I recently got the opportunity to do analyze data for State of Massachusetts department of education where I have created a dashboard that answers questions like How does the class size affect college admission? What are the top math schools in the state? What schools are struggling the most? and many more such questions. Lets check what the results show following the analysis using Tableau.
This study explores real data taken from Massachusetts Department of Education website for the year 2017 and is actually a combination of multiple reports which can be found here https://profiles.doe.mass.edu/statereport/
I used Tableau for conducting the analysis by
Connecting to Data
Creating a bar chart
Creating Scatter Plot
Creating line chart
BAN/ KPI/ Metrics
Reference line
In addition to Using marks cards for label, colors, size and tooltip
Considering a hypothesis that smaller class would mean more students attending colleges to check this out I plotting it as a Scatterplot that showed the relationship between class size and the number of graduates attending colleges and it was proven wrong as the scatterplot showed that the class size did not truly matter when it came to students graduating and attending college. The highest college admission was for Boston Preparatory at 95% and their average class size was 34 students as against Goodrich Academy with average class size of 7 students had only 26% attending college. However the majority of the schools showed an average 74.51% college admissions and the average class size ranged between 11 and 25 students. All labels showing are necessarily the outliers ranging from lowest to highest average % attending college with the lowest being 10.50% with a class size of 12 students and highest being Boston Preparatory Charter Public School with class size of average 34 students and average 95.20% attending college.
This study also allowed me to identify the schools that are struggling to have majority of its students able to graduate. For that I used a bar graph to identify the top schools that are graduating and the bottom schools that are graduating and its graduation percentage and it was observed that the school that that had the least graduations was at 8.70% and 10 lowest graduating schools were at 20% students graduates and 100 % graduating classes were the top 10 schools in Massachusetts.
Another study looked at the % passing the 4th grads math standardized test and it was plotted on a line graph against a reference line which showed the schools with average at 50% below and above for 4th grade Math which showed clear distinction of schools that are high performing Districts and schools that are struggling. The school that was at the highest average % at 4th grade Math was in district name Hingham at 91% and the least passing was in district TEC Connections at 17%.
It was also interesting to analyze the KPI's that showed the Total schools 1800 schools considered, total students at 841 students, where 83% students graduated, and 75% average attending college, 173 students completing high school graduation and at 7% average drop outs. These numbers showed as KPI's a banner on top of the dashboard and gave a quick and clear context to the study of the school system in the state.
I hope you all like this analysis as more use cases can be analyzed from this data which can be for a future project. Please feel free to provide a feedback of additional points to consider for future studies. I am also planning a different type of presentation using a video demonstration in the future so stay connected.
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