Instructions

You must follow the instructions below to get credits for this assignment.

Q1 Describe the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study that the U.S. Department of Education undertook in the late 1990s.

Hint: Make sure to discuss study’s goal, subjects, and variables in the data.

The ECLS was designed to look at the academic process of American school children in grades from kindergarten up to 5th grade. 20,000 American children were selected from various parts of the country and several different schools to get a wide spread set of data from different states. Next, the ECLS took note of all physiological features of the students including gender, family structure, race, socioeconomic status, etc. The next step was to start quizzing parents and school board members about different types of perenting styles and the way students were brought up. The goal was to see correlations between how a child was brought uo compared to their academic performances.

Q2 Describe regression analysis in your own words.

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”.

To determine the strength and effectiveness of correlations between many different variables, a regression analysis must be required. Thy then can hold the constant between different variables. This will allow them to only look at 2 specific variables to figure out the strength and those two variables co-vary. The author explains this concept using the term “circuit board” which is some what fitting. Economists line up all the types of variables and then “flip switches” or stop looking at similar variables and figure ou which ones are not similar and do not line up.

Q3 What is a drawback of regression analysis. What type of questions can regression analysis not answer?

Hint: A correct answer must have a discussion on causality versus correlation.

The drawback with regression analysis is that it cannot give 100% accurate answers but can only answer the trends. Doese having a ton of books in his house help your child do well in school?. This example was used by the author to show that while the answer usually is yes, it isn’t always going to be yes 100% of the time. Therefore the better way to ask that question would be, Do Children that have many books at home tend to do better than those children who do not. Question one uses causality, as question two uses correlation.

Q4 What role does the quality of schools play in academic performance of students.

Hint: See page 150.

Class size, techer education, and student to computer ratio usually determins the quality of a certain school. Therefore there is a definite correlation and certainly an impact in test scores depending on the quality of school that the students go to.

Q5 Continued from Q4. How could you control for the quality of schools in the study?

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”.

To control this, researchers would have to look for which independent variables they are going to use to determine the quality of schools and only look at that to determine it. As I mentioned examples of the independent variables could be average teacher education, average class size, and average student to computer ratio. After that, you’d have to look at independent variables such as, annual udget, average amount of students getting in trouble, and then use those for variables to consider what qualifies as a good or bad school.

Q6 The author says that regression is more art than science. What does he mean?

The author says that because regression analysis can be more than just numbers, you have to be able to make correlations mrore creatively. This is why the author mentioned it as a learned skill.

Q7 What are major takeaways from the reading?

A few major takeways that I took from the reading is that nothing is a 100% correlation all the time, however you must be able to look at the trends and say typically something can happen but it’s not for sure.

Q8 Hide the messages, but display the code and its results on the webpage.

Hint: Use message, echo and results in the chunk options. Refer to the RMarkdown Reference Guide.

Q9 Display the title and your name correctly at the top of the webpage.

Q10 Use the correct slug.