DataKind's Student Success Tool (SST)

Customized and easily actionable insights for data-assisted advising, at no cost

Data-assisted advising helps advisors use their limited time to more efficiently identify and reach out to those most in need of help. Using the Student Success Tool to implement data-assisted advising, John Jay College has reported a 32% increase in senior graduation rates in two years via their CUSP program. Based on the success of this implementation, DataKind is supported by Google.org to develop this solution with additional postsecondary institutions, at no institutional cost. This repo is where the google.org fellows team will collaborate with DataKind to develop and ultimately share the open source components of the tool.

DataKind's Product Principles

• Transparent: Our features and models will be openly shared with the institution, so you can know exactly what variables are leading to identifying those student most at risk of non graduation. Our end-to-end tool code will be openly shared in this github repo.
• Dedicated to bias reduction: We use bias-reducing techniques and regularly review our implementations for fairness and equity.
• Humans in the loop by design: Our interventions are designed to be additive to the student experience, and all algorithms are implemented through human actors (advisors).

Model Training and Prediction Workflow

What's in this repo?

Current PDP pipeline code: to be built into an actual installable python package

• Base schema: defines the standard data schema for PDP schools, with no customization
• Constants: defined for all schools
• Dataio: ingests the PDP data and restructures it for our workflow
• Features: subpackage for each grouping of features with a function that takes school customization arguments and adds the features to the data you give it as new columns.
• EDA: produces exploratory visualizations, summary statistics, and coorelation analysis for features
• Targets: defines and filters the data based on the student population, modeling checkpoint, and outcome variable
• Dataops: other functions frequently used across the process
• Modeling: AutoML.py is the main code that can be used for running and evaluating models, configured with parameters accepted from the config.yaml
• Tests: unit tests, to be built out into full unit testing suite (possibly fellows can help with this to get us set up for open source)
• Synthetic_data: Code for creating fake data for testing purposes

Contributing

Please read the CONTRIBUTING to learn how to contribute to the tool development.

Setup

local machine

1. Install uv (instructions here).
2. Install Python (instructions here). When running on Databricks, we're constrained to PY3.10: uv python install 3.10
3. Install this package: uv pip install -e .

databricks notebook

1. Connect notebook to a cluster running Databricks Runtime 14.3 LTS or 15.4 LTS.
2. Run the %pip magic command, pointing it at one of three places:
   • a local workspace directory: %pip install ../../../student-success-tool/
   • a GitHub repo (for a specific branch): %pip install git+https://github.com/datakind/student-success-tool.git@develop
   • public PyPI: %pip install student-success-tool (NOTE: THIS DOESN'T WORK YET)
3. Restart Python, per usual: dbutils.library.restartPython()