03-ds-role.Rmd

What is a Data Scientist in Education? 

One way to define data science is to think of it as [combining three skills](http://drewconway.com/zia/2013/3/26/the-data-science-venn-diagram) to do data analysis: programming, statistics, and content knowledge. Though if you Google "what is a data scientist" you'll won't find a simple answer. 

But for this book's exploration, thinking of data science as a combination of these three skills is useful because we can try substituting the field of education in for "content knowledge." Even then, we still face a broad field of possibilities when imagining what a data scientist in education actually does on a day-to-day basis. 

While having no established data science identity makes it hard for educators to explain their data work to the layperson, it does allow them to take on a variety of data-related activities and, ultimately, build the definition of the role. So rather than grapple with defining this role, let's share some examples of what data scientists do in the field of education. 

*Leading Office Culture Toward a Data-Driven Approach*

Jesse, a director at an education non-profit in Texas, is setting up a database to house student achievement data. This project requires a number of data science skills we'll discuss in chapter five, including cleaning data into a consistent format. Once the data is prepared, Jesse builds dashboards to help her teammates explore the data.

But not all of Jesse's work can be found in a how-to manual for data scientists. She manages a team and serves as the de facto project manager for IT initiatives. And given her expertise and experience in data science, she's leading the charge towards a more data-driven approach within the organization.

*Helping School Districts Plan to Meet Their Goals*

Ryan, a special education administrator in California, uses data science to reproduce the state department of education's special education compliance metrics, then uses the results to build an early warning system for compliance based on local datasets. In this case, Ryan uses foundational data science skills like data cleaning, visualization, and modeling to help school districts monitor and meet their compliance requirements. 

*Doing and Empowering Research On Data Scienctists in Education*

Joshua, Assistant Professor of STEM Education at University of Tennessee in Knoxville, researches how students do data science and helps teachers teach the next generation of data-informed citizens. He makes this work possible by building R packages—self-contained groups of data tools—that he and other researchers use to analyze datasets efficiently. 

The data scientists in these examples apply statistics and programming to create new knowledge in the education field. But that's as far as we can go when looking for commonalities in their day-to-day work. Maybe the education community will develop common norms and expectations for how it all works together as the relationship between data science and education grows. 

But because this relationship is still young, it is important that the people growing data science within education understand the culture and unique challenges in their education job. Afterall, the defining feature that will differentiate data science in education from data science in general will be doing data science that meets the unique needs of students, staff, and administration in education.