Unistats: Key Information Set (KIS)

Unistats launched their Key Information Set (KIS) for comparing UK higher education course data yesterday.

It includes data on each university and college’s satisfaction scores in the National Student Survey, jobs and salaries after study and other key information for prospective students (like award classifications):

Unistats: Key Information Set (KIS)

It’s very big, 167MB unzipped!  The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) positively encourage it’s use, under licence.

Higher education provides ideal data sets to apply and illustrate data and statistical analyses, of practical use to both teachers and students, and potentially as teaching or learning tools in themselves.

By it’s nature, the academic calendar suggests a schedule for reproducible research and reporting.

New Zealand schools data

A very practical example of exploratory data analysis, descriptive statistics and visualisation with R by Luis A. Apiolaza (Quantum Forest).

It’s a series of posts on schools data in New Zealand, merging a sample of assessment data with existing data on schools socio-economic and demographic profiles.

The sample is self-selecting, schools consenting to early-release of their data ahead of the complete set, to be released in a contentious educational policy initiative.

Eric Crampton of Offsetting Behaviour adds some more exploratory regressions, using Stata.  He also notes the perspective from Emil’s Demense, a policy analyst, who cautions that since assessment is by overall teacher judgement, not standardized testing, it’s quite unsuitable for ranking.  It may be more useful in identifying best practice and enabling meaningful teacher appraisal in the context of national data.

Analysis of the data also relies on feedback, in interpretation of coding and the policy framework which defines the schools covered.

What is this blog for?

This blog is to note and comment on data analysis, statistics and reporting in education.