Reflective Essay on Science

Reflective Essay on Science

This work is a reflection on my own experiences of collaborative data science work, using the DEBRIEF framework. It is adapted from my report initially submitted in March 2022.

Describe events 'Six students, including me, worked together on the Group Project in the Data Science module. Most of us had never met before and we had not previously worked together. I was initially working from home due to various circumstances. The other five were present in person. We were working on the Open University Learning Analytics Dataset (OULAD). The question we examined was: 'How can data about students' interactions with the University educational technology help them improve students' engagement and academic achievement?'. I focused on student withdrawals. We worked with R Markdown. The choice to work with R was made in my absence by other students, as those students felt most confident using R. GitHub was used for version control. My ideas included looking at withdrawal dates and using a logistic regression model to predict which students were likely to withdraw. I suggested the 'sum of clicks' and 'score' as possible predictive factors for outcome. Others were supportive of these ideas; we each wrote part of the code to implement them. Another student suggested the 'number of late submissions' as a predictive factor and this was also included. We did EDA individually, before bringing our results together to build a predictive model and report our findings (Baraskar et al.: 2022).

Evaluation ' While working remotely, I repeatedly asked for team calls to be scheduled and for help with file management in R, but unfortunately, these things did not happen. It soon became clear that traveling to Newcastle was necessary. Attending in person made it much easier to discuss things such as division of work, as well as to ask for help with any R issues. Collaborating using the GitHub branch system usually worked well, but this way of working was new to me. I was sometimes unsure of what to do or whether what I had done had worked, partly due to remote working. Two people worked on the same sub-tasks for several days before realizing it and one person worked on a topic that was out of the scope of the project. However, using GitHub also means our research can later be further developed, by ourselves or others. As Poduska (2020) states: '[] you're not only collaborating with people right now: You're collaborating with people in the future'.

Now I have experience of collaborative working on GitHub, I am keen to work in this way again. Guides to working with GitHub are available such as Mines (2018). In data science, collaborative working is increasing (Zhang et al. 2020:1) and it was valuable to get this experience.

Technology such as Teams and WhatsApp enabled us to hold group meetings and communicate from different locations. Technology can be prone to failure and perhaps our group did not always use technology in the best possible ways. As well, connecting virtually is not the same as, or as good as, connecting in person.

It was great to work together to find solutions, make new connections with other students, and further develop teamwork and communication skills that are highly valued by employers. As a group we benefited from a flowchart about selecting the right type of predictor (Bevans 2020); a team member had found this online. Other team members provided interesting perspectives on areas including Maths and Software Engineering, which improved business understanding. At first, one person could not see the point of looking at withdrawals, but I pointed out that a large part of improving students' engagement is preventing withdrawals.

I am very much an 'ideas person' and it was great to work together with others who were supportive of these ideas and were better than I at writing R code. Students who were strong in R spent time helping me. This was time they did not spend doing technical work, but without their help, I could not have done my own technical work. Conversely, I helped those whose first language is not English.

Bring out emotions etc. ' I felt isolated during the early days of this project. I did not feel involved in the data management process, decision-making, or team discussions. However, I found the subject area interesting. I was also glad to work in a sub-area of the task that intrigued me. I felt happy when our group work improved significantly towards the end of the project. On one occasion, I felt powerless and confused when there was a conflict between two other group members. This conflict took place on our group Teams chat. In this situation, I was unsure of what action to take, but I decided to wait and see how things developed. I did not get involved in the situation. The conflict seems to have been short-lived and I was relieved when it got re