For this project, I am attempting to use text analysis software to identify
any possible differences in the “My Goals” statement written by “successful” students
vs. “unsuccessful” students in their ePortfolios. It might be useful if such
goal statements, written at the outset of students’ careers at the college,
were to prove predictive of future success or lack thereof, perhaps enabling
the college to provide greater support to students less likely to succeed.
For the purposes of this project, we gathered 2841 goal
statement “pages” that were created by students between 9/16/2010 and 6/15/201
from our Digication ePortfolio system. We wanted statements written closer to
the beginning of students’ time here, so we limited selection to students with
0-20 credits (which yielded 1065). Of these 1065, only 511 had actual text in
them.
This data was sent to the office of Institutional
Research to identify two groups: students who have been successful (defined as
graduated or transferred early) vs. unsuccessful (defined as no longer in
attendance, but neither graduated nor transferred early). The complete statistics generated for
each students included the number of semesters enrolled starting in Fall 2010,
final GPA, whether graduated (1), whether transferred (1), whether graduated or
transferred (1), and credits attempted, credits earned and GPA for Fall 2010
and Spring 2011.
Professor Dragan then provided massive assistance by creating an “interface”
called ePortfolio Explorer that allowed the data base to be searched and easily
loaded into text analysis software.
The goal statements (combined into 1 document for successful students vs. 1
document for unsuccessful students) were then run through Voyant.
OUTCOMES
There is 1 document in this corpus
with a total of 73,081 words and 5,993 unique words.
Most frequent words in the corpus: career (574), college
(495), work (358), goals (323), degree
(319).
Unsuccessful (=neither graduated nor transferred):
There is 1 document in this corpus
with a total of 73,020 words and 5,997 unique words.
Most frequent words in the corpus: career (569), college
(558), goals (470), want (365), like
(300).
DISCUSSION
At this point, I haven't found any particular insights, and am not quite sure how to pursue the analysis this further (any thoughts would be welcome!). For both successful and unsuccessful students, 3 of the top five words were career, college and goals. While degree was in the top five for successful students (323 occurrences), it was mentioned fairly often by unsuccessful students as well (9th with 248 occurrences). The other 2 top five words for unsuccessful students, want and like, also appear in the top 10 words for successful students. So maybe what I can say at this point is that both successful and unsuccessful students are entering college with goals that are articulated in similar ways (though the individual goals themselves differ widely).
