Topic and Trend
For the data trend project, I decided to examine the number of declared education majors at UMW compared to the whole student body. The United States is going through a teachers crisis, and I was hoping that examining the number of students majoring in education might explain a trend that mirrors the number of current teachers in the US to try to identify what is causing the shortage in teachers in America today. Examining the data through the table and chart revealed that while the number of students at UMW studying education remained relatively low, the number of education majors remained steady even increased after COVID, though decreased in the the most recent years. I found this data set through the UMW Grade Distribution Report. The full data set can be found through this Excel Sheet.
Process
The trend of the number of declared education majors at UMW decreasing and then steadily increasing overtime was found through Excel. After looking at the Grade Distribution Report, I copied the number of total declared education majors for each semester onto an Excel sheet (excluding Spring 2020, which did not have any data due to the change in grading systems as a result of the COVID outbreak. After creating a table, I copied the data into a pivot table, which helped me create a more visual line graph to represent the changes in the number of declared education majors and total undergraduate students with declared majors. Through the chart, I was able to identify that the data first decreased, increased, and then decreased overtime. The steady decrease in the years after COVID may represent a possible trend in teaching conditions after COVID, though the data resembled pre-COVID data closely.