Visualization of Student Cohort Data With Sankey Diagrams via Web-Centric Technologies
Caleb D. Morse · UNM’s Digital Repository (University of New Mexico) · 2014
Universities have long been analyzing student cohorts in an attempt to understand the factors influencing whether a student continues in their major, switches to another major (often referred to as swirl), or drops out entirely. A visual representation of how students flow between majors and colleges can aid in this understanding. This thesis will study how a student cohort can be represented in a Sankey Diagram. In this analysis, a student cohort is represented as a weighted, directed, graph, where a vertex represents a distinct class status for a semester and each weighted edge represents the number of students moving between class statuses. To ease understanding, this graph is represented visually as a Sankey Diagram, a special kind of flow diagram. The purpose of this tool is to give university administration a visual representation of the flow of a student cohort between majors and colleges on a semester by semester basis. This representation can be viewed at three levels of granularity: that of an entire university, college, or a single major.