The education sector has been quick to recognize the power of predictive analytics to enhance student success rates. However, there are challenges to widespread adoption, including the lack of accessibility and the potential perpetuation of inequalities. These challenges present in different stages of modeling, including data preparation, model…

Persistence is an important part of student success--both in and out of school. To enhance persistence, we first need to assess it accurately. Digital games can be used as vehicles for measuring and enhancing persistence. The purpose of this study is to test the effects of (a) game-level characteristics (i.e., game mechanics and conceptual…

Although educators frequently use assessment to identify who needs supplemental instruction and if that instruction is working, there is a lack of research investigating assessment that informs what instruction students need. The purpose of the current study was to determine if a brief (approximately 20 min) task that reflects a common middle…

Introduction: Despite the assumed importance of school-focused possible identities for academic motivation and outcomes, interventions rarely assess the effect of the intervention on possible identities. This may be due to difficulty coding open-ended text at scale but leaves open a number of questions: 1) how do school-focused possible identities…

In the analysis of causal effects in non-experimental studies, conditioning on observable covariates is one way to try to reduce unobserved confounder bias. However, a developing literature has shown that conditioning on certain covariates may increase bias, and the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon have not been fully explored. We add to the…

How should a wide variety of educational activities be sequenced to maximize student learning? Although some experimental studies have addressed this question, educational data mining methods may be able to evaluate a wider range of possibilities and better handle many simultaneous sequencing constraints. We introduce Sequencing Constraint…

The purpose of this study was to assess the added value of dynamic assessment (DA) beyond more conventional static measures for predicting individual differences in year-end 1st-grade calculation (CA) and word-problem (WP) performance, as a function of limited English proficiency (LEP) status. At the start of 1st grade, students (129 LEP; 163…