As a research field geared toward understanding and improving learning, Learning Analytics (LA) must be able to provide empirical support for causal claims. However, as a highly applied field, tightly controlled randomized experiments are not always feasible nor desirable. Instead, researchers often rely on observational data, based on which they…

To identify the ways teachers and educational systems can improve learning, researchers need to make causal inferences. Analyses of existing datasets play an important role in detecting causal patterns, but conducting experiments also plays an indispensable role in this research. In this article, we advocate for experiments to be embedded in real…