What are the best classes to take? A DATA MINING APPROACH TO FINDING THE BEST CLASSES AND TEACHERS BY JOSEPH BRODERICK

Project Goals

What are the best classes to take at CWRU? What makes a class good?

Who are the best teachers at Case Western? What can a teacher do to improve their teaching style?

Is there that big of a difference between a class at CWRU? Same class different teacher?

Different class same teacher?

Data Collection How to format the data

Give every Data point a star rating

Use the ratings to determine conclusions about the data

How many people in a class?

How about more current data rather than just 1997-2006.

Data Preprocessing

Dr. Oc did not put in 0 for his reports.

Isn’t all of the data normally distrusted anyways? (Turn to Z values, so scale from (-1 to 1) (need to do)

Multiple teachers with the same last name

Different Departments switch name (EECS came as a department in 2000)

No nursing evaluations

Implementation

Run all the text data into a string reader from python Get all the numbers

Turn those numbers into ratings

Use the Scikit for clustering analysis

IPython Notebook for more precise results of teachers and courses to determine who belong to what group.

How do we decide the results

K means Already know different group of teachers want to find those groups

“Percentile” of teacher

Which department average Average by class or by students

Standard deviation away

Question what Departments have courses with lighter workloads

https://plot.ly/~jase.broderick/1/overall-work-load-of-different-departments/

https://plot.ly/~jase.broderick/2/average-workload-of-different-departments/

More Interesting Results

Clustering some of the Data

Good Teachers?

Year Winners

2005Robert E. Dunn (Music)Robert E. Harris (Chemical Engineering)

2004Chris Butler (Mathematics)Hillel Chiel (Biology)

2003Jutta Ittner (Modern Languages & Literatures)Eric Youngstrom (Psychology)

2002Ronald Cechner, Biomedical EngineeringJohn Orlock, Theatre

2001Ken Ledford, HistoryMano Singham, Physics

2000Thomas S. Ellis, EnglishCarol D. Epstein, Nursing

1999Gary M. Ciepluch, MusicDavid A. Smith, Physics

1998Miram R. Levin, HistoryJoe H. Payer, Materials Science and Engineering

Past Recipients of the Carl F. Wittke AwardGroup They Belong To:

2,3,4,12,2

2,36,0,0

7,6,52,6

0

1,2,35,06,5,5,26,0,5

3,532,01,3

Future Implementations

Biclustering Look at the different attributes of the instructor (Questions 5-16) and

see which groups of teachers will show up

Which of those groups of teachers are the best at teaching

Good teaching?

Compartmentalize Classes and Teachers into their own categories. All reviews of one teacher go into one data point

All reviews of one class go into one data point

Normalize all the data for better results

Figure out best teacher for different classes.

Results so far from Teaching Styles

Question 15 seems to be irrelevant for some teachers

Questions?

End of Presentation