Statistics Project

Description of the Project:

Accountability and quality of education at the K-12 grade levels have become important issues during the last few years. Many states are experimenting with various testing procedures to measure student and school performances. In Massachusetts, a few years ago, the state board of education introduced a testing standard called MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System). The test is offered at the 3rd, 4th, 8th and 10th grades to measure basic proficiency of the students, and also to monitor the school districts’ progress. This is becoming an even more important matter for Massachusetts students as, starting 2004, high school students are required to pass MCAS test to graduate. You can learn everything that you ever wanted to know about MCAS by going to the Massachusetts Department of Education website at http://www.doe.mass.edu/mcas/about1.html You can download the district-by-district MCAS performance results for the year 2005 from http://www.doe.mass.edu/mcas/2005/results/data/district.pdf

The objective of this project is to explore the relationship between the socioeconomic conditions of Massachusetts communities and the MCAS score. To keep things simple, we will consider the 10th grade average MCAS proficiency index (an aggregate measure of performance in English and Math) for the year 2005 as our response variable, and use socioeconomic covariate information such as median household income, median housing price, percentage of the population attended college, etc. Obtain a random sample of at least 20 school districts from the list (PDF file). Compute the average of the English Language (ELA) proficiency index for 10th grade regular education students by assigning weight 4 to the percentage of students deemed advanced (A), 3 to the percentage of students deemed proficient (P), 2 to the percentage of students deemed needing improvement (NI), and 1 to the percentage students deemed failing (W/F). As an example: Suppose in a school district, 2005 ELA score is reported as: 40% A, 32% P, 14% NI and 14% W/F. Thus the proficiency index is: (4*40+3*32+2*14+1*14)/10=29.8. Do the same to compute the math proficiency index, and take the average of the two indices to get an aggregate proficiency index of regular 10 ^th grade students for that school district.

Now you need to collect the covariate information for these communities that you have sampled. On the internet, there are many different sources, which provide community profiles. Here is one source that you may want to lookup: http://realestate.yahoo.com/realestate/neighborhood/main.html I encourage you to investigate other sources (refer to the grading criteria) for covariate information. Choose at least 9 socioeconomic independent variables for your initial model, and collect the covariate information for each town you have sampled. Carry out regression analysis, and identify the final model. Explain your results clearly in a short report. Your report must be typed, and must have the following components:

Requirements

1. A short description of the problem
2. Description of the covariates you have selected for the study. Clearly identify and list the sources that you have used for data collection.
3. List the data that you have analyzed.
4. Use SAS to develop the final regression model using all tools that was covered from the textbook (Statistics Tenth Edition, McClave Sincich)
5. Comment on your final model, and provide a short and clear explanation of the results in the context of the problem.
6. Include only the relevant portions of the computer output.(SAS only)

*Please follow the instructions carefully*

*Make it concise and easy to understand (Even for the people who do not have Statistics Knowledge), rather than being abstract and sophisticated.

Price: $18.0

Solution: The downloadable solution consists of 7 pages, 1100 words and 8 charts.
Deliverable: Word Document