Savannah Kelly (University of Mississippi)
Abstract
Have you or your students wanted to learn R but felt the learning curve was too steep or that you wouldn’t have time to teach programming? This workshop will introduce attendees to the tidyverse, a suite of R packages primarily used for data cleaning, manipulation, and visualization, but more importantly, a highly accessible approach to teaching and engaging with the R environment.
Most students in my statistics course have no background in computer science or mathematics. I have found that teaching the tidyverse is the most compelling way to get students excited and invested in learning R, and subsequently, using R for statistical modeling. When given the opportunity to teach statistics, although all previous instructors used SPSS, I decided to teach R. I wanted students to learn statistical modeling using real-world data, but to work with real-world data, we would need a toolkit to manipulate, clean, and visualize our data prior to modeling. That toolkit is the tidyverse.
This hands-on workshop is intended for anyone who wants to learn R but has not had the time or energy. If you’ve never used R, this workshop will get you up and running. We’ll learn how to import and export (readr), clean and manipulate (dplyr, tidyr, stringr, forcats), and visualize data (ggplot2). This workshop will be laid-back and fun, and you will walk away with a foundational understanding of R and the tidyverse.