Year 2020 has been a challenging year. On March 13, 2020, all public schools in California were shut down due to COVID-19. All students ended their 2020 school year in a remote learning setting. Early August, all students had to start school year 2021 remotely still. I work in a school district as a Database Manager in Southern California. Our school district is a K-12 school district and have roughly 50,000 students and 50 schools. I work in Information Technology department and my main role is to maintain and suport data in any information system that school district is using. Because of school closures since March this year, a lot of changes in the systems were made because students can physically go to schools to get instructions. Because of these changes, we were able to collect some new data points this school year to analyze. It is interesting to see what these new data points can tell us.
As a first step, let's upload our Jupyter notebook to Jovian.ml.
project_name = "analyzing-k12-student-data-2021" # change this
!pip install jovian --upgrade -q
import jovian
jovian.commit(project=project_name)
[jovian] Attempting to save notebook..
[jovian] Updating notebook "yinyinw/analyzing-k12-student-data-2021" on https://jovian.ml/
[jovian] Uploading notebook..
[jovian] Capturing environment..
[jovian] Committed successfully! https://jovian.ml/yinyinw/analyzing-k12-student-data-2021
Data source will be from our SIS (Student Information System). Our SIS is using Microsoft SQL Server as database server so I wrote a T-SQL script to pull student data from database server. Since student data is confidential, I didn't include any sensitive student data. I also replaced unique identififer for each school and student in SIS with some unique ID that I created just for this project.
Here is some information of data file I am using:
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
data_raw_df = pd.read_csv('data-science-project-2021-k12.csv')
data_raw_df
There are 34 columns and 51,354 rows in this data file. That means there are currently 51,354 students enrolled in our school district.
data_raw_df.columns
Index(['SchoolType', 'EnrollmentType', 'SchoolCode', 'Track', 'Grade',
'GradeLevel', 'StudentID', 'HasLaptop', 'HasInternet',
'LaptopCheckedOut', 'PCSurveyLaptop', 'MiFiCheckedOut',
'PCSurveyInternet', 'PCSurveyInstrProg', 'TotalStudentInHousehold',
'IsSED', 'IsSPED', 'SPEDProgram', 'IsEL', 'ELPAC', 'IsDLI', 'IsGATE',
'IsGNP', 'IsFoster', 'Gender', 'Ethnicity', 'ParentHighestEdLevel',
'DaysEnrolled', 'DaysPresent', 'PresentRate', 'CountT1P_N_IDF',
'CountT1_N_DF', 'CountQ1P_IDF', 'CountQ1I_DF'],
dtype='object')
New data points since school year 2021 are EnrollmentType, HasLaptop, HasInternet, LaptopCheckedOut, PCSurveyLaptop, MiFiCheckedOut, PCSurveyInternet, PCSurveyInstrProg.
data_raw_df.info()
<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
RangeIndex: 51354 entries, 0 to 51353
Data columns (total 34 columns):
# Column Non-Null Count Dtype
--- ------ -------------- -----
0 SchoolType 51354 non-null object
1 EnrollmentType 51354 non-null object
2 SchoolCode 51354 non-null int64
3 Track 51354 non-null object
4 Grade 51354 non-null object
5 GradeLevel 51354 non-null object
6 StudentID 51354 non-null int64
7 HasLaptop 51354 non-null object
8 HasInternet 51354 non-null object
9 LaptopCheckedOut 51354 non-null object
10 PCSurveyLaptop 51354 non-null object
11 MiFiCheckedOut 51354 non-null object
12 PCSurveyInternet 51354 non-null object
13 PCSurveyInstrProg 51354 non-null object
14 TotalStudentInHousehold 51354 non-null int64
15 IsSED 51354 non-null object
16 IsSPED 51354 non-null object
17 SPEDProgram 6910 non-null object
18 IsEL 51354 non-null object
19 ELPAC 5672 non-null float64
20 IsDLI 51354 non-null object
21 IsGATE 51354 non-null object
22 IsGNP 51354 non-null object
23 IsFoster 51354 non-null object
24 Gender 51354 non-null object
25 Ethnicity 51354 non-null object
26 ParentHighestEdLevel 51354 non-null object
27 DaysEnrolled 51354 non-null float64
28 DaysPresent 51354 non-null float64
29 PresentRate 51354 non-null float64
30 CountT1P_N_IDF 51354 non-null int64
31 CountT1_N_DF 51354 non-null int64
32 CountQ1P_IDF 51354 non-null int64
33 CountQ1I_DF 51354 non-null int64
dtypes: float64(4), int64(7), object(23)
memory usage: 13.3+ MB
data_raw_df.describe()
It looks like max number of students in a household is 41. Not sure if this is bad data since 41 students in a household seems high. Let's find out.
data_raw_df[data_raw_df.TotalStudentInHousehold == 41]
Since the data file was created without any confidential student information, there is no way to identify why there is a household with 41 students so I checked SIS directly. It turns out that there are 41 students with no Household ID in SIS (bad data). I need to contact school sites to have them to correct the data and also I need to change their "TotalStudentInHousehold" to 0.
k12_data = data_raw_df.copy()
Always make a copy of raw data before change data.
k12_data.loc[k12_data.TotalStudentInHousehold == 41, 'TotalStudentInHousehold'] = 0
k12_data.describe()
Now max number of students in a household seems making more sense.
Here are some findings based on these integer columns:
k12_data['StudentCount'] = 1
Add a new column "StudentCount" so it is easier to count student in different category later.
import jovian
jovian.commit()
[jovian] Attempting to save notebook..
[jovian] Updating notebook "yinyinw/analyzing-k12-student-data-2021" on https://jovian.ml/
[jovian] Uploading notebook..
[jovian] Capturing environment..
[jovian] Committed successfully! https://jovian.ml/yinyinw/analyzing-k12-student-data-2021
This section is to explore data points in the data file using visualization. There are some existing data points that I list here for people to understand our school district's basic demographic. New data points that we collected in school year 2021 due to COVID-19 school closures are listed here for exploring the possible analysis.
import seaborn as sns
import matplotlib
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
%matplotlib inline
sns.set_style('darkgrid')
matplotlib.rcParams['font.size'] = 14
matplotlib.rcParams['figure.figsize'] = (9, 5)
matplotlib.rcParams['figure.facecolor'] = '#00000000'
Let's check how grade level distribution looks like in our school district.
grade_level = k12_data.Grade.value_counts()
grade_level
10 4350
09 4331
11 4298
12 4167
08 4084
07 4015
05 3832
06 3822
04 3813
03 3609
02 3552
01 3474
KN 3035
KA 538
PS 303
TR 130
IN 1
Name: Grade, dtype: int64
plt.figure(figsize=(10,6))
plt.title("Student Grade Level in School Year 2021")
sns.barplot(grade_level.index, grade_level);
In general, K-12 student counts are evenly distributed with high and intermediate school students (7-12) slightly more than elementary students (K-12). Some other grade levels that are not K-12 are for some Special Education students that receive our services so they have relatively low counts.
How about ethnicty distribution? Let's find out.
ethnicity_count = k12_data.Ethnicity.value_counts()
ethnicity_count
Hispanic 27536
White 11953
Asian 7758
Black or African American 3284
Other 823
Name: Ethnicity, dtype: int64
plt.figure(figsize=(10,6))
plt.title("Student Ethnicity in School Year 2021")
plt.xticks(rotation=45)
sns.barplot(ethnicity_count.index, ethnicity_count);
Hispanic ethnicity is a clearly winner here followed by White and Asian.
plt.figure(figsize=(10,6))
plt.title("Student Ethnicity in School Year 2021")
plt.pie(ethnicity_count, labels=ethnicity_count.index, autopct='%1.1f%%', startangle=180);
Same data but differnt chart here to show percentage of each ethnicity using pie chart. A little bit more than half of our studens are hispanic.
Because of COVID-19, all California schools began school year 2021 in a remote learning (virtual) setting. During summer time, our school district sent out a survey asking parents' preferred learning models (instruction programs) for their students. There are two selections: Virtual and Traditional. Schools schedule students into differnt enrollment types based on their survey answers. For those parents who didn't answer the survey, default enrollment type is Traditional.
k12_data.EnrollmentType.unique()
array(['Traditional', 'Virtual'], dtype=object)
virtual_traditional = k12_data.EnrollmentType.value_counts()
virtual_traditional
Traditional 38678
Virtual 12676
Name: EnrollmentType, dtype: int64
plt.figure(figsize=(10,6))
plt.title("Student Enrollment Type in School Year 2021")
plt.pie(virtual_traditional, labels=virtual_traditional.index, autopct='%1.1f%%', startangle=180);
Based on this pie chart, about a quarter of students are enrolled in Virtual settings in 2021.
Because of school closures, students can't physically go to school to receive instructions. Students now have to rely on technologies to attend online meetings with teachers or do their homework. In order to support some families who can't afford these technologies, school district has budget to purchase Chromebooks and hot spots for students to check out to use at home. Parents can make requests for Chromebook or/and hot spot on parent portal. Information Technology department gathers these requests and notifies parents to come to district office to pick up devices when inventory allows.
Let's check how many devices have been checked out since March, 2020.
laptop_checked_out = k12_data.LaptopCheckedOut.value_counts()
laptop_checked_out
No 32752
Yes 18602
Name: LaptopCheckedOut, dtype: int64
Total 18,602 Chromebooks were checked out to students.
mifi_checked_out = k12_data.MiFiCheckedOut.value_counts()
mifi_checked_out
No 43532
Yes 7822
Name: MiFiCheckedOut, dtype: int64
Total 7,822 hot spots were checked out to families. We only provide one hot spot to each household.
has_laptop = k12_data.HasLaptop.value_counts()
has_laptop
Yes 42649
No 8705
Name: HasLaptop, dtype: int64
has_internet = k12_data.HasInternet.value_counts()
has_internet
Yes 45106
No 6248
Name: HasInternet, dtype: int64
I created HasLaptop and HasInternet two fields based on two conditions for "Yes" when I wrote the SQL query to pull data:
Because we are still waiting for vendors to deliver Chromebooks and hot spots orders, we need to monitor how many students/families still need to check out Chromebooks or/and hot spots to support students' online learning experience.
Based on the numbers, we still have 8,705 students that will need to check out a Chromebook and 6,248 families that will need to check out a hot spot.
plt.figure(figsize=(10,6))
plt.title("Student Has a Laptop to Use?")
plt.pie(has_laptop, labels=has_laptop.index, autopct='%1.1f%%', startangle=180);
Based on this pie chart, there is still 17% of students in our school district currently don't have a laptop to use for attending school remotely.
plt.figure(figsize=(10,6))
plt.title("Student Has a Laptop to Use?")
plt.pie(has_internet, labels=has_internet.index, autopct='%1.1f%%', startangle=180);
And there is 12% of students in our school district currently don't have internet access for attending school remotely.
One of many ways to track student engagement is thru student attendance. It is proven higher student attendance rate can lead to higher academic performance. Let's see how attendance rate distribution looks like in school year 2021.
plt.figure(figsize=(10, 6))
plt.title("Student Present Rate in School Year 2021")
plt.xlabel('Present Rate')
plt.ylabel('Number of Student')
plt.hist(k12_data.PresentRate, bins=np.arange(0,1,0.1), color='blue');
Here are some findings:
import jovian
jovian.commit()
[jovian] Attempting to save notebook..
[jovian] Updating notebook "yinyinw/analyzing-k12-student-data-2021" on https://jovian.ml/
[jovian] Uploading notebook..
[jovian] Capturing environment..
[jovian] Committed successfully! https://jovian.ml/yinyinw/analyzing-k12-student-data-2021
Due to new data points collected in this school year, there are some things I am interested in knowing. Here I listed 5 questions that I have in mind that may be answered using this data set.
Because students' enrollment type (Traditional or Virtual) was selected by parents, it is interesting to see if there are certain ethnicity or gender group of students having preference over Traditional or Virtual learning model. I actually had the idea when I obeserved my kids' classes. Both of my kids picked Virtual setting and I feel in both of their classes, they have more Asian classmates than they used to have in previous years. Let's see my "feeling" is correct or not.
eth_virtual = k12_data[k12_data.EnrollmentType == "Virtual"].groupby(['Ethnicity', 'Gender', 'EnrollmentType'], as_index=False)[['StudentCount']].count()
eth_virtual
I am interested in knowing for both ethnicity and gender group so first I did a group by to count only Virtual students by their ethnicity and gender.
eth_traditional = k12_data[k12_data.EnrollmentType == "Traditional"].groupby(['Ethnicity', 'Gender', 'EnrollmentType'], as_index=False)[['StudentCount']].count()
eth_traditional
Then I did a group by to count only Traditional students by their ethnicity and gender.
eth_erollmenttype = eth_virtual.merge(eth_traditional, on=["Ethnicity", "Gender"])
eth_erollmenttype
I merged two data sets together so I can have one column showing Virtual count and another column showing Traditional count for eaiser calculation later.
eth_erollmenttype['VirtualRate'] = eth_erollmenttype.StudentCount_x / (eth_erollmenttype.StudentCount_x + eth_erollmenttype.StudentCount_y)
eth_erollmenttype
I use count of Virtual students / total count of students to generate a new column called Virtual Rate so I can know how many percents of students in each group picked Virtual learning model.
pivot_eth = eth_erollmenttype.pivot("Ethnicity", "Gender", "VirtualRate")
pivot_eth
After getting Virtual Rate, I prefer to use Heat Map to show the differences from each group so I have to pivot the data set first. Since count of students in Non-Binary gender group is only 3, I decided to exlude the group from my Heat Map so it won't confuse people.
plt.title("Q1: What ethnicity and/or gender group(s) of students prefer to start school year in a Virtual setting?")
sns.heatmap(pivot_eth[['Female', 'Male']], annot=True, cmap="Blues");
Here are some findings:
The biggest goal since school closure for us, Information Technology department, is to try our best to provide students technologies to attend school remotely. Unfortunately, vendors can't provide enough Chromebooks and hot spots at once for our needs so there are still students who have requested to receive technologies, but haven't be able to receive them. Since first progress report for students are available now. Let's do some analysis to see if students with technologies can help them get better grades.
Since elementar schools and secondary schools (intermediate and high schools) have different terms so I have to separate them.
k6_data = k12_data[k12_data.GradeLevel == "Elementary"]
k6_data.describe()
First step is to create a data set with only elementary students. There are 25,979 elementary students.
The column I am going to use here to analyze is CountT1P_N_IDF. The column is a count of student's total in danger of failing subjects. Based on the summary here, max number of subjects an elementary student can get is 14. Mean is 0.59.
sns.scatterplot(k6_data.PresentRate, k6_data.CountT1P_N_IDF, hue=k6_data.HasLaptop, s=100);
First I tried to use Scatter Plot to see if students who don't have access to a laptop can form an obvious group on the chart. I don't see there is an obvious separation between two groups.
sns.scatterplot(k6_data.PresentRate, k6_data.CountT1P_N_IDF, hue=k6_data.HasInternet, s=100);
Same thing for students who don't have access to Internet. There is no obvious separation. I want to try Barplot and see if it gives the answer that I am looking for.
plt.title("For elementary students, does ''access to a laptop'' lead to higher student performance?")
sns.barplot('HasLaptop', 'CountT1P_N_IDF', data=k6_data);
This Barplot chart does show "students with access to a laptop" have fewer failing subjects. Variation on "No" is higher than "Yes". I know it doesn't neccessary mean students have better academic performance, but this is the only data point we can use to determine "student success" academically now.
Let's check students with access to internet next.
plt.title("For elementary students, does ''access to internet'' lead to higher student performance?")
sns.barplot('HasInternet', 'CountT1P_N_IDF', data=k6_data);
The differenct in this chart is bigger than the last one. I believe it shows that "whether students having internet access" is a more influential factor for student performance than "whether students having laptop access".
plt.title("Q3: For elementary students, do students in Virtual learning model perform better or worse?")
sns.barplot('EnrollmentType', 'CountT1P_N_IDF', data=k6_data);
In this Barplot chart, it shows Virtual students have more failing subjects than Traditional students. Based on the findings, it shows students are learning better in Traditional setting than Virtual setting. However, since I know there have been multiple problems with the platform we picked for Virutal students to use to learn their course content. It is highly possible to be the reason why Virtual students had a rough start in this school year. I want to wait until I can get more data points regarding to student performance to make a more resonable conclusion.
secondary_data = k12_data[k12_data.GradeLevel != "Elementary"]
secondary_data.describe()
First step is to create a data set with only secondary students. There are 25,375 secondary students.
The column I am going to use here to analyze is CountQ1P_IDF. The column is a count of student's total in danger of failing subjects. Based on the summary here, max number of subjects an secondary student can get is 8. Mean is 1.42.
plt.title("For secondary students, does ''access to a laptop'' lead to higher student performance?")
sns.barplot('HasLaptop', 'CountQ1P_IDF', data=secondary_data);
This Barplot chart does show "students with access to a laptop" have fewer failing subjects. I know it doesn't neccessary mean students have better academic performance, but this is the only data point we can use to determine "student success" academically now.
Let's check students with access to internet next.
plt.title("For secondary students, does ''access to internet'' lead to higher student performance?")
sns.barplot('HasInternet', 'CountQ1P_IDF', data=secondary_data);
Unlike elementary student analysis, secondary students show similar trend for HasLaptop and HasInternet. It shows students having laptop access and having internet access can help student performance greatly.
plt.title("Q5: For secondary students, do students in Virtual learning model perform better or worse?")
sns.barplot('EnrollmentType', 'CountQ1P_IDF', data=secondary_data);
In this Barplot chart, it shows Virtual students have more failing subjects than Traditional students. Similar to elementary students, it shows students are learning better in Traditional setting than Virtual setting. For the same reason, I want to wait until I can get more data points regarding to student performance to make a more resonable conclusion.
laptop_yes = k12_data[k12_data.LaptopCheckedOut == "Yes"].groupby(['Ethnicity', 'IsSED', 'LaptopCheckedOut'], as_index=False)[['StudentCount']].count()
laptop_yes
laptop_no = k12_data[k12_data.LaptopCheckedOut == "No"].groupby(['Ethnicity', 'IsSED', 'LaptopCheckedOut'], as_index=False)[['StudentCount']].count()
laptop_no
merge_laptop = laptop_yes.merge(laptop_no, on=["Ethnicity", "IsSED"])
merge_laptop
merge_laptop['CheckoutLaptopRate'] = merge_laptop.StudentCount_x / (merge_laptop.StudentCount_x + merge_laptop.StudentCount_y)
merge_laptop
pivot_laptop = merge_laptop.pivot("Ethnicity", "IsSED", "CheckoutLaptopRate")
pivot_laptop
plt.title("Checkout Laptop Rate by Ethnicity and SED?")
sns.heatmap(pivot_laptop, annot=True, cmap="Blues");
mifi_yes = k12_data[k12_data.MiFiCheckedOut == "Yes"].groupby(['Ethnicity', 'IsSED', 'MiFiCheckedOut'], as_index=False)[['StudentCount']].count()
mifi_yes
mifi_no = k12_data[k12_data.MiFiCheckedOut == "No"].groupby(['Ethnicity', 'IsSED', 'MiFiCheckedOut'], as_index=False)[['StudentCount']].count()
mifi_no
merge_mifi = mifi_yes.merge(mifi_no, on=["Ethnicity", "IsSED"])
merge_mifi
merge_mifi['CheckoutMiFiRate'] = merge_mifi.StudentCount_x / (merge_mifi.StudentCount_x + merge_mifi.StudentCount_y)
merge_mifi
pivot_mifi = merge_mifi.pivot("Ethnicity", "IsSED", "CheckoutMiFiRate")
pivot_mifi
plt.title("Checkout Hot Spot Rate by Ethnicity and SED?")
sns.heatmap(pivot_mifi, annot=True, cmap="Blues");
import jovian
jovian.commit()
[jovian] Attempting to save notebook..
Note:
import jovian
jovian.commit()
TODO
import jovian
jovian.commit()