Quantitative Data Analysis Using Microsoft Excel: A School Administrator's Guide

Using Microsoft Excel for those who work in our nation’s schools - superintendents, principals, curriculum coordinators, teachers, etc., are inundated with a multitude of data from a number of different sources each and every day of the school year. Having taught computer applications and educational research to aspiring school leaders for a number of years, we have found that the old adage “learning by doing” is the best way to learn this material. Many action research projects require the collection, tabulation, and analysis of data. Assisting the school administrators with these tasks is primarily what this book is about. Researchers utilize powerful tools such as SPSS to assist them in these tasks. However, we have found that such programs are not readily available to the school administrator and, even if they are, the skills to effectively utilize them have not been mastered. Therefore, we have based this book on the utilization of the much more familiar application, Microsoft Excel.