Analyzing Student Data in a Spreadsheet

Below is the spreadsheet assignment for Google sheets using the imaginary student data.  Figuring out how to embed the sheet was more difficult that I thought it would be but the actual act of embedding was very simple.  It was just a matter of finding how to get the HTML code to be able to copy it.  Just FYI, if you go to the "share" tab in the upper right hand corner of the Google sheet, click on the down arrow get the drop down menu, and select publish as a webpage.  In the new window, where it says "Get link to the published data" there is a drop down menu that initially says "Webpage".  Click on that menu and select "HTML to embed in a page", copy the information that shows up below and paste that into your blog under the "Edit HTML" tab if you are using Blogger.  After that, everything seemed to work fine

As for manipulating the data in Google sheets, it worked very similar to Excel which I am very familiar with.  It appears to me that there is a sort function that I can use to sort the information but I have not yet figured out how to use it.  Manually sorting the data, which is what I did, is fine for small data sets like this but for very large sets that would be a very time consuming task.

As for the specific data, most of the below average students showed slow and steady gains through all five tests.  The chart clearly identifies three students (Queen, Walter, and Renee) as significantly lagging behind the other students and as a teacher I would try to figure out why this was the case.  It could be something about how I was teaching or it could be some other external factor that I was not aware of but the visual representation of the graph makes it clear that something is going on.  Additionally, the graph also shows that there is very inconsistent performance by Katherine which would be good to look into.

As a teacher, I think that graphing out all of the students scores over time, perhaps in groups of 10-15 so as not to obscure trends, so that I can look for patterns in student scores with relation to the teaching tools that I use so that I can be sure that I am effectively teaching to my students' strengths to maximize their learning.