This special issue's editors invited discussion of three broad questions. Slightly rephrased, they are: How well do self-report data represent theoretical constructs? How should analyses of data be conditioned by properties of self report data? In what ways do interpretations of self-report data shape interpretations of a study's findings? To…

James J. Cochran is Professor of Applied Statistics, Rogers-Spivey Faculty Fellow, and Associate Dean for Research in the Culverhouse College of Commerce at the University of Alabama. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and of Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences. He is also a recipient of the INFORMS Prize…

This commentary elaborates on the role of "grounding" as a focal theoretical concept and aims to contextualize the claims formulated by Schneider and Pea (2015, this issue) in previous CSCL discussions. It provides fingerposts for enriching and refining the concept of grounding from a pedagogical point of view. It also suggests using the…

Learning analytics is a relatively new field of inquiry and its precise meaning is both contested and fluid (Johnson, Smith, Willis, Levine & Haywood, 2011; LAK, n.d.). Ferguson (2012) suggests that the best working definition is that offered by the first Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) conference: "the measurement, collection,…

The article, "Distributed Revisiting: An Analytic for Retention of Coherent Science Learning" is an interesting study that operates at the intersection of learning theory and learning analytics. The authors observe that the relationship between learning theory and research in the learning analytics field is constrained by several…

This commentary to the recent article by Musso et al. (2013) discusses issues related to model fitting, comparison of classification accuracy of generative and discriminative models, and two (or more) cultures of data modeling. We start by questioning the extremely high classification accuracy with an empirical data from a complex domain. There is…

In this commentary on Van Leeuwen (2015, this issue), I explore the relation between theory and practice in learning analytics. Specifically, I caution against adhering to one specific theoretical doctrine while ignoring others, suggest deeper applications of cognitive load theory to understanding teaching with analytics tools, and comment on…

In the field of higher education there are few places reserved for philosophical exploration, and this, this author argues, can limit and distort the cartography. Higher education research tends to be framed as the empirical process of collecting and analysing qualitative or quantitative data. But this conception of research leaves little space…

In Miyamoto et al. (2015, this issue) the authors looked to substantiate the presence of the spacing effect, referenced from the psychology literature, in several MOOCs. Their secondary analyses constituted a robust, empirical finding on the correspondence between session distribution and certification but with only a coarse, analogous…

This commentary reflects on the contributions to learning analytics and theory by a paper that describes how multiple theoretical frameworks were woven together to inform the creation of a new, automated discourse analysis tool. The commentary highlights the contributions of the original paper, provides some alternative approaches, and touches on…

This paper contends that powerful techniques to manipulate data, enabled by technological and economic developments, can be easily co-opted to serve the restrictive frameworks of hyper-controlling, managerial accountability that characterise current cultures of summative assessment in education. In response to these challenges, research is…

There are infinitely many ways of talking about infinity. The assortment of discourses on learning infinity is infinite as well. When the author says "way of talking" or "discourse," she is concerned with much more than the question of how words are chosen and combined. Ways of talking are not just innocent "auxiliaries" to thinking--they shape…

The commentaries on my article contain a number of points with which I disagree but also several with which I agree. For example, I continue to believe that the existence of many cases in which between-person variability does not increase with age indicates that greater variance with increased age is not inevitable among healthy individuals up to…

To address the question of musical identity, the research the author mainly draws on takes the form of qualitative, in-depth interviews with people about how music fits into their everyday lives and musical biographies. In this the author adopts a largely biographical and social constructionist perspective, asking people to reflect on important…

In the past decade, language memoirs, linguistic autobiographies, and learners' journals and diaries have become a popular means of data collection in applied linguistics. It is not always clear however how one should go about analyzing these data. The aim of this paper is to offer a critical review of analytical frameworks applied to second…