Abstract:
While intuitive time-series visualizations exist for common datasets, student
course history data is difficult to represent using traditional visualization
techniques due its concurrent nature. A visual composition process is
developed and applied to reveal trends across various groupings. By working
closely with educators, analytic strategies and techniques are developed to
leverage the visualization composition to reveal unknown trends in the data.
Furthermore, clustering algorithms are developed to group common course-grade
histories for further analysis. Lastly, variations of the composition process
are implemented to reveal subtle differences in the underlying data. These
analytic tools and techniques enabled educators to confirm expected trends
and to discover new ones.