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  • 1.  Data First Year Students are interested in.

    Posted 05-04-2018 10:43
    Does any know of a good place to get a rich data set that my First Year Students might be interested in?  I would like them to download a data set on day one of my class and then proceed with discovery learning.  They are too young to care about most of the data I find and the tired old survey of our own students is really quite boring (among other problems).

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    Bernadette Lanciaux
    Instructional Faculty
    Rochester Institute of Technology
    School of Mathematical Sciences
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  • 2.  RE: Data First Year Students are interested in.

    Posted 05-06-2018 16:23
    When I taught introductory statistics, I would sometimes have students generates hypotheses that could be tested on the class itself  - students might study attitudes toward sexuality and ethnicity, football watching and agression, etc....
    I would ask them to find 3 studies related to their hypothesis, and try to predict the findings.
    Generally, we had about 25  - 30 individuals in the class and we could rotate through the students.

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    Elizabeth Smith
    Statistician
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    Original Message


  • 3.  RE: Data First Year Students are interested in.

    Posted 05-07-2018 16:46

    Here are some sources where you can get free data sets.


    https://data.mendeley.com/    - People can store and share data often related to publications. A small but growing resource.

     

    https://fedstats.sites.usa.gov/showcase/    - Federal datasets

     

    https://www.kaggle.com/datasets?sortBy=relevance&group=featured&search=environment  – Can store and share data here, often used for machine learning/predictive modelling practice

     

    http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/wiki/Main/DataSets - dataset available from the Vanderbilt department of biostatistics


    Also look at the journal "Data in Brief".

    Best,
    Nelson


    Nelson Pace, PhD, SM

    Scientist | Exponent | 475 14th Street Suite 400 Oakland, CA 94612

    Office 510-268-5064 | Email npace@exponent.com
    Bio www.exponent.com/nelson_pace





    Original Message


  • 4.  RE: Data First Year Students are interested in.

    Posted 05-08-2018 15:09

    Someone else might have already recommended these sites, but I find some interesting data at ICPSR from the University of Michigan https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/content/about/thematic-collections.html. I work in the area of education and child development and they have some interesting longitudinal data. You might find some interesting data at data.world which collects a wide variety of data. I've used it to search for governmental data at the city-level or for NGOs like OECD).

     

    Karen Moran Jackson, PhD

    Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology and Assessment

    MA Program in Educational Leadership and Societal Change

    The Graduate School

    Soka University of America

    1 University Drive

    Aliso Viejo, CA 92656

     

     




    Original Message


  • 5.  RE: Data First Year Students are interested in.

    Posted 05-09-2018 15:27
    I'm going to agree with Karen. ICPSR is a great resource for finding social science datasets. The one caveat is that some datasets are quite complex and the process of obtaining, importing, and understanding the data structures can be a challenge for learners. Selecting one or two datasets and then formatting them for educational purposes might alleviate the problem while still allowing students to work with real research.

    Most of the simulated studies I see from across the curriculum tend to focus on areas of interest for the students. Students seem to take to the research process more easily when they have domain knowledge, otherwise the process can become rote calculation.

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    Daniel S. Coven
    Graduate Statistics Consultant
    Arizona State University
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    Original Message


  • 6.  RE: Data First Year Students are interested in.

    Posted 05-07-2018 10:53
    You may want to stir things up by looking, say, at what's on someone's Twitter account.

    To take one example, look at http://varianceexplained.org/r/trump-tweets/.  (Honest, I just Googled "r get twitter feed" and this is the simplest one I found.) And this url shows some very nice patterns in the data.

    You could then have some willing students find some other Twitter accounts, or their own, and look for similarities/dissimilarities among them. Some data wrangling and cleaning, which may be good for them (or not!), and lots of descriptive stats and graphs. You could do some formal statistical investigators by taking several, say T, Twitter accounts, splitting each up by week or month, say, (except for the last M units of time) to get some type of replication; then see if the accounts from the earlier can be distinguished (how? let the students think about it); then see if they can correctly assign the T accounts for each of the last M units to the correct accounts--maybe simply by some graphs of word frequencies (for an introductory class). Whatever holds their interest.

    (Bernie and I work just a few hundred feet from each other!)

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    Joseph Voelkel
    Rochester Institute of Technology
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    Original Message


  • 7.  RE: Data First Year Students are interested in.

    Posted 05-10-2018 16:26
    What field of work are your students apt to enter?  Physical sciences, engineering, social sciences, etc, perform different types of experiments and use different types of data.

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    Emil M Friedman, PhD
    emilfriedman@gmail.com
    http://www.statisticalconsulting.org
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    Original Message


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