Services
I know education data. I’ve personally collected data through classroom observations, student assessments, teacher surveys, and more. I have experienced the pain points of data collection and have seen the consequences of neglecting data management. Through those experiences, I found my passion for data management and I have spent years learning best practices and how to implement them. If you talk to anyone who knows me, they will confirm how much I love talking about and working on data management problems. For me, it is such a rewarding experience, helping education researchers implement quality practices that allow them to shift more of their focus on using data to make a positive impact on students, teachers, and communities, and less on how to organize and secure their research study data.
I currently provide a variety of data management services as a freelance consultant. If you are looking for help in any of the areas below, contact me to learn about rates and availability. I look forward to hearing from you!
You can review my experience and qualifications in my resume.
Data Management Consulting
I provide both short and long-term data management planning for every phase of the research life cycle. I can help your team set up an efficient and reproducible process for just one phase of data management, such as data collection or data entry, or help your team plan an entire data management workflow for your center or project. I also provide data curation consultation, including reviewing your existing data sources and helping prepare them for public data sharing.
My process is to meet with you and your core team to learn more about your project/s, your goals, and any existing work that has been completed so far and then I develop and present a plan for what services I can provide to support your team.
Direct Services
I also provide direct services such as data cleaning, documentation, database design, or creation of other data management or collection tools. I have proficiency with the following tools: R and RStudio, SPSS, Microsoft Access and Excel, REDCap, FileMaker, and Qualtrics. If you use other database, data collection, or data wrangling tools, let’s connect! We may still be able to find ways to work together.
Training
I currently provide two types of data management training for research teams.1. I provide a full or half-day overview of data management best practices. Using the research life cycle to guide our discussion, these trainings review data management best practices at different phases of a project, as well as how to integrate those practices into a personalized workflow that meets the needs of your specific project/s. See what previous attendees of this training have said:
I can’t overstate how valuable this training was. Crystal provided my team with important information and plans of action that I know will improve our ability to produce good work. My lab and I highly recommend this training!
- Dr. Leigh McLean, Center for Research on Educational and Social Policy, University of Delaware
2. I also provide a series of hands-on workshops in Data Wrangling with R and RStudio. The goal of the workshop series is to give your team a consistent set of criteria for assessing the quality of a dataset, as well as equip them with skills to create a clean and shareable data product. This a la carte series is designed to meet the needs of your team, no matter their level of experience.
- The first workshop in the series is an introduction to R, designed for beginners, such as those transitioning from another software like Excel or SPSS.
- The second workshop provides attendees with a standardized data cleaning checklist and then introduces team members to a series of functions that are commonly used when wrangling education data. This workshop is an excellent overview for those new to R but is also beneficial for people who currently work in R but want to learn more efficient and reproducible practices.
- The last workshop in the series reviews more advanced topics such as restructuring and joining data and also reviews the process of validating the quality of your data.
I took part in Crystal’s workshops for data management and R coding for data cleaning. Crystal is a great instructor. She has a very good pace in teaching and explains things very clearly. Before taking these workshops, I had a hard time when cleaning data with R, but now I feel very comfortable with using R for data cleaning. Besides being knowledgeable, Crystal was also very approachable and patiently helped trainees with the coding issues they struggled with. Overall, I really enjoyed the workshops with Crystal and would definitely recommend them to others.
- Anonymous Data Management and Data Cleaning in R training participant
Through this training, Crystal did a terrific job engaging us through real examples from our project! I use R very frequently, however, through these trainings I realized that I was missing most of the shortcuts, functions and packages which could make my job easier! So glad that I was able to listen to Crystal and expand my knowledge of R. I would recommend this training to people from any background or any expertise level because Crystal’s training really focuses on personal or group needs!
- Anonymous Data Management and Data Cleaning in R training participant
Wow! This was amazing. Walking through the process today and just thinking about all of the ways to consider your data was phenomenal. This was exactly as it was billed to me: "Everything you were never taught and need to know."
- Anonymous Data Cleaning for Data Sharing Using R training participant
