Credential Attainment Cover of Project

Credential Attainment from a Mom, Data Science Student, and Previous Counselor

Inspiration

I was inspired to try this challenge because I wanted to experience and learn more about the world of coding and development, besides what I have learned at school & what I see at work. My experience is in counseling, and I have experience in working with youth. This topic of finding explanations and how to increase credential attainment was of great interest to me. I started off with exploring ideas on how to dissect the problem first. I wrote down on a piece of paper the top ideas I can think of that can affect credential attainment, the first bullet. Looking at different factors. I then ranked them from the most important to the least important. Afterwards, I then wrote down where I can get the information for that topic, and if I have data to be able to provide proof for my hypothesis on the reason that credential attainment is able to be supported. Some ideas include: Household Income - My idea for evaluating this is to evaluate how much money school districts are receiving from property taxes. I also wanted to review the other factors that higher income provides extra opportunities like private tutoring, school technology & staff support, improved environment like bike lanes, local businesses with booming businesses to provide space for school or studying, and more that increase the likelihood of credential attainment.

Location of Schools how it affects Attendance & Grades

Location of Schools - To evaluate if the distance of schools from the students had an affect on availability to attend school. If there are more schools in a certain area, I wanted to evaluate if that had a positive effect on attendance or grades of the students. I was able to use Python to join tables from different folders, where I was able to then get a condensed list of LEA ID's, names of school districts, within TX and the count of school districts that serve each zipcode. I usually prefer and have more knowledge in using TAbleau, but I was running out of time to locate the free version (I use Tableau for work), and it appears that it may no longer be available, but still advertise it on their website. Anyway, I then switched to Excel. Once I created a couple of pivot tables, I observed that there is one zipcode that has 5 school districts serving that area. That is the most in the state. I reduced the list to the Top 20, so the graph is more easily read. If I had more time, my next step would have been to then evaluate within that zipcode, what the grades are, credential attainment, and household income.

Are there Transportation Assistance resources that help alleviate the distance for students? This also provides more exploration on Transportation , and if this the distance to schools affects the transportation resources to schools, which affects grades and attendance.

Family Support

Family Support - Although I have seen studies on this (which I wanted to look at peer reviewed studies on the importance of this too), I wanted to find more information on how we can evaluate family support. It could be done by maybe finding PTA enrollment, booster clubs within the clubs that are managed by parents & involvement (I know this because I'm a parent and I'm involved in these). I wanted to find a way that can support the data that can evaluate if family support makes a big impact, and if that makes a difference in certain areas within TX.

Disability

Disability - I wanted to evaluate if I could find data on support for students with disabilities, how many are receiving 504 accommodations, or are identified as having a disability. This helps identify if the supports are available and supporting students to reach that credential attainment. What resources are available to assist the students, do they have qualified teachers and support to help students with their credential attainment and educational support. Do they have the resources available outside of school to be successful as well.

Cost of Living

Cost of Living - This is very important, because just like household income, what are going to be the cost to live in that school district area, and compare incomes with cost of living can provide more insight into what households have left after an average cost of living estimation.

Community Events & Support

Community Events & support - Outside of family support, are there organizations supporting students? Are there areas to receive food, shelter, tutoring, assistance with financial aid, and scholarship opportunities to pay for education?

Other Factors

There are many other factors I have explored including unemployment rates, school support & activities, psychological aspect is another exploration as well. Because many students attend school not only for the education, but for their friendships, and what are schools doing to foster that? Are there counselors or psychologists available to discuss mental health? Or are they focused only on grades? Are there enough extracurricular activities that help student focus on other team sports that foster friendships and interest? What about clubs and music & arts? Does that help support attendance in students?

Project Management & Conclusion

I have an excel file, a jupyter notebook python file to be able to share to provide the start of my exploration. My project is beginning level, but also I took the appreach of first a Project management viewpoint of first exploring ideas, putting them down on paper to organize my ideas, form a hypothesis, and then start with forming the technical coding with a combining data; to then explore more ideas & be able to provide proof of hypothesis is either correct or not. So including a bit of statistics that I recently learned as well, but I didn't quite get to that part yet.