relevant to the geographical area for which you doing the analysis?
– How reliable is the data?
– Is it one data set or more than one?
– If multiple data sets, can you relate them?
– What are the privacy, legal and security concerns?
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Accuracy/appropriateness of the data/do you have the right spices?• For each data element ask the following questions:– Who collects this data?
– Why is this data being collected?
– Is there a reason for systematic bias in this data?
– Does this field contain a lot of missing data?
– Does this field contain a large number of outlier values?
– Does the data make sense?
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Some data sources to consider/going shopping• ASISTS (https://www.asists.com)
• Census (www.census.gov)
• Immigration data (http://www.dhs.gov/office-immigration-statistics)
• NAAL (http://nces.ed.gov/naal/)
• Other government open data projects– Data.gov (http://www.data.gov/)
– NYC open data portal (https://nycopendata.socrata.com/)
– NYS open data portal (https://data.ny.gov/)
– Data from other government entities (example: School districts)
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To look for in ASISTS• Existing reports (with and without dissagregation)
• Downloads of existing reports
• Data downloads
• Reviewing data screens
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Census data• The Decennial Census
• The American Community Survey (ACS)
• The Current Population Survey (CPS)
• Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP)
• Statistics about governments
• Economic census
• The American Fact Finder (AFF)
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The American Fact Finder
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Cleaning your data/washing your vegetables• Watch out for – Outliers and invalid values
– Number of records that make sense
• Simple methods for cleaning your data– Sorting in spreadsheets
– Frequency counts
• Validate against other sources
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A data cleaning exercise• Cleaning up employment status data– Download ASISTS student data
– Do percentages of student with different status
– Compare to employment statistics for your area
– Talk to the manager and intake staff responsible for collecting data
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The tools of the trade• Microsoft Excel
• Access
• For advanced statistics, R, SPSS, SAS
• Census and other data rich web sites
• Google maps
• ARC GIS for mapping
• Other Google tools (Fusion, Ngage)
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Preparing your data• To get your data into the right format for analysis
• Recode
• Sort
• Group
• Deleting unnecessary data
• Removing duplications
• Delete blank rows
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Finishing your dish/analyzing the data• What do you want to say about the data?
• How do you want to say it?
• What analyses are most appropriate to answer your questions? (Tip: you don’t have to be a statistician to do good data analysis)
• How do you want to present your data?
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Presenting your data• Presentation is everything!
• Talking about your result the right way is as important as using the right tables and charts
• Tools– Excel
– PowerPoint
– Google Fusion tables
• Don’t over generalize!
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Data Analysis as
iterative
Asking the Question
Refining the Question
Locating the data
Cleaning data
Analysis
Presentation
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The adult ed data blog• www.adultedgps.blogspot.com– Regular posts of data analyses and policy updates
– Policy and data related tweets
– Searchable
– Downloadable presentations
