Question

Pretend that I (your professor) have enough free time to create an elaborate database for one of my fall face-to-face classes that contained the following information:

1) daily attendance

2) grades for every assignment and exam (including date of assignment)

3) age of students

4) every contact that each student made with me including email and office visit

5) voluntary class participation per student

6) whether students were freshmen, sophomore, junior, or senior

7) how many hours each student worked at a job each week

Write a 300-word essay discussing what ways I (the professor) could examine the relationship of this data to learn more about this class. Also, is there any additional data that would be interesting to have to examine this class?

Example: "I would like to analyze the relationship between class attendance and grade. I suspect that, on average, the students who do not show up to class are less likely to perform well..."

Answer 1

Being a professor who is elaborating the database of his class, I will be able to analyze the following examinations and conclusions from the relationship of database tables.

From attendance and contact data, I can conclude that the students who are absent from the classes for specific days are mostly contacting using email.

From grade and attendance relationship, I can analyze that student with less assignment marks starts attending the more classes to improve grades in assignment next time.

From attendance data, I will be able to find the months during which the students are most likely to be absent from the class. These would be mostly the festival months.

The relationship between job hours and attendance can help me analyzing that the students who are spending more time on job are having less attendance in class. Further using the relationship between job hours, attendance and grade data, I can analyze that there would be few students who have less attendance and more working hours, but still are doing well in assignments.

From attendance and assignment relationship, I can find that the students submitting their assignment in the days when they were absent from the class are not able to score good grades as compared to the days when they attend the class and submit the assignment.

From contacts, grade and class participation table relationship, I can find out that students who contacted me in the office visits are mostly asking about the assignment work. They are doing well in class participation which is resulting good score in their assignments.

I suspect that the freshmen are more interested in classes and are having good attendant whereas the senior students are spending more hours in job so there will be a shortage in their attendance. This can be analyzed from the relationship of grade, job hours and attendance tables.

The age and job hours relationship will give me the idea of the average age of the student. It could be possible that the older students are more interested in doing the job as their working hours are more.