[ad_1]
ISYS 1055 Database Design Assignment
Assignment Overview
For this assignment, you will be applying your SQL skills to analyse research data, and write a report that details your investigations into the question of whether particular variables such as class size and the perceived attractiveness of teaching staff influence course evaluations.
As part of this assignment, you are likely to need to carry out some research and refer to additional information beyond what was covered in the course. This is an important skill. Keep a note of any external references that you use, as these will need to be detailed in your report.
Analysing Variables That Influence University Course Evaluations
At most universities, teaching is evaluated through a process whereby students complete course experience surveys, rating courses in response to questions regarding the content, clarity of material, presentation, and other factors. These questions are typically distilled into a single score that is supposed to reflect overall teaching quality. In most Australian universities including RMIT, this is the Good Teaching Score (or GTS).
Prior research has indicated that many factors can influence student feedback, and these may include things that are directly asked as part of the surveys (Were the teaching staff good at explaining things? Did the staff work hard to make the course interesting?) and other factors that are not explicitly asked (Was the lecture room too crowded and noisy? Did an unexpected event occur part-way through the semester that required fundamental changes in teaching delivery? Are the teaching staff attractive?).
Daniel Hamermesh and Amy Parker, two researchers form the USA, collected data to investigate the question of whether teaching evaluations are influenced by the attractiveness of teaching staff [1]. In this assignment, you will be analysing their data to carry out a preliminary investigation into answering this question. The data was collected at the University of Texas at Austin, USA, and includes information about 455 courses, taught by teaching staff in various departments (note that some staff taught multiple courses included in the data set). Courses were of various sizes in terms of the number of enrolled students. Each course was evaluated using student surveys, with responses to the question “Overall, this course was…?” being collected on a 5-level ordinal scale with a minimum score of (1) “very unsatisfactory” and a maximum score of (5) “excellent”. Information was obtained on each faculty member, based on characteristics including their gender, whether they are on a tenure track (roughly speaking, working towards being offered a permanent position at their university), whether they are part of a minority group, and whether they received their education in an English-speaking country. ISYS 1055 Database Design Assignment
Separately, a picture of each teaching staff member was rated by 6 undergraduate students. Hamermesh and Parker describe the rating process as follows: “The raters were told to use a 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest) rating scale, to concentrate on the physiognomy of the instructor in the picture, to make their ratings independent of age, and to keep 5 in mind as an average” [1]. The ratings – subsequently referred to as “beauty” scores – were then normalised to have a mean score of zero. (This means that someone with a rating greater than zero was judged to be more “beautiful” than the average, while someone with a negative score was judged to be less “beautiful” than the average”.)
ISYS 1055 Database Design Assignment
Need Help with a similar Assignment?
What Students Are Saying About Us
.......... Customer ID: 12*** | Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐"Honestly, I was afraid to send my paper to you, but splendidwritings.com proved they are a trustworthy service. My essay was done in less than a day, and I received a brilliant piece. I didn’t even believe it was my essay at first 🙂 Great job, thank you!"
.......... Customer ID: 14***| Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
"The company has some nice prices and good content. I ordered a term paper here and got a very good one. I'll keep ordering from this website."
