Doctoral Level Stats Paper and Presentation

Data Analysis Report (final): Further Instructions and Grading Rubric

For this assignments, you will run two statistical analyses using data from your school or district, data provided by the course, or data related to your thesis. You will then contextualize your own analyses within the literature you have read, writing up your findings in a ~10 page report. Submissions should be APA formatted. Abstracts are not necessary. Title page and references do not contribute toward page total. The following elements are required:

• Brief review of relevant literature o Needs only be long enough to establish a theoretical basis for a relationship between the variables you

are using. For example, if you want to regress teacher salary on years of experience and teachers’ favorite baseball team, you need to be able to illustrate an established relationship (or the reasonable expectation for one) between salary and baseball preferences.

• Research Questions (RQs) and/or Hypotheses o Hypotheses not necessary, as they are falling out of tradition, but you are welcome to include them.

• Description of data o Where does it come from? o What are the variables of interest? How are they measure and what do they represent? Not all variable

names are self-explanatory – help the reader understand what the variable truly means. • Description of analytical approach

o Identify technique(s) [must be an inferential technique covered in this course: t-test, ANOVA, chi- square, correlation, regression, etc.]

o Assumptions of technique and evidence they have not been violated • Results

o Walk the reader through your output and what it means. • Discussion/interpretation of results

o What are the practical interpretation of your results? How do your results align (or not) with the literature you reviewed?

o What are the implications for future policy, practice, and for future research? What else would you like to know?

While not required, some students may find the following outline helpful: • Background • Problem • Purpose • RQs • Lit Review • Methodology • Results • Discussion • Conclusion

Student may elect to collapse the first 3 items into a shorter section without distinct headings for the problem and purpose. The overall idea here is that you will write-up a miniature quantitative study that is related to your area of interest. If you are having trouble planning out your final paper, I encourage you to schedule office hours so that we can discuss. All good term papers have a solid introduction containing a) a clear purpose statement, and b) a roadmap that identifies the remaining sections. If your analyses are appropriate, the paper is well written, and it follows APA, you’re going to have a good time. See next page for grading rubric.

Overall assignment score

Criteria 0-11 12-23 24-35

Quality of Writing • Poor grammar • Poor syntax • Poor adherence to APA

• Some grammatical and or syntax errors

• Some adherence to APA

• Proper grammar • Proper syntax • Follows APA

Quality of Analysis

• Chosen techniques are not appropriate

• Analyses are neither well- executed and results are not accurate

• Chosen techniques may not be appropriate or best

• Some issues with analysis and results

• Chosen techniques are appropriate

• Analysis is well-executed and results are accurate

Adherence to Guidelines

• Not ~10 pages • Missing several required

elements • Few elements are

substantive or well done

• Not ~10 pages • Contains most required

elements • Some elements are

substantive and well done

• ~10 pages • Contains all six of the

required elements • Elements are substantive

and well done

Submissions will be graded based on a combination of their quality of writing, quality of analysis, and adherence to guidelines. Submissions that earn a full score of 35 will fully satisfy the criteria of the right-most column.