DOI: 10.5061/dryad.c59zw3rg6
title: Code from: Beyond the classroom: Alicia’s multivariate journey

description: The importance of data science skills for modern scientific research
 cannot be understated. Although policy documents increasingly
 recommend what skills should be included in undergraduate
 statistics and data science curricula, little is known about how
 students actually develop and apply these skills. This
 paper addresses this gap through an in-depth case study tracing
 one student’s learning progressions throughout her master’s
 program. Using a qualitative method to analyze student code, which has
 seen little use in statistics education research, I examined how
 Alicia transferred the data science skills from her applied
 statistics course into authentic research settings. The analysis
 shows that, while Alicia successfully navigated new challenges,
 she encountered persistent hurdles when extending bivariate
 techniques into multivariate contexts, particularly with
 visualizations and summary statistics. These findings
 highlight the obstacles students may face when applying classroom
 knowledge to real-world data problems. The results carry
 implications for instructors designing curricula, researchers
 studying how students learn data science, and policymakers
 shaping educational standards, underscoring the need to pair
 policy recommendations with research on the realities of student learning.
description: R Script files submitted by Alicia (pseudonym) over the course of
 the study. The files are named according to when they were
 submitted: December 2018 
 R Script #1 April
 2019 R Script #1 (revised) R
 Script #2 September 2019
 R Script #1 (revised) R Script
 #2 (revised) 
 Qualitative Data Analysis Files (Rich text files)
 December 2018 Script #1 April
 2019 Script #1 April 2019 Script #2
 September 2019 Script #1 September 2019
 Script #2 Quantitative Data Analysis
 Files r-code-themes.csv 
 Comma separated values file with separate sheets for each R
 script Each sheet contains the qualitative code
 assigned to each line of code and whether the code contained
 errors. 
description: # Code from: Beyond the classroom: Alicia’s multivariate journey
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.c59zw3rg6](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.c59zw3rg6) This repository contains the R script files submitted by Alicia (pseudonym) throughout this study, files associated with the qualitative analysis of the code, and files associated with visualizations of the qualitative themes included in Alicia's code. ## Description of the data and file structure As this is a qualitative analysis, the usage of these "data" files differs from a typical quantitative analysis. * The `.R` Files contain the scripts generated by Alicia at each time point (December 2018, April 2019, September 2019) * The `-codes.rft` Files contain the (qualitative) process codes for each `R` script * The `r-code-themes.xlsx` The file contains information on every script and the qualitative code assigned to each line of code. ## Code/Software While the "data" for this analysis are R scripts, these scripts **cannot** be executed. The intention of the analysis was not to run these scripts, but to qualitatively describe the processes used throughout each script. As such, the scripts should be thought of as static documents.