Results for EDUC 423: Introduction to Data Science

Social scientists can benefit greatly from utilizing new data sources like electronic administration records or digital communications, but they require tools and techniques to make sense of their scope and complexity. This course offers the opportunity to understand and apply popular data science techniques regarding data visualization, data reduction and data analysis.

Quantitative data require considerable work before they are ready to be analyzed: they are often messy, incomplete and potentially biased. This course is designed to help you thoughtfully collect, manage, clean and represent data so it can offer substantive information researchers can act upon. In our weekly sessions you will take a critical and reflective approach to these tasks and learn the technical skills needed to get your data into shape. Education and social science datasets will be our focus.

This course centers on the question of how you can use various data science techniques to understand social phenomena. Applied to education and social science topics, the course will introduce you to supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms, new data, and provide you the skills to thoughtfully evaluate and assess machine learning performance and implications.