Today I decided to take a quick look at the percentage of all students who score proficient on the Statewide science assessment.
I also did the same map for economically disadvantaged students.
After looking at the maps I put them on the same color scale.
I found a new dataset today. It shows the number and percentage of students that are promoted in high school every year.
The map shows the percentage of 2020-2021 grade 9 students that were not promoted to grade 10.
Played around with showing Non-FARMS High School graduates who earn a college degree by age 25. The Maryland Longitudinal Data System Center publishes the data as a percentage of high school graduates that enroll in college. I used their published numbers to see the total high school graduates. I was originally interested in FARMs students, but the data was repressed for most of the schools.
As always this is just me exploring the data that is available. I am trying to make sense of the data and be able to remember the information.
I am exploring using a map to display college enrollment data for Anne Arundel County. Unfortunately, I only have a shapefile that includes Crofton HS, which is a new school, so the boundaries do not reflect the boundaries at the time. The are other specialized high schools in the county that are not reflected in the data. Since I haven’t done mapping in a while I had to remember how to upload the data, but I figured it out pretty quickly.
I am a sucker for outcome data by state. I like to take the data from these reports and graph the Maryland data.
This is primarily a blog about me exploring data visualization. I am having trouble flipping the order of the categories, I would like “completed at starting institution” to be on the bottom. I think that being able to easily control the order of the categories is very important. The order shown hides the percentage of students that have graduated from any institution.
I figured it out, but I had to reenter the data. I would also like to add national data on the same chart, but that does not seem to be an option anymore.
Apparently, I can add national data if I make a stacked bar chart, but not for a stacked column chart.
This is a look at students enrolled in Maryland community colleges in fall 2019. In fall 2019, there were 113,288 students enrolled in Maryland Community College. Of those students, 35,905 (31.7%) were enrolled full-time and 77,383 (68.3%) were enrolled part-time. I decided to dig deeper into this information by combining attendance status with student age. The Maryland Higher Education Commission (MHEC) reports enrollment of students aged 25 and older by attendance status. Approximately one-third of community college students are aged 25 or older. About 85% of community college students aged 25 and older attend part-time, while approximately 60% of community college students under age 25 attend part-time.
I made a Sankey diagram to show both age and attendance status of community college students at the same time in the same diagram. This is a different use of a Sankey diagram than I have made in the past. In the past, I have used a Sankey diagram to show individuals flowing through the education system. This diagram shows two variables related to the same population of students. I am happy with the result and find it easy to understand and read; however, I don’t know if people unfamiliar with Sankey diagrams will find it easy to read and understand. My next step will be to ask my friends and family about what they think about the visualization. I also wonder if there are other data sets that I use that would be better understood using this formate. Another way to show this information would be with a single bar graph with four segments: 1) aged 25 and over and part-time; 2) aged 25 and older full-time; 3) under 25 and part-time; and 4) under 25 and full-time.
Source: Maryland Higher Education Commission, Databook 2021
The bar graph shows the same information as the Sankey diagram above, but it is another formate. The purpose of this post is to show this data in different forms on the web and be able to test them on various platforms and to remember what I learned about the data. From the bar graph visualization, it is easy to see that the largest group are students who are under 25 and attending part-time and the smallest group (by far) are students who are 25 and older who are attending full-time.
AmCharts has updated its library to version 5. AmCharts5 includes updates to their Venn diagram library. Since I love Venn diagrams I spent the morning figuring it out. I created the Venn diagram below to show HS completers. It took me a while to figure out the syntax. Overall I think I was mostly able to make it do what I wanted to do. However, I since haven’t figured out how to put a category entirely in another category. For example, I would like a big circle with all HS completers that includes HS graduates and HS certificate students.
The Venn diagram below is of Maryland public school students that completed high school. It shows the overlap of how the students that: (1) earned a completion certificate (for completing a special education program); (2) met the University System of Maryland (USM) requirements); (3) met the Career and Technical Education (CTE) requirements; and/or (4) met the regular diploma requirements. “Normal diploma” is just to indicate students that did not earn either a USM or CTE credentials in addition to their high school diploma. This is primarily for my own understanding of the data and to learn web-based data visualization techniques.
Now that I have made this visualization I am not sure if using a Venn diagram is better than a Sankey diagram for this data. I would also like to add additional information to the chart such as a title and to have the actual numbers displayed on the chart. As far as the data goes, I wish that I had information about the post-high school behavior of these different groups of students. According to this data, about 60.5% of high school completers met the USM requirements.
The colors used below are not intended to mean anything beyond looking nice. It took me a while to figure out the colors. Once I figured it out I just used a rainbow with my only intention to combine blue and yellow to make green.
Source: Maryland State Department of Education, 2019 High School Completion
This is a test of a waterfall chart with negative numbers. This is just a test to see if I can recreate a waterfall chart I saw using Amcharts. I have linked the document with the original waterfall chart in the source below, the chart is on page 16 of the document. Initially had trouble with showing the final two bars because they went into negative numbers, but I was able to play around with the formatting to get it to display properly. As I note I do not have access to the underlying data, I used the displayed figures to produce the chart below. To completely recreate the chart I need to still figure out how to format the Y axis numbers. I need to add a “$” sign and truncate the numbers. I will research this and update once I figure it out.
ARP: American Rescue Plan
COLA: cost-of-living adjustment
IT: information technology
This chart shows the number of students and staff currently quarantining according to Anne Arundel County Public Schools (AACPS) COVID-19 data dashboard. The dashboard is currently being updated daily, but I have not been diligent about collecting the data daily; therefore there is data missing from some days. So far, according to the data I recorded, the number of students quarantining peaked at 1,756 on September 29, 2021. On that date, there were 40 staff members quarantining, which was also a high point.
Below I have copied what AACPS says about who is included in the number of students and staff currently quarantining.
The number of current quarantine cases above includes those who are COVID-19 positive through confirmed testing, those who have been designated as having COVID-like symptoms, and those who are probable cases as defined below on this page. It also includes those who have been determined to be close contacts of those persons and who are not fully vaccinated. The data includes cases traced in schools as well as those involving AACPS students that are traced in the community and have no immediate impact on schools.
Anne Arundel County Public Schools
I like that datawrapper provides several options for displaying the date at the bottom of a chart. Because I have taken foreign languages and lived abroad, I have used both the day/month/year date formate and the month/day/year formate. I find it sort of confusing switching between the format conventions, so I'm happy that there is an option that eliminates that potential confusion by using the month abbreviations as such "Sep" or "Oct" with the date number above. I find this date format easier to read.
I used the straight number of students and staff currently quarantining for this chart because I was interested in the actual numbers. I could also show the percentage of students and staff currently quarantining. I would need to find an accurate count of students and staff for the current school year to make that chart.
Keeping up with the COVID-19 data published by Anne Arundel County Public Schools on an individual school basis is not really sustainable because it is currently being published daily. The data can not be downloaded so it has to be transcribed by hand. So I am looking at some other ways to visualize the data that might be less time-intensive, and still informative. My primary goals are to 1) learn how to build various data visualizations, and 2) explore the utility of various data visualizations. Maintaining a data dashboard, unless I am curious about the data that day is not my primary purpose.
One idea is to look at the cumulative COVID-19 cases by both students and staff on a daily basis. I did not think to capture this data earlier, so I have a few days of data missing. I also have missing days because life got in the way. It doesn’t seem hard to enter in a few data points every day until you get wrapped up in life and then you realize that you haven’t even looked at the website in a few days. I wish that they published the data in a way that I could download their archival data, but I will take what they share. The Maryland Health Department publishes their archival school outbreak data; however, their data only reflects outbreaks (as they have defined them) and is only published once a week on Wednesdays. Because of the missing data, I used the step model of lines as I think it is a more honest way to show the data.
This line chart shows the cumulative daily COVID-19 cases for students and staff for the 2021-2022 school year. The number of cases are from the Anne Arundel County Public Schools data dashboard. I have added dots for the days that I recorded the published data. There are no dots on the days that I do not record the data.
