This article discusses issues concerning the spread of data-driven educational technologies in Brazil. Here, as elsewhere, educational technology continues to be promoted optimistically as the bearer of a panacea for historically-rooted social problems. Whilst some of these technologies have indeed contributed to important widening-participation…

The field of learning analytics is progressing at a rapid rate. New tools, with ever-increasing number of features and a plethora of datasets that are increasingly utilized demonstrate the evolution and multifaceted nature of the field. In particular, the depth and scope of insight that can be gleaned from analysing related datasets can have a…

Data mining of course enrollment and course description records has soared as institutions of higher education begin tapping into the value of these data for academic and internal research purposes. This has led to a more than doubling of papers on course prediction tasks every year. The papers often center around a single prediction task and…

National failure rates seen in undergraduate introductory CS courses are quite high. In this paper, we develop a predictive model for student in-class performance in an introductory CS course. The model can serve as an early warning system, flagging struggling students who might benefit from additional support. We use a variety of features from…

Most White people have learned to ignore the way that the social construct of race benefits them or harms people of Color, myself included. In this way, people take for granted that race is not real, but rather the invention of White supremacists. Moreover, researchers who are responsible for generating knowledge far too often depend on…

Introduction: Interrupted Time Series (ITS) studies may be used to assess the impact of an interruption, such as an intervention or exposure. The data from such studies are particularly amenable to visual display and, when clearly depicted, can readily show the short- and long-term impact of an interruption. Further, well-constructed graphs allow…

Diagnostic test accuracy (DTA) systematic reviews are conducted to summarize evidence on the accuracy of a diagnostic test including a critical evaluation of the primary studies. Where appropriate, the evidence is meta-analyzed to obtain pooled estimates of effectiveness. In this study, we reviewed and critiqued three DTA guidance documents with…

The purpose of this research note is to introduce a latent growth curve reconstruction approach based on the Tabu search algorithm. The approach algorithmically enables researchers to optimally determine at both the individual and the group levels the order of the polynomial needed to represent the latent growth curve model. The procedure is…

Systematic reviews with meta-analyses are powerful tools that can answer research questions based on data from published studies. Ideally, all relevant data is directly available in the text or tables, but often it is only presented in graphs. In those cases, the data can be extracted from graphs, but this potentially introduces errors. Here, we…

Inconsistent filtering of force plate data persists in published studies. Previous evidence suggests that low pass filtering produces the largest error when calculating jump height, but used jump height from unfiltered force plate data as the criterion. This study investigated the effects of low pass filtering on jump height calculated from force…

While a dot plot depicts data on a quantitative variable without distortion, a boxplot shows only the five-number summary. For large data, to aid in counting, we propose an IVY plot as a companion to a dot plot. Also, for large data, if the variable is approximately normally distributed, as a companion to a boxplot, we propose a Gaussian interval…

In co-located, multi-user settings such as multi-touch tables, user interfaces need to be accessible from multiple viewpoints. In this project, we investigated how this goal can be achieved for depictions of data in bar graphs. We designed a laboratory task in which participants answered simple questions based on information depicted in bar graphs…

This paper presents the R Analyzer for Large-Scale Assessments (RALSA), a newly developed R package for analyzing data from studies using complex sampling and assessment designs. Such studies are, for example, the IEA's Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment. The package…

Situations of catastrophic social change, such as COVID-19, raise complex, interdisciplinary research questions that intersect health, education, economics, psychology, and social behavior and require mixed methods research. The pandemic has been a quickly evolving phenomenon, which pressures the time necessary to perform mixed methods research.…

Item harvesters who memorize, record and share test items can jeopardize the validity and fairness of credentialing tests. Item harvesting behaviors are difficult to detect by the existing statistical modeling approaches due to the absence of operational definitions and the idiosyncratic nature of human behaviors. Motivated to detect the…