myDataFrame <- read.csv("GradeRetentionData.csv")
The read.csv function assumes that your file has a header row, so row 1 is the name of each column. If that’s not the case, you can add header=FALSE to the command:
mydata <- read.csv("filename.txt", header=FALSE)
If your data use another character to separate the fields, not a comma, R also has the more general read.table function. So if your separator is a tab, for instance, this would work:
mydata <- read.table("filename.txt", sep="\t", header=TRUE)
Note that when using read.table you need to specify header=TRUE if the first row is column names (default is FALSE which is the opposite of read.csv where default is TRUE).