Hi Carrie,
Glad you're joining the course. Based on your very cool job and education, I'm looking forward to following your posts and reflections.
I've used Adobe Connect's poll tool for some work with groups of faculty and found it quite helpful. Hope you can share some of your plans for these tools as well.
Cheers,
Jeff
Good question, I think we should. Seems like these analytic approaches are broadly useful and could mature into a helpful educational resource. I suspect learners that struggle with a particular concept also share some common identifiable attributes, experiences, or behaviors. Many great teachers already have some ideas about these commonalities, but this expertise is too often underutilized because we don't have a systematic analytic environment to detect them or to support educational actions.
For example, imagine if a physics faculty member knew the textbook a student's ninth grade science teacher used to first explain the scientific method. Could that knowledge reveal something that would be relevant to his instructional strategy? Potentially, and it seems like analytics could help scale such tailoring so that patterns of historical data are used to predict potential misconceptions and to recommend targeted/personalized instructional support. We have a long way to go, but several analytic competitors (such as, Amazon and Netflix) have already illustrated the potential.
Jeff
Hi Mark,
Good call out. When I read that part I assumed it was the nested nature of school settings with students measured by teachers, in classes, in schools, in districts, etc... Many have found hiearchical linear models to help here. These complexities in the measurement model are probably somewhat unique to education and need some additional work beyond most business applications.
That said, I suspect it's true also that the analytic applications havn't focused enough on the the conceptual relationships amoungst their measures and items. I've been reading about Rasch analytic techniques and suspect their application across assignments/courses/programs would strengthen our measures of learning outcomes.
Jeff
Nice article today in the Chronicle about course sequence analysis. Glad to see the Chronicle covering this type of emerging work ni institutional research.
Interesting notion towards the end about statistically "controlling" for student's personality to improve the power of the analysis - hunch?
Check it out!
http://chronicle.com/article/One-Measure-of-a-Professor-/125867/
Jeff
Hi Michael,
Glad to have you in this forum and I'm interested in your work to measure learning outcomes. I've been involved in this type of work as well and always look for collaborative opportunities. In my work, I've gotten some benefit from the concept of an assessment triangle, in which a model of student cognition is used as a basis for measuring outcomes (check out link below). Have you had any success in articulating such models to measure learning outcomes? Seems like these models would be a great way to foster cross-institutional collaboration.
Knowing what students know http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309072727
Jeff