useR! 2024

In my role at the University of Huddersfield, a mid-size institution in the north of England, I contribute to the analysis and reports on students' educational outcomes and factors that affect differential attainment of various groups of students across the entire institution. They present the composition of student population and state of their educational outcomes at various levels of institutional hierarchy and to various internal stakeholders. In this talk, I will highlight the varied applications of R analytical, visualisation and reporting capabilities in a higher education context: from correlations between attendance and marks on individual modules, through parametrised reports on students engagement with online materials, to mixed effects models that disentangle contributions of socioeconomic status and prior qualifications to graduate outcomes, with a few maps thrown in as well. These applications demonstrate the versatility of R, used not only as a business intelligence tool, but also as a "pedagogical intelligence" tool, to help us evaluate educational practice, focus our attention on challenges and direct support to improve the students' outcomes.