OHIO PROGRAM EVALUATORS’ GROUP
SUMMER STATISTICS WORKSHOP
"Using Excel for Data Mining and Analysis"
Monday, August 2, 2010
Center for Learning Excellence
Room #204
807 Kinnear Road
Columbus, Ohio
43212
Workshop Description
Although ubiquitous as a tool for “putting data in their place” and creating cute figures and displays, Excel is not used as often as a data analysis tool. While it has its limitations --compared to its big brothers like SPSS and SAS—Excel can be a handy and fairly simple tool for looking at data relationships and patterns, making statistical inferences, and forecasting trends. This one day workshop will provide hands-on exercises using several Excel data manipulation and statistical functions. Sample data sets will be provided to demonstrate how to derive metrics such as means, standard deviations, tests of differences, correlations, forecasts, regressions, standardized scores, and chi-squares. For each exercise, participants will examine ways that the analyses could apply to practical problems in their own work contexts.
About the instructors: Jerry Walker, Ph.D., is Associate Director for Research and Evaluation at the Ohio Department of Education. Prior to his current position, Dr. Walker was a senior policy evaluator with the Legislative Office of Education Oversight for the Ohio General Assembly, Director of Evaluation at the National Center for Vocational and Technical Education at Ohio State University, and a member of the team that started The Evaluation Center at OSU before it moved to Western Michigan University. He was also awarded OPEG’s Evaluation Recognition Award in Spring 2010 for his contributions to the field of evaluation.
Jerry Bean, Ph.D., is an independent consultant providing research, data management and analysis, and program evaluation services to public and private, not-for-profit organizations. He has held staff and administrative positions at the Ohio Department of Mental Health and the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. His research and evaluation experience is in the areas of homelessness, child abuse and neglect prevention, teen pregnancy prevention, after-school programs, and school improvement. Jerry was awarded OPEG’s Evaluation Recognition Award in 2007.
Learning Objectives - Using Excel, participants will learn how to answer questions related to:
• Making sense of seemingly disparate data arrays, trends, and snap shots;
• Demonstrating the probability differences between observed and expected values;
• Making reasonable inferences about whether a "treatment" has been successful;
• Determining the likelihood that various sets of observations are similar or different;
• Determining the extent to which different data arrays co-relate to each other;
• Making forecasts about values using extant data trends;
• Using pivot tables to rearrange data in ways that allow them to be examined;
• Comparing "apples to kumquats" by standardizing different data displays; and
• Creating data displays in ways the central messages will stick in the minds of observers.
Schedule:
10:00 - 10:30
• Introductions
10:30 - 12:00
• Why we try to grasp patterns, differences, and probabilities
• Measure of central tendency and variability exercises
• Applying Z scores to distributions
12:00 – 1:00
• Lunch (on your own, suggestions will be provided)
1:00 – 3:30
• Chi squares
• Applying probability tests
• Determining and graphing correlation coefficients
• Using pivot tables
• Memorable data displays
All participants must bring a laptop computer with Excel 2007 loaded onto it, as well as a power cord. Data for exercises will be provided.