From Business Intelligence

[edit] Award Contact=

If you have questions or would like more information, please contact Anne Ruggles Gere (argere@umich.edu).

[edit] Award Description=

Patrick Manning was the key data manager for a project that will change the way incoming students are introduced to writing at U-M. The current system of Directed Self Placement (a list of 7 questions) will be expanded to include actual writing in response to a prompt. To make the assessment of this writing most effective, we devised a data‐driven plan. The plan for assessing student writing has two dimensions. First, the Writing Center staff identified a subset of upper division students who have not passed their Upper Level Writing Requirement. Using the University's Data Warehouse, staff looked at this subgroup's incoming test scores, neighborhood cluster (for the most recent cohorts), English language status, and other characteristics to create a profile of first‐year students most at‐risk for encountering difficulty with writing.

This work will be followed with a survey and interview of those students to develop a fuller portrait of who succeeds (or not) at writing in the University. Secondly, the Writing Center will use the statistical profile it develops to identify students in the class of 2013 who will be most at‐risk for encountering difficulty with writing. Those incoming students' writing samples will be read first so that they have an opportunity to consider Practicum as they go through the Orientation process at the University. It would have been impossible to implement this plan without Patrick’s assistance. He retrieved data on multiple dimensions and helped the Writing Center analyze how different populations of students perform in courses that fulfill the Upper Level Writing Requirement, and he frequently offered keen insights and valuable suggestions as the research team discussed the project. Patrick’s contributions were particularly impressive since he is a new UM employee who has learned to work with the Data Warehouse since he joined the Sweetland staff in August of 2008.

Patrick retrieved all the data, often suggesting new combinations of queries to yield the results the team was seeking. In doing this, he was leveraging existing data about students’ academic aptitudes and performances to enable the Sweetland Writing Center to provide better information to students and advisors about appropriate placements in writing courses.

Patrick issued multiple reports based on his data retrieval. He typically offered several different ways of looking at information about students. For example, in a report he sent just yesterday, he combined SAT/ACT scores with high school GPA and neighborhood clusters several different ways to see what percentage of the 2008 entering class would fall below various cut points. Patrick’s work thus gave the team multiple ways to slice and dice available data, and his reports created visual representations of this variety. This entire project has been dependent upon data mining, and Patrick has been the person who has done that. And, as indicated above, this project is designed to use existing data to predict future performances by incoming students.