KENNETH A JENSEN
PREDICTING COLLEGE READINESS FOR STUDENTS IN EIGHTH GRADE
Gwinnett County Public Schools
Gwinnett County is located in Georgia just outside of Atlanta and their public school system is one if the largest in the country.
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I worked closely with the school system's research department to find new ways to identify where the schools had room for improvement in the education of the individual students.
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The main focus was to utilize the large volumes of data that the school system has available on each student along with data science and statistics to develop an early-warning system for students who were at risk of not being college-ready when they graduate High School. I succeeded in creating machine learning models that allowed us to identify the at-risk students as early as the 8th grade and one of the main indicators was found to be the student's achievements in 8th grade algebra.
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These warnings are early enough for the school and the teachers to intervene and formulate a plan and any remedial actions for the individual student to help make them college-ready when they graduate High School.
IBM Corp. (2012)
Gwinnett County gains award-winning insight into school performance
To improve student outcomes, Gwinnett County Public Schools (GCPS) needed better insight into school performance. In particular, the organization wanted to adjust results to account for economic and demographic disparities among schools, in order to reveal which were truly adding value and which were under-performing. It also wanted the ability to benchmark performance figures against other high-performing large school districts nationally.
"I had the pleasure of having Kenneth help us with one of our clients. In addition to bringing tremendous technical skills in the areas of analytics and data science, he also had excellent people skills. He did some predictive analytics work for us using SPSS Modeler and not only did the analytics work but was able to walk the client through the modeling process while explaining the pros and cons of the various techniques. I would highly recommend Kenneth for any analytics or data science position."