Visualization of Student Cohort Data With Sankey Diagrams via Web-Centric Technologies

Universities have long been analyzing student cohorts in an attempt to understand the factors influencing whether a student continues in their major, switches to another major (often referred to as swirl), or drops out entirely. A visual representation of how students flow between majors and colleges can aid in this understanding. This thesis will study how a student cohort can be represented in a Sankey Diagram. In this analysis, a student cohort is represented as a weighted, directed, graph, where a vertex represents a distinct class status for a semester and each weighted edge represents the number of students moving between class statuses. To ease understanding, this graph is represented visually as a Sankey Diagram, a special kind of flow diagram. The purpose of this tool is to give university administration a visual representation of the flow of a student cohort between majors and colleges on a semester by semester basis. This representation can be viewed at three levels of granularity: that of an entire university, college, or a single major.

Name thesis:degree_name

Computer Engineering

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Year

2014

Author dc:creator

• Morse, Caleb

Contributors dc:contributor

• Heileman, Gregory
• Abdallah, Chaouki
• Lamb, Christopher
• Turner, Terence

• Sankey
• Student Data
• Visualization

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/ece_etds/180

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digitalrepository.unm.edu:ece_etds-1179