Applied Analysis:
Incoming EIU President Dr. Jay Gatrell is planning a task force to look at student wellbeing in the wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic. He has asked a group of
students on campus to meet to discuss the multiple impacts that the pandemic has had on campus life and student learning – especially student mental
health. You were selected to participate in this group of students and agreed to be the chairperson leading the group in making recommendations on student
mental health at EIU.
Luckily, you just finished analyzing data on EIU undergraduate students’ anxiety and depression during the pandemic. Your statistics professor assigned you
a data set that looked at different independent variables like gender identity, class ranking, field of study, and an indicator of how students feel they have
adapted to shifts in teaching and learning during the pandemic.
As the chairperson, you need to prepare a written summary of what you have found about the mental health status of EIU students. Because Dr. Gatrell is
interested in the academic outcomes of students, you decide to write how student anxiety and depression varies for students of based on gender, academic
class rankings, fields of study, and their perceptions on how they adapted to the pandemic.
Write an 800-to-1,000-word response – much like an Executive Research Summary – which recapitulates what you have concluded from these data analyzed
in Excel Exercises #9 and #10.
Consider, for example, when thinking about freshmen, sophomores, juniors, or seniors, who should Dr. Gatrell should target programming for based on
different outcomes for students with anxiety or depression.
Or what should Dr. Gatrell understand about how students from different fields of study might be impacted differently (or not) by the pivot to remote
learning? Are there notable differences based on major in terms of anxiety or depression?
Does the gender identity of college students impact their anxiety or depression?
Perhaps you found that students who adapted well to the shift to remote teaching and learning fared better in terms of anxiety and/or depression.
Based on your analyses, what does the incoming President of our university need to know? And what should he do about it?