Week 4: Independent Analysis of OPD Content Areas and Improvement Recommendations

Lindsey Anderegg

Research Questions

What are the primary content areas covered by OPD resources?
What recommendations do educators have for improving OPD resources?

Primary Content Areas

Content areas identified by users of OPD resources:

 [1] "RecordedDate"       "ResponseId"         "Role"              
 [4] "Q14"                "Q16"                "Resource"          
 [7] "Resource_8_TEXT"    "Resource_9_TEXT"    "Resource_10_TEXT"  
[10] "Topic"              "Resource_10_TEXT.1" "Q16.1"             
[13] "Q16_9_TEXT"         "Q19"                "Q20"               
[16] "Q21"                "Q26"                "Q37"               
[19] "Q8"

# A tibble: 18 × 2
   Content_Area                                                        Frequency
   <chr>                                                                   <int>
 1 ""                                                                      18694
 2 "Elementary Education/Generalist"                                        9966
 3 "English Language Arts"                                                  7156
 4 "Mathematics"                                                            6402
 5 "Social Studies"                                                         6288
 6 "Science"                                                                5876
 7 "Exceptional Children"                                                   4253
 8 "Career Technical Education"                                             2345
 9 "Arts Education"                                                         1943
10 "Healthful Living"                                                       1726
11 "Other (Please specify)"                                                 1533
12 "Information and Technology Skills"                                      1162
13 "Guidance"                                                               1054
14 "Not Applicable"                                                          854
15 "World Languages"                                                         656
16 "English as a Second Language"                                            535
17 "Which content area(s) do you specialize in?  (SELECT ALL THAT APP…         1
18 "{\"ImportId\":\"QID16\"}"                                                  1

OPD Improvement Recommendations

Top words taken from recommendations listed for Q26 of survey have been narrowed down to remove blanks, stopwords, and stemming.

        word    n
1       time 1157
2      video  395
3      modul  372
4     easier  230
5    teacher  218
6    resourc  202
7     inform  198
8     access  193
9  recommend  183
10   complet  163
11    exampl  161
12     onlin  157
13      user  155
14    friend  148
15   shorter  141
16  interact  136
17     navig  125
18 technolog  115
19    school  109
20    comput  107

Refined Recommendations

After viewing the improvement recommendations, I wanted to see if two-word phrases could give a deeper insight.

               bigram   n
1         user friend 133
2       onlin resourc  54
3         time consum  33
4       easier access  30
5        technic issu  30
6         grade level  29
7         common core  23
8  profession develop  20
9       specif exampl  18
10     technic glitch  16

Conclusions

There is not a consistent amount of OPD offered for the different content areas (varies by 1,000’s among the top 5). Outside of Elementary education, English, Math, Social Studies, and Science are the top areas covered indicating that the primary focus of OPD is for core departments.
Top 10 recommendations range from technical issues to specific grade level/common core suggestions. With the bi-gram results (time consuming, easier access, specific examples) provides more insight into what recommendations educators have for OPD.

Discussion

Limitations: While wrangling data, I needed to adjust from viewing just the top words for the recommendation feedback as using the bi-gram or looking at two-word phrases provided more helpful insight. This could indicate that with this much information, continual adjustments would need to be made to provide more accurate feedback or results.
Implications: OPD recommendations really range in suggestions, but overall imply that the content (grade level, common core, specific examples) and user/site issues (time consuming, technical issue/glitch) were the strongest suggestions for improvement.
Next Steps for Analysis: Look into the top 10 recommendations and analyze further. Further explore correlation between top content areas and the feedback/recommendations that were given for these content areas.