Happy Christmas!

Here we are at the eve of another Christmas! If you asked me where this year has gone I would point you to the inumerable spreadsheets, books and piles of printed papers that I have accrued over the last 12 months.

The last 2 weeks have been a mixture of triumph and disaster. The disaster was discovering a basic error in the analysis spreadsheet that meant all the work I had done up to a week last Sunday was wrong. The air was blue when I found this but since then I have corrected the error, checked the calculation cells and run the data through again. This time rather than print the results out I have simply marked up a summary sheet with colours to show the highest difference between results of those within a category and everyone else. This minor triumph shows very clearly that rest is not a factor at all in almost all the variables and that work is also less of an issue.

I have also exported the final results for the students taking the Part 1 course and this gives me a picture of who stayed the course and who dropped out early. Once Christmas is over I can make a proper start on going through the data variable by variable. I have primed the family that I will be otherwise engaged so hope to finish this by the end of the month. I am taking the first week of January as annual leave and hope to have made a start on writing before I return to College on the 12th.

Those of you following this blog will notice a change in the title as the 12 months is now stretching towards 18 months. All being well I trust I will not need to change it again!

I wish you all well and hope you have a very Happy Christmas and, credit crunch or not, a prosperous New Year.

Analysis on Course

The last 2 weeks have been reasonably productive. The spreadsheet for analysing the diaries against the different variables has worked well and I have further refined it so that I can drill down further to look at times by total for the week, weekdays, weekends as well as by day. I have also refined it so that I can look at specific groups of students and if necessary to exclude students who answer Yes to specific questions.

I have identified those activities and variables that I want to examine in the first round and I have almost completed their analysis. The output gives me an indication as to whether there are significant differences and the second round will be to drill deeper and to compare against the student profiles. All being well this will be completed by the end of December. At the end of this week we have the results board for the target students so it will be interesting to add in their overall result to the profiles.

I am taking the first week in January off work and will use this to crack on with the writing. I have already set up the chapters in Word so feel more or less prepared! Also early in January I will be seeing my supervisor before he jets off to Singapore and Hong Kong for his sabbatical. There really is no rest for the wicked. At the moment I'm not sure that I have time for Christmas but no doubt time will be found!