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.

In the late 1990s, there was a study performed on thousands of children that asked them many personal questions about their lives including race, home life, and socioeconomic status. Interviews were conducted with parents and lots of data was collected.

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”.

Regression analysis is the analysis of many different variables of a certain trait, then finding two individual sets of data with all similar variables except for one, and seeing how that one trait affects the sample when all else is equal in traits.

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.

Regression analysis can prove correlation and demonstrate it, but it cannot prove cause. Questions asking whether or not a certain aspect is the cause of another one cannot be answered.

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

Hint: See page 150.

Whether black or white, all students that attend a bad school, which tend to be majority black, perform badly.

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”.

You could control for the quality of schools by using them like independent variables

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

He means that regression analysis is not a perfect science in determining factors about samples, and is not in a way a scientific approach, but more of a way to get a general idea about correlations.

Q7 What are major takeaways from the reading?

The main takeaways from the reading are that regression analysis is a way to find correlation, not causation, between a wide set of data by finding all similarities between groups and comparing the one set that is different, and seeing the correlation. Also, in the study, it mattered what the parents were like in their status before the child was raised, not what they decided to do for the child afterward. Their marital status, socioeconomic status, etc.

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.