The Research office is exploring how students are moving through math courses here at SAC. The following files are visualizations that were created for this purpose. You can use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out as needed.
Each node is a math class at SAC, which you can hover over for a title. The number in parentheses next to the title indicates the number of students who did not attempt a subsequent course after that course (e.g., 118 students did not attempt another math course after taking Geometry). Each arrow represents a flow of students from the origin node to the terminating node as the subsequent math course attempted. Arrows that loop around and point back at the node indicate the number of students who reattempted a course after attempting it previously. The width of the arrow is proportional to the number of students passing between those classes, and if you hover over the arrows you can get the total number of students (based on the last 8 years) moving between courses. If you click on a node it will highlight all connected nodes, and the dropdown menu will let you filter to either remedial or college level courses.
The interesting thing about force networks are the built in physics. Essentially, you can get an idea of how "important" any given node is by moving it around and viewing the impact on the other nodes. In the case of this network, Statistics and Probability (219) is a very important node (moving it moves basically the whole network) whereas moving Geometry (70) has relatively little impact on the rest of the network. From this we can identify pathways and interconnected courses that are in different pathways.
Please use either Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox to view the visualizations, as they will not open in Internet Explorer. For the full network visualization follow this link (SAC Full Math network). Additionally, two more focused visualizations were created for students who passed 083 (SAC Math 83 network) and who passed 084 (SAC Math 84 network).