Data Mining for Student Success and Perseverance

This repository hosts the code needed to generate the final report for the PAREA grant.

The electronic version of this report is always up-to date and on the web, viewable at sameerbhatnagar.github.io/studentsuccess_finalreport

To contribute to the report:

• go to https://github.com/sameerbhatnagar/studentsuccess_finalreport and fork the repository
• go to your home directory
• clone the repository you just forked (from the terminal: git clone <insert name of your forked repo)
• from the terminal: cd studentsuccess_finalreport
• from the terminal: git remote add upstream https://github.com/sameerbhatnagar/studentsuccess_finalreport.git
• from the terminal: mkdir bin/data
• copy or move the data to the newly created bin/data
• Open the R Project file studentsuccess_finalreport.Rproj with un updated version of
  • R
  • RStudio
• create a text file and save it as .Rprofile (NOTE: it must be named .Rprofile without .txt at the end)
• in the newly created .Rprofile enter the following line:

R_path_to_data_directory = '<Enter Absolute Path to your local copy of Data>'

For example, my .Rprofile file looks like this:

R_path_to_data_directory = "/home/sahir/git_repositories/studentsuccess_finalreport/bin/data/"

• Open the script data-setup.R in the folder bin
• run the script to produce some of useful R objects (will automatically be placed in the folder bin/data)
• press build-book in RStudio IDE to get a local preview of the entire book in
• Modify only the .Rmd files. Commit, and make a pull request back to me (Sameer), and I will merge to master branch, which will automatically update the live web version

PDF version

• should always available at https://github.com/sameerbhatnagar/studentsuccess_finalreport/blob/master/docs/studentsuccess_final_report.pdf

Collaborating Colleges

• for any CEGEP that would like to extract their CLARA tables, into the same anonymized format as what was used for this project, please refer to the SQL procedures in the folder bin/SQL

This project was made possible by:

• PAREA (Programme d'Aide de Recherche et Enseignment et Apprentissage)
• Derek Gaucher and Anna Likht, from the Dawson College department of Information Systems and Technology, for writing the data extraction scripts that could be used by collaborating colleges
• Diane Gauvin, Academic Dean, Dawson College, for setting in motion the process of creating a mirror database of CLARA, for the purposes of research into Student Success and Perseverance
• Partners at Collaborating Colleges
  • Larry Calahan, and Ross Tzankov (especially for additional feedback in generalizing SQL procedures)
  • Kim Rousseau and Greg Bagshaw from John Abbott College

To Do List:

• Investigate baseline models that colleges can use for identifying at-risk students (Jon G)
• Finish Littl Review (Sam B)