To conduct a province-wide study of school divisions’ experiences with teacher retention before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. This will be achieved by distributing a survey inquiring about how staff employing, retention, and dismissal have changed since the pandemic. The survey will also identify hiring practices and division properties such as rural/urban. Once complete, this survey will be submitted to the College of Alberta School of Superintendents (CASS), Alberta’s educational leaders that oversee the success of school systems in Alberta.

Survey data will be used with data analysis techniques; unsupervised learning techniques such as clustering will identify key factors associated with higher or lower staff hiring, retention, and other quantifiers. Patterns associated with hiring techniques will be analyzed, and conclusions about population geographical factors’ relation to the survey results will be drawn.

1. Conduct an Alberta-wide survey targeted at school divisions.

2. Clean and transform the collected data from the survey.

3. Use RStudio to conduct data analysis processes such as clustering and decision trees.

4. Record findings in an academic research paper.

The student will work under the supervision of Dr. Mohamad El-Hajj.