In this tutorial, you will learn R commands for combining cleaned data files to make an analysis file. This tutorial assumes that you have a limited knowledge of R. If you don’t know any R at all, you may find it helpful to complete the OpenSDP Data Exploration Tutorial before starting this one.
In Part 1, you will briefly inspect cleaned student, test score, and school data files. In Part 2, you will combine the student and test score files; in Part 3, you will add information about schools; and in Part 4 you will define several derived variables.
To run this tutorial you will need R Studio version 1.0 or higher. Download the R .zip file and unzip the contents into a folder on your Desktop. Double-click to open the data_exploration_tutorial.Rmd file in the folder using R Studio. In the file viewer pane, you'll see a set of commands with a grey background. Click on the small green triangle on the right margin of line 13 to run the commands. Then, scroll down to read through the content in the file viewer pane (this is the tutorial). As you see each grey section of code, click on the green arrow to run the commands. You will see the results in the window below. Use the results to answer the questions in the tutorial. Check your answers with the answer key.
This tutorial was originally authored by the Strategic Data Project.
OpenSDP is an online, public repository of analytic code, tools, and training intended to foster collaboration among education analysts and researchers in order to accelerate the improvement of our school systems. The community is hosted by the Strategic Data Project, an initiative of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University. We welcome contributions and feedback.