A course in quantitative research workflow for students in the higher education administration program at the University of Florida
NOTE This assignment needs to be completed by the start of the next class. That means everything pushed to your remote GitHub repo before class starts. If you are unsure whether you have successfully pushed your changes, check the online version of your repo at GitHub.com. If you can see your changes there, I can see them too.
Remember, I encourage you to save your work, commit smaller changes, and push to your remote GitHub repo often rather than wait until the last minute.
Now that you’ve selected a topic and data set for your final
reproducible report, it’s time to conduct a preliminary analysis. In
short, I want you to use the skills you’ve learned so far to answer the
questions you’ve set for yourself. Specifically, I want you to submit
two items. Both should be stored in your final_project
folder.
Submit a Markdown (.md
) file called final_project_instructions.md
that explains how to get the data required for your analysis and where
it needs to be placed in relation to your R script. The instructions
need to be detailed enough that I can find, download, unzip (if
necessary), and place the raw data files so that your script will run.
Assume I’m me, but am not familar with your data (i.e. that I’ll
figure it out).
This means that it’s not enough to say, “Get these files from IPEDS,” and then list files. You should include a link to the proper webpage and instructions for any clicking that I need to do to get your data.
Create an R script called final_project_analysis.R
that does the
following:
data
directory —
you can save it in whichever format makes sense to you: .csv
,
.rds
, .rda
, etcYour R script should also have a section that:
Your R script should be well-organized, following our template. It should be well commented throughout, explaining what you are doing, particularly if making subjective data cleaning decisions or writing your own functions. It should also run from top to bottom without error or requiring that the user change anything.
I don’t expect that your full analysis will be completed in two weeks. You may end up changing some analyses or adding new ones. But I do expect you are able to put your data together and produce at least a couple of statistics. I fully expect that you will repurpose this code in your final report so the more you do now, the better off you’ll be.