Friday, January 31, 2014

Spring is in the air!

Not actual spring, mind you, since the temperature in New York has barely broken 20 degrees all winter, but the Spring 2014 semester!  We came back from SSWR in San Antonio energized - we had a really good interactive workshop AND we got to meet some other social workers who use R!

In the meantime, we have four sections of Practice Research going on at Wurzweiler this spring, and we thought we would let you know how our students are using SSD for R throughout the semester. 

Everyone teaches a little differently, but, over the years, we have both come to the conclusion that the best way to get students comfortable with using statistical software is to have them use it early, incrementally, and often.  The students don't get into analyzing their own data until later in the semester, so we start out with datasets that we use throughout our book and in our own research.

Charlie's class, which meets in person, has already created their first annotated graph of Jenny's yelling:


Pretty good for the first day of class, huh?

Wendy's class is a distance learning class (a big shout out to Moodle, which is making our lives infinitely easier this semester), so that section is more concerned right now with downloading R, RStudio, and SSD for R, since these students' computer labs are in their living rooms.  Once we have everyone on-board with that, we will be zipping right along.

We have both provided our students with an earlier draft of the manuscript for our book, so they can step through activities at home AND they will be able to refer back to the text throughout the semester when the students eventually analyze their own data.

Stay tuned - we both LOVE teaching this class (and our students enjoy taking it), so we will be blogging often about our students' progress.

In the meantime, feel free to check out our website and feel free to email us!



Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Goal!

Did we get your attention?  No, we are not talking football!  We are talking about the Gline() function, which is in the newest release of SSD for R, 1.4.1.  

After spending some time with John Orme and Terri Combs-Orme at CSWE in Dallas this past November, we thought that it would be a good idea to add a goal line to our graphing functions.  What does a goal line represent?  It displays a personal goal that you're aiming for in your work with your client/student/patient.

Here's an example for you:

Bobby is a child who is throwing temper tantrums at school.  The ultimate goal would be, of course, to eliminate these completely, but a shorter term objective is to decrease the tantrums to no more than one a day.  We can now visualize this:



By adding a goal line, we can see that in the baseline, Bobby met this goal three times, but met it or exceeded it fourteen times in the intervention.

If you haven't downloaded the newest version of SSD for R, do it now so you can use this slick new function!

If you haven't visited our website lately, come see us as www.ssdanalysis.com!