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Q
uantitative
R
easoning &
P
roblem
S
olving
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© 2014 Pacific Crest
should it be organized? How would the different stakeholders (the school, the students, legislators, etc.)
want to access and use the data? How could the course’s stakeholders answer these types of questions:
1. Is learning taking place?
2. Is the feedback (grades, assessments, etc.) having any impact on learner performance?
3. Is the course evaluation system fair?
4. Why are certain students failing and others succeeding?
W
hat Do You Already Know?
Tapping into your existing knowledge
1. What data bases are you familiar with and how would you describe their basic structure or
organization?
2. In the individual data sets, what do each of the columns represent and what do each of the rows
represents?
3. What is common among the values in a single row of a data set, that is, how are they related?
M
athematical Language
Terms and notation
attribute
— a specific description of the variable (column) in a data set
data administration
— the official responsible organizational unit that registers and monitors
users, enforces data security, monitors performance, maintaining data integrity, and performs data
management
data maintenance
— processes used to keep the database clean and well organized so that it will
not lose functionality as conditions change
data management
— defining new data structures for a database, removing data structures from the
database, and modifying the structure of existing data
database
— a set of data that has a structure designed and organized for easy update retrieval, and
maintenance
query (in a database)
— primary mechanism for retrieving information from a database consisting
of questions (queries) presented to the database in a predefined format in order to extract specific
combinations of data
record
— represents a single, implicitly structured data item in a table (row)
report (in a database)
— presents information retrieved from a query in a manner than has been
formatted to be useful and/or attractive
relational database
— a database that has multiple data sets with pre-defined relationships between
the data sets
retrieval
— obtaining information either for end-user queries and reports or for processing by
applications
SQL
—
S
tructured Query Language is the standard language for using relational database management
systems
update
— inserting, modifying, and deleting data