TASO Technical Guides

A collection of interactive TASO resources to enhance your evaluation, data visualisation, and coding practices

Introduction

Welcome to the TASO Technical Guide, an interactive resource designed to guide and enhance your evaluation, data visualisation and coding practices. This website contains:

A practical guide on using institutional data to identify equality gaps in students success and evaluate the effectiveness of interventions designed to reduce them. Aims to help higher education providers generate robust type 3 (causal) evidence.

Developed to help TASO, our partners, and the wider sector to create impactful charts. Designed to provide clear, accessible guidelines that you can apply using the data visualisation tool of your choice (e.g., Excel, R or Tableau).

Guidelines, tools and tips for ensuring that code is accessible and shareable. Designed for those looking to improve the tidiness, reproducibility and quality of their R scripts.

Why publish on GitHub?

We created these documents using Quarto, and published them through GitHub. This enables a more fluid and responsive approach to sharing good practices. It allows us to regularly update the content, ensuring that you always have access to the latest guidance.

The interactive nature of this website also facilitates a more engaging experience. You will see callout boxes that highlight key points or warnings:

Tip

The data visualisation guide and coding good practice are separate but complementary documents. We designed the data visualisation style guide with a wide audience in mind. Those who do code can view the technical details behind the charts.

You will also see when we are referring to code through text highlighted like this. You can see code that you can copy and try yourself in these fold-out boxes:

Show the code 
library(tidyverse)

taso_three_colour <- c("#3b66bc", "#00a8da", "#07dbb3")

df <- data.frame(
  Year = c(2019, 2020, 2021, 2022),
  School_A = c(10, 12, 15, 13),
  School_B = c(17, 15, 21, 24),
  School_C = c(4, 2, 5, 6)
)

You can see the latest changes and the code behind how we built this website using Quarto on our GitHub page.

Licensing and acknowledgements

The TASO Technical Guide © 2024 by TASO is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0. This means that others are free to share, copy, distribute, and transmit the work, as well as to adapt or build upon it, for non-commercial purposes, as long as appropriate credit is given, a link to the license is provided, and any changes made are indicated.

This website incorporates and adapts elements of the Quarto code from the “Best Practices for Data Visualisation” guide, authored by Andreas Krause, Nicola Rennie and Brian Tarran, and published by the Royal Statistical Society in July 2023. While the specific content from the guide has not been used, the code structure has been valuable in the development of specific functionalities on this site. Their guide is accessible at https://royal-statistical-society.github.io/datavisguide/ and is licensed under CC BY 4.0. We are thankful to the authors and the Royal Statistical Society for sharing their expertise and resources, which have greatly assisted in the technical aspects of this website’s construction.

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