You must follow the instructions below to get credits for this assignment.
Hint: Make sure to discuss study’s goal, subjects, and variables in the data. The study was to measure and track the academic progress of elementary age children across the United States. In this study they asked more questions than they do in most studies. Asking all these questions was so they could try to find any correlations that they might not have found otherwise.
Hint: A correct answer must have a discussion on a main concept of regression, often called as, “all else being equal”, “controlling for other variables”, or “Ceteris paribus”. The author explained this concept using “the circuit board analogy”. Regression analysis takes the data and compares it. The example they used in the reading was comparing how students with a lot of books did compared to students with few books. They did find that the students with more books typically did better in school. It’s just taking the information and comparing it to see if there is a correlation.
Hint: A correct answer must have a discussion on causality versus correlation. The drawback is that it is only showing correlation, it doesn’t show causality. As mentioned before, kids with more books at home tend to do better on tests than kids with fewer books. While it is easy to see a correlation between these things, it still can not tell you the cause. Using regression analysis, you can not answer the question “Does having a lot of books in your home lead your child to do well in school?”
Hint: See page 150. While the schools were mostly the same in sense of the education the teachers had, the class sizes, and the computer-to-student ratio. But, the schools with a higher rate of black students also have a higher rate troublesome indicators, non-students loitering, and a lack of PTA funding. Even though these schools are mostly black students, the white students in the school are affected as well. The students in these schools all struggle, no matter what they look like. And in the good schools, all the students perform well. So, if a student goes to school where less kids are getting into trouble, the more likely they are to perform well.
Hint: For this question, you may need additional information in addition to the assigned reading. You may Google search someting like “how does regression control for variables”. One way to control the quality of schools in the study is to make sure that all the schools have the same resources. Of course, the better schools might have higher-quality resources and more resources. It might be important to make sure that all of the schools have all of these resources. In the study it does say that they same similar computer-to-student ratios, but some schools probably have better computers than others. Other than that, I would like to control the amount of diversity in these schools. Diversity is such an important thing and these schools do not have a lot of it. This is a difficult study to control because obviously you can’t control where kids go to school.
My major takeaways from the reading is that doing these studies is hard and finding the controls is hard. But, it is really important to look at any correlations and any confounding variables. Like the author said, most students who have more books typically do better in school, but sometimes the parents just have more money to get more books. The parents having more money to buy more books would be the confounding variable. Keeping the confounding variables in mind can change the results entirely.
Hint: Use message, echo and results in the chunk options. Refer to the RMarkdown Reference Guide.