Learning While Creating — A Newbie’s Foray into Data Analysis with Excel.
I learned that for you to be good at something, you have to practice it, make mistakes, accept feedback and adopt them till you are good at it. It’s like polishing a mirror till your reflection shines through. So, I generated some (wild) data to learn a bit about data analysis with Microsoft Excel.
The Data
This ‘academic’ data for 20 students spans 5 years and has information on student gender, subjects taken, parental involvement (as a score), socio-economic class, and demographic data.
While a lot of insights can be gained from this, these are my baby steps to try and understand the data.
Formatting
When working with data in excel, I am told it is better to put your data into a table format. I also created some columns which I wanted to play with further. Columns created included Attendance Records and Parent Influence. These were used in the analysis to judge what effects they had on scores.
Analyses
While this by no means is exhaustive, a bit of insight can be gained from analyzing the data.
Attendance: The data shows that, while attendance is not great for the school, it does seem those who have poor attendance records actually performed better over all (singular exceptions for 2019 and 2022) over the 5 year period. While the difference was not much, those who had lower parental involvement scores actually had better attendance.
Games: Over the 5 year period, those in the physical sports performed better than those doing intellectual activities.
Demographics: Over the 5 year period, the Asians did a great job in scores despite having the least parental involvement score.
Looking up
I think, as I learn the rudiments of Excel and try to separate the proverbial wheat from chaff data, learning what makes ‘metrics’ and ‘KPIs’ pop in data analysis, I will be in for an interesting time.
