Learning analytics (LA) promises understanding and optimization of learning and learning environments. To enable richer insights regarding questions related to learning and education, LA solutions should be able to integrate data coming from many different data sources, which may be stored in different formats and have varying levels of structure.…

At the stage of designing an educational environment, one of the most significant problems is the creation of effective visualization tools for collecting, organizing and analysing educational information. Existing approaches to visual information analysis have a number of disadvantages, which include a significant resource intensity and high…

One of the challenges that science teachers face is the lack of strategy/method to train students in data collection and developing analytical skills, which are pre-requisites to resolve socio-scientific problems and an important element in scientific literacy. In this activity, the SWOT analysis proposed by the Stanford Research Institute in the…

Big data is an important part of innovation that has recently attracted a lot of interest from academics and practitioners alike. Given the importance of the education industry, there is a growing trend to investigate the role of big data in this field. Much research has been undertaken to date in order to better understand the use of big data in…

We interrogate the opportunities and challenges of using mixed methods (MM) within a developmental evaluation (DE) context by drawing on two illustrative cases that investigated educational change in Canada. Methods: Multi-case design and cross-case analysis, with a focus on examining common patterns across the two cases, enabling new ways of…

Among the great challenges posed to democracy today is the use of technology, data, and automated systems in ways that threaten the rights of the American public. Too often, these tools are used to limit our opportunities and prevent our access to critical resources or services. These problems are well documented. In America and around the world,…

The overwhelming majority of families rely on public education for a foothold in the American Dream, making it perhaps the most consequential expression of America's core value of opportunity for all. State policymakers are the constitutional stewards and primary funders of America's public schools. They have the awesome responsibility of guiding…

In the United States, increased pressure through accountability policy and through the production and dissemination of scientifically based research are intended to create conditions for improving research use. Concurrently, researchers, education agencies, and funders have mounted efforts to strengthen relationships between research and…

This paper contributes to a growing body of research on the increasing datafication of schooling, which has become a salient topic in comparative education and education policy research. Specifically, we address the rising scholarly concern about the meaning of (comparing) contexts as bounded localities facing an increasingly fluid and generative…

The need for geoscience students to develop a quantitative skillset is ever increasing. However, this can be difficult to implement in university-style lecture courses in a way that is both manageable for the instructor and does not involve lengthy, potentially repetitive, question sheets for the students. Here, a method for teaching dimensional…

Community-based instruction (CBI) is one type of community experience in which students with disabilities work toward instructional goals while engaged in activities occurring in a natural environment outside of a typical school setting (Hoover, 2016; Rowe et al., 2015). Educators who implement CBI capitalize on their students' time in the…

Early childhood is a crucial stage in a child's life, and aspects of the environment in the physical, social-emotional, cognitive, and health and safety domains all play important roles in shaping children's development during these early years. Having a valid and reliable measure of the quality of these aspects of children's care settings is…

In education settings, treatments are often non-randomly assigned to clusters, such as schools or classrooms, while outcomes are measured for students. This research design is called the clustered observational study (COS). We examine the consequences of common support violations in the COS context. Common support violations occur when the…

Case study has been one of the most often used qualitative research methodologies in the field of education at all levels -- from preschool to adult. Yet the number of available resources for case study researchers--be they emerging or experienced--is still limited. This paper will review the definition of the case study method as well as some of…

In massive open online courses (MOOCs), learners can interact with each other using discussion boards. Automatically inferring the states or needs of learners from their posts is of interest to instructors, who are faced with a high attrition in MOOCs. Machine learning has previously been successfully used to identify states such as confusion or…