TALK TO TRIUMPH
Measuring the Power of Student Voice

How data analysis helped transform online classrooms at Georgia Cyber Academy.

The Question

During the 2023–2024 school year, I set a goal to help teachers at Georgia Cyber Academy increase student “talk time” — the amount of time students actively participated verbally during class. I began by collecting baseline data through classroom observations, then measured progress after coaching sessions. Over the course of the year, we achieved a 9% increase in student talk time.

That progress led to a bigger question:
Does more student talk time actually correlate with higher academic achievement?

Visualization created in R (ggplot2) showing pre-, during-, and post-observation student talk time.

Data & Tools

To examine whether student talk time correlated with academic success, I analyzed engagement data from K–12 students across Georgia Cyber Academy.

The dataset included:

Microphone activation counts (as a measure of verbal engagement)
Semester grades
Georgia Milestones assessment scores

After cleaning and organizing the data, I focused on making the results visually interpretable. Instead of displaying tables of raw numbers, I created a series of longitudinal visualizations to illustrate how student talk time changed before, during, and after coaching sessions — and how those changes related to student performance.