Co-curricular Quantitative Data Analytics Training Program (CQDATP) for Undergraduate Natural Science Students

While data analytics has increasingly become an essential skill for various professionals in natural science fields, college curricula often cannot be updated frequently to meet the emerging changes of the workforce’s needs. A drastic curricular change is particularly difficult at small colleges with limited availability of faculty. This study proposes a co-curricular training program that enables natural science students to master skills of applying quantitative data analytics on real datasets without requiring a significant curricular change. The training program was developed and implemented as a sequence of in-person one-hour training sessions at a small four-year college. The results show that the approach is effective in improving students’ data analytics skills. This program can be adapted by other small institutions to achieve similar goals.

This dataset include the training materials and deidentified student performance and survey responses.