Game-based learning (GBL) is increasingly recognized as an effective tool for teaching diverse skills, particularly in science education, due to its interactive, engaging, and motivational qualities, along with timely assessments and intelligent feedback. However, more empirical studies are needed to facilitate its wider application in school…

In 2017, the mathematics assessments that are part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) program underwent a transformation shifting the administration from paper-and-pencil formats to digitally-based assessments (DBA). This shift introduced new interactive item types that bring rich process data and tremendous opportunities to…

This study examines the use of data analytics to evaluate students' behaviours during their participation in an online collaborative learning environment called SkyApp. To visualise the learning traits of engagement, emotion and motivation, students' inputs and activity data were captured and quantified for analysis. Experiments were first carried…

Still lacking in the mainstream data-driven approaches to studying educational settings is the very basic, most popular educational setting -- that is, the classroom. Capturing data that describes learning in the classroom is the focus of the current issue. The articles in this issue present a large variety of data sources, data collection tools…

Automatic machine learning (AutoML) methods automate the time-consuming, feature-engineering process so that researchers produce accurate student models more quickly and easily. In this paper, we compare two AutoML feature engineering methods in the context of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data mining competition. The…

Research involving digital games and language learning is rapidly growing. One advantage of using digital games to support language learning is the ability to collect data on students learning in real time. In this study, we use educational data mining methods to explore the relationship between in-game data and elementary students' Chinese…

Stealth assessment has been successfully embedded in educational games to measure students' learning in an unobtrusive and supportive way. This study explored the possibility of applying stealth assessment in a digital reading platform and sought to identify potential in-system indicators of students' digital learning outcomes. Utilizing the user…

Data use is considered a key lever in school improvement processes, but the punitive pressure of high-stakes accountability can influence whether or not data use is enacted in ways which facilitate improvement. School leaders must learn to respond to high-stakes accountability in ways which lead teachers to feel safe, efficacious, and agentic with…

Increased attention to Data-Informed Instruction (DII) and learning analytics has not been accompanied by a commensurate base of theory or evidence showing how practitioners successfully enact DII, or illustrating what the difficulties and contextual particularities of doing so involve (Coburn & Turner, 2012; Little, 2012; Spillane, 2012).…