Learning analytics (LA) involves the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, aiming to understand and optimize both the learning process and the environments in which it occurs. Among many themes that the LA community considers, natural language processing (NLP) algorithms have been widely…

Advances in Information Technology (IT) and computer science have without a doubt had a significant impact on our daily lives. The past few decades have witnessed the advancement of IT enabled processes in generating actionable insights in various fields, encouraging research based applications of modern Data Science methods. Among many other…

Accounting for complex interactions between contextual variables and learners' individual differences in aptitudes and background requires building the means to connect and access learner data at large scales, across time, and in multiple contexts. This paper describes the ASU Learning@Scale (L@S) project to develop a digital learning network…

Despite best efforts, the student experience remains poorly understood. One under-explored approach to understanding the student experience is the use of big data analytics. The reported study is a work in progress aimed at exploring the value of big data methods for understanding the student experience. A big data analysis of an open dataset of…

This AERA Open special topic concerns the large emerging research area of education data science (EDS). In a narrow sense, EDS applies statistics and computational techniques to educational phenomena and questions. In a broader sense, it is an umbrella for a fleet of new computational techniques being used to identify new forms of data, measures,…

Collection and analysis of students' writing samples on a large scale is a part of the research agenda of the emerging writing analytics community that promises to deliver an unprecedented insight into characteristics of student writing. Yet with a large scale often comes variability of contexts in which the samples were produced--different…