Constructively engaging with learning analytics enables institutions of higher education to support students in more personalized, empowering ways, but to do so requires sustained levels of collaboration not commonly found within colleges and universities. Themes that emerge from the chapters of this volume provide useful principles for leveraging…

The cognitive load that a teacher experiences is mind-numbing. To improve, a teacher must begin by reflecting on his or her work, but with the mountain of decisions, where does a teacher find time or have the capacity to notice the way in which students are interacting with lessons? In 2014, the St. Vrain Valley School District Office of…

Games-Based Learning systems, particularly those that use advances from Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) to provide adaptive feedback and support, have proven potential as learning tools. Taking their lead from commercial games such as Little Big Planet and SuperMarioMaker, these systems are increasingly turning to content creation as a learning…

The textbook is often a primary resource for teachers in elementary content areas, and it is often used to the exclusion of other resources. Research indicates that students may not have sufficient exposure to elements of nonfiction texts in order to be successful when encountering them in the content area. For many years, there has been little…

Even though the evidence-based movement and the concept of public good have been thoroughly discussed and from a range of perspectives in the literature, there is no general consensus on the definitions and nature of these terms and concepts. In this chapter, the author conceptualizes what is meant when educators speak of the concepts like…

Written from a health-care perspective, the focus of this chapter is to discuss the evolving role of digital storytelling, as a research method. The chapter explores how digital stories can be viewed as a qualitative response to the "big data" approaches to research which are critical in the information age. It will suggest ways in which…

Complexity in item response theory (IRT) has traditionally been quantified by simply counting the number of freely estimated parameters in the model. However, complexity is also contingent upon the functional form of the model. The information-theoretic principle of minimum description length provides a novel method of investigating complexity by…

Our research explores the experiences of participants in a program for graduate students interested in pursuing faculty careers in higher education (Students Pursuing Faculty Careers). The methodologies used to collect data for this case study included individual semistructured interviews, an asynchronous online focus group, a qualitative Levels…

This case study is based on research begun for an MA dissertation in Human Resource Management and subsequently developed. It follows the government's decision that from September 2012, UK universities would be able to increase their tuition fees from a maximum of £3000 to £9000 per year. The project aimed to investigate the impact of this on…

With developing technology statistical information and data sources become a very important issues and from primary school it has become necessary to gain the skills for making interpreting and making sense of data. These skills consist of collecting information, arrangement and analysis of collected data and the interpretation of the results. The…

Challenging the "bridge metaphor" theme of this conference, this article contends that current practice-research integration strategies are more like research-to-practice "pipelines." The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the potential of clinical data-mining studies conducted by practitioners, practitioner-oriented PhD…

A process for analyzing log files collected from open-ended learning environments is developed and tested on a virtual lab problem involving reaction stoichiometry. The process utilizes a set of visualization tools that, by grouping student actions in a hierarchical manner, helps experts make sense of the linear list of student actions recorded in…

With the spread of learning analytics (LA) dashboards in K-12 schools, educators are increasingly expected to make sense of data to inform instruction. However, numerous features of school settings, such as specialized vantage points of educators, may lead to different ways of looking at data. This observation motivates the need to carefully…

This paper reports on the findings of an ESRC funded project that contributes to the evidence base underpinning contextualised approaches to undergraduate admissions in England. We show that the bolder use of reduced entry requirements for disadvantaged learners is necessary if ambitious new widening access targets set by the Office for Students…

Given that our current educational context has required many educators to utilize online instruction in some capacity over the past year, the purpose of this paper is to describe how literacy specialists and teachers can use digital tools to remotely engage in data-based decision-making within a collaborative professional learning community.…