Civitas Learning was conceived as a community of practice, bringing together forward-thinking leaders from diverse higher education institutions to leverage insight and action analytics in their ongoing efforts to help students learn well and finish strong. We define insight and action analytics as drawing, federating, and analyzing data from…

This research note contributes to the discussion of methods that can be used to identify useful auxiliary variables for analyses of incomplete data sets. A latent variable approach is discussed, which is helpful in finding auxiliary variables with the property that if included in subsequent maximum likelihood analyses they may enhance considerably…

The massive adoption of technology in learning processes comes with an equally large capacity to track learners. Learning analytics aims at using the collected information to understand and improve the quality of a learning experience. The privacy and ethical issues that emerge in this context are tightly interconnected with other aspects such as…

Word clouds (or tag clouds) are popular, fun ways to display text data in graphical form; however, we contend that they can also be useful tools in assessment. Using word clouds, instructors can quickly and easily produce graphical depictions of text representing student knowledge. By investigating the patterns of words or phrases, or lack…

This article proposes a framework of quality indicators for learning analytics that aims to standardise the evaluation of learning analytics tools and to provide a mean to capture evidence for the impact of learning analytics on educational practices in a standardised manner. The criteria of the framework and its quality indicators are based on…

This paper presents the overall lifecycle and evolution of a software system we have developed in relation to the "Learning Ecology through Science with Global Outcomes" (LETS GO) research project. One of the aims of the project is to support "open inquiry learning" using mobile science collaboratories that provide open…

Various educational mandates, including the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and No Child Left Behind (NCLB), and educational approaches, such as Response to Intervention (RTI) and Positive Behavior Supports (PBS), require use of objective data to inform decision making for academics and behavior. However, some traditional…

This brief provides tips for forming a team of staff and consultants with the needed expertise to make key measurement decisions that will ensure high-quality data for answering the study's research questions. The brief outlines the main responsibilities of measurement team members. It also describes typical measurement tasks and discusses…

Similar to mammalian brains, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) are universal approximators, capable of yielding near-optimal solutions to a wide assortment of problems. ANNs are used in many fields including medicine, internet security, engineering, retail, robotics, warfare, intelligence control, and finance. "ANNs have a tendency to get…

This document recommends a set of core practices, operations, and templates that can be adopted and adapted by local education agencies (LEAs) as they consider how to respond to requests for both new and existing data about the education enterprise. These recommendations reflect core best practices for: (1) managing the flow of requests; (2)…

Suppose an education researcher wants to test the impact of a high school drop-out prevention intervention in which at-risk students attend classes to receive intensive summer school instruction. The district will allow the researcher to randomly assign students to the treatment classes or to the control group. Half of the students (the treatment…

This case study is about using narrative archival sources in the social sciences, a research method which is distinct from using archival data that are statistical in nature, such as birth cohort data or archived qualitative data that have already been subject to primary analysis. Generally, archival material is a primary resource for historians,…

This case provides an account of how micro-ethnography and fiction narratives were used together on a PhD that explores teachers' emotional involvement with their day-to-day work in 'special-alternative' schools. The case study presented here focuses on examining the practicalities and challenges of putting together those methods. A…

This case study presents an example of using a generalized linear model with a log-linear link to calculate an adjusted risk ratio to be able to assess the association between educational attainment and obesity in a cohort study of American adults. Both risk ratios and odds ratios can be calculated based on cohort study data, and risk ratios are…

The interpretation of single-case data requires systematic visual analysis across and within conditions. Graphs are a vital component for analyzing and communicating single-case design data and a necessary tool for applied researchers and practitioners. Several articles have been published with task analyses for graphing data with the new versions…