In this project, from the Applied Statistics course, we had to develop a statistical analysis on a topic at our choice. We studied the PISA dataset, which contains data collected from students in european high schools. Our goal was to study their well-being, both
psychological (do they believe in themselves? can they bear school failures and successes? are they scared about their future? etc);
and social (do they feel supported by their families, classmates, and teachers? do they suffer some bullying events? etc);
in order to identify which where the healthiest countries and why, i.e. which factors induced such a high level of well being.
We applied several statistical techniques such as linear mixed models, random forests, PCA, Manova and Anova, to derive in the end the a deep understanding of the variables that mostly affect the well-being. For example, we found significant impacts in: increasing the presence of books at home, having more possibilities of playing sports, renovating the school facilities, giving specific training of the teachers, etc. Moreover, a final ranking of the european countries was derived, as the title "Where are the happiest students?" suggests.
To explain our results, we composed the following poster and we also developed an interactive game, through a Telegram bot (even if in hindsight a google form could have been more effective and efficient, from our side but also from users' side), to make the player impersonate the Minister of Education, for a state of their choice, and decide where should they spend their budget in order to improve the well-being of the students of their country. A final scoreboard of the players was also available online, and automatically updating in real-time, to make the players see how they position themselves, and against to each other, according to their strategy.
Github repository: https://github.com/federicomor/progetto-applied.
Link diretto al pdf qui. Direct link to pdf here.
