Appendix D — Pause & Reflect

Learning R is as much about building habits and confidence as it is about memorising functions. These short reflection breaks – one after each module – are a chance to pause, notice what’s clicking (and what isn’t), and connect the material back to your own work.

There are no right or wrong answers here, and nothing to submit. Some learners like to jot down their answers in their workbook.Rmd (perhaps in a final “Reflections” section), in a separate notebook, or just think them through. If you’d like to discuss any of these questions with others, the R community links in Overview of R and RStudio – Stack Overflow, the RStudio Community, and R-bloggers – are a great place to connect.

D.1 After Module 1: Getting Started

You’ve installed R and RStudio, written your first lines of R code, and created a workbook.Rmd to keep working in.

  • Why are you learning R, and what did you hope to get out of this course? Has anything surprised you so far?
  • Have you used other data analysis or programming tools before (e.g. Excel, SPSS, Python)? What felt familiar about R so far, and what felt different?
  • At this point, how comfortable do you feel typing code directly into the console versus writing it in workbook.Rmd? Is there anything from this module you want to revisit before moving on?

D.2 After Module 2: Working with Data

You’ve worked with vectors, factors, data frames, and lists – the core building blocks for storing data in R.

  • Think about a dataset from your own work or studies. How might you represent it as a data frame? What would the columns be?
  • Which concept in this module felt most natural – vectors, factors, or data frames and lists? Which one do you think you’ll need to revisit (the Glossary is a good place to start)?
  • $, [ ], and [[ ]] all do slightly different things. Can you explain, in your own words, when you’d use each one?

D.3 After Module 3: Data in Action

You’ve imported data, visualised it with ggplot2, and learned how to find help when you’re stuck – completing the full import -> wrangle -> plot workflow.

  • Now that you’ve seen R applied end-to-end on the “fruit shop” data, do you think R could help with your own work? Why or why not?
  • What’s one type of plot from this module (scatter plot, bar chart, histogram, boxplot, etc.) that you’d like to try on your own data?
  • Looking back across all three modules, what’s one thing you want to practice more, and what’s your plan for continuing to learn R after this course? (Revisiting the Course Roadmap or working through the exercises again with your own data are both good options.)