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 study was to try and understand the development of children and their learning/ school environment. They took a cross section of 20,000 students from kindergarten to fifth grade all across the states including different backgrounds location and economic disparity in order to have a well rounded data set of the United States. their variables included “race, gender, family structure, socioeconomic status, the level of his or her parents’ education… It also included interviews with the students’ parents (and teachers and school administrators), posing a long list of questions more intimate than those in the typical government interview: whether the parents spanked their children, and how often; whether they took them to libraries or museums; how much television the children watched” (146).

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”.

it is hard to isolate independent variables when there are multiple dependent variables. in order to understand a data set one must hold variables constant in order to get a proper causation correlation affect. If one can isolate multipul independent varriables, the data set becomes more clear.

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.

because regression analysis assumes the relationship between variables remains unchanged the results can be flawed. A regression analysis can also be flawed with limited or skewed data. data with coefficients close to zero can be hard to read with regression analysis and causality and correlation may get lost.

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

Hint: See page 150.

bad schools produce students with worse learning skills and good schools produce students with good learning skills. It was thought that it was black v white schools that made the difference in learning and productivity. However, it seems now that the causation of unintelligence is not a matter of race but a matter of location and the qualities of the school.

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”.

understand what variables make a “good school” vs a “bad school” and how they may do this.

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

this means that regression analysis does not always produce correct results. It can be used to understand how variables interact with each other however it is not always accurate and there can be variables that muddy the water. without correctly understanding the relationships between variables conclusions can be made that are unfounded in fact.

Q7 What are major takeaways from the reading?

That i don’t like reading about math and stats is complicated like my relationship with cigarettes.

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.