COVID-19’s
Educational Impacts
A Digital Humanities Project
About the Project
The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019 has caused unprecedented disruption in the education sector around the world. Disadvantaged students with limited resources are disproportionately affected as schools shift to distance learning. Working with the SEDA 2023 data set developed by the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), our project seeks to understand the disparities in COVID’s educational impacts across different student populations.
Our project seeks to explore the following research questions:
Question 1
How does the change in students’ standardized test scores during COVID-19 correlate with the change before COVID-19?
Question 2
How did students’ demographic characteristics (income, race) affect academic recovery after schools returned to normal operations following COVID-19 pandemic restrictions?
Our Team
Akeesha Rodrigues
Project Manager
Akeesha was responsible for overseeing the planning and execution of the project by ensuring that everyone in the team met all the milestones along the way. She guided the team by coordinating meetings and practicing open communication while documenting all team discussions. She created the maps in the project. She is a fourth-year Neuroscience major and Digital Humanities minor.
Andres Enriquez
Data Cleaner
Andres was focused on cleaning the team’s dataset, to help ease the process of data visualizations. To properly clean and understand the data he utilized tools such as python, and Open Refine. He is a fourth year computer science major who is passionate about automation and building full stack applications.
Ariya Ghoshal
Editor
Ariya was responsible for editing the written aspects of the project. She looked through everything before it was submitted and made last minute touches before publishing it. She revised the information regarding the SEDA dataset, and the data visualization analysis. She is currently a second-year at UCLA, double majoring in Art and Data Science Statistics.
Sherry Zhou
Content Developer
Sherry was responsible for organizing the content of the website. She oversaw the writing and editing of the narrative, as well as the design of the website. Sherry is a third year at UCLA studying Political Science and Communications, and is passionate about the intersection between technology/digital media and policy.
Elisa Xu
Data Visualizations
Elisa was responsible for the data visualizations. She created various visualizations, navigating how to best showcase the data’s impact in the scope of our narrative. She researched datasets to supplement the project. To create the visualizations, Elisa mainly used Tableau to create her visualizations. Elisa is a fourth year at UCLA majoring in Pyshcology and double minoring in Asian American Studies and Entrepreneurship. She is passionate about the intersection between business and social impact.
Sihui Lin
Website designer
Sihui was responsible for designing and structuring the website. She assisted in creating data visualizations using Tableau, and worked with HTML to ensure that the embedded visualizations are presented to the team’s specifications. Sihui is a third year at UCLA double majoring in Architectural Studies and Statistics and Data Science, and she also minors in Digital Humanities. She is passionate about the impacts of digital tools on memory and cultural institutions.
Acknowledgement
We would like to thank our TA Nick for his thoughtful and steadfast guidance through the creation and execution of this project. His support through lab sessions, office hours, and consistent check-ins propelled our group to be able to successfully garner the skills we needed to create each element that is seen in this project. His passion not only for digital humanities, but for mentorship and education, has shown through each of his interactions with us.
We would also like to thank Dr. Albrezzi for her engaging and thought provoking lectures and assignments, which made it possible for us to learn and practice sorting and cleaning data, creating visualizations, and more. This project would not have been possible without her guidance.