Introduction

Welcome!

This site hosts the lessons for a two-day workshop on R held in the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia on January 15-16, 2018, hosted as part of the Virginia Education Science Training (VEST) Program at UVa.

The purpose of the workshop is to introduce researchers who primarily work in the social science fields of education, economics, and public policy to the R statistical language. As a standard disclaimer, two days (or a few modules) aren’t enough to show everything that R has to offer. Instead, I hope this workshop serves as an introduction to the most common data analysis procedures and gives participants a chance to practice working with R themselves.

Structure of the course

All modules are scheduled to last about 90 minutes. Within that time frame, the goal is that demonstration of the content will take up about an hour, with interspersed quick exercises taking up the rest of the time.

R scripts for each module (less the markdown content used to build the site) can be downloaded, and participants should use them to follow along with the demonstration on their own machines.

Questions throughout are highly encouraged. Aside from wrecking my voice, it will dreadfully boring to hear me talk about coding for two entire days!

This website

All the files needed for the workshop can be accessed through this site. I’ve also tried to write up the modules so that they are useful after the fact or for others who didn’t attend the workshop in person. Please contact me with any suggestions for improvements. Pull requests are great, but emails or tweets are fine, too.

About me

I am a Research Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Virginia with an affiliation in EdPolicyWorks. My research interests center on the policies and practices that affect students who attend community colleges and open access universities. In recent work, I have focused on the relationships between online course delivery and student enrollments, course outcomes, and degree attainment.

In addition to using the R language extensively in my own work, I am the author and maintainer of a number of software packages, including rscorecard, which can be used to download data from the College Scorecard, and crosswalkr, a port of a set of Stata commands that help build master data sets from smaller files in a reproducible manner.