This report identifies effective strategies to tackle skills imbalances in Italy. It provides an assessment of practices and policies in the following areas: the collection and use of information on skill needs to foster a better alignment of skills acquisitions with labour market needs; the design of education and training systems and their…

Item response models typically assume that the item characteristic (step) curves follow a logistic or normal cumulative distribution function, which are strictly monotone functions of person test ability. Such assumptions can be overly-restrictive for real item response data. We propose a simple and more flexible Bayesian nonparametric IRT model…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to explore the influence of principal leadership behaviors and potential of utilizing adult learning strategies on the development of a school's professional learning environment (PLE). The intention was also to determine if principals considered themselves prepared to develop and sustain such an…

In this dissertation, I explored the lives of 10 children who were diagnosed with a language disorder. The children were enrolled in a therapeutic half-day speech-language preschool classroom for 3- and 4-year-old children within a public-school system in the rural Southeast. The research included a 15-week mini-ethnographic case study utilizing…

In this study, we applied decision trees (DT) to extract a compact set of pedagogical decision-making rules from an original "full" set of 3,702 Reinforcement Learning (RL)- induced rules, referred to as the DT-RL rules and Full-RL rules respectively. We then evaluated the effectiveness of the two rule sets against a baseline Random…

In this article, we playfully revisit the same data scene, but from three different perspectives. We call these revisits "re-turns" to data. These "re-turns" draw upon moments with young boys playing at a makerspace located in a multiracial, working-class community. This idea of "re-turn" is not simply about…

Closing the U.S. academic achievement gap is as complex as it is comprehensive due to the disproportion of instructional opportunities available to underserved student populations. Underserved student populations are defined as minority and/or students of color from low-socioeconomic families and communities, English language learners and recent…

Established in December 2016, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's Roundtable on Data Science Postsecondary Education was charged with identifying the challenges of and highlighting best practices in postsecondary data science education. Convening quarterly for 3 years, representatives from academia, industry, and…

Lorain County Community College (LCCC) was designed for access, however, not necessarily completion. The college was unprepared for students who wanted to earn a degree but then often didn't make it to graduation. In 2011, LCCC retained fewer than six in ten students. Its three-year graduation rate was 8 percent. For African American students, it…

The U.S. Department of Education's (Department) mission is to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access. The Department pursues its mission by establishing policies and distributing corresponding funds, focusing national attention on key educational issues,…

Learning analytics has been defined as the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimizing learning and the environments in which it occurs. The potential use of data and learning analytics in educational contexts has caught the attention of educators and…

Common Core proponents and detractors debate its merits, but students have voiced their opinion for years. Using a decade's worth of data gathered through design-research on youth voice, this article discusses what high school students have long described as more ideal learning environments for themselves--and how remarkably similar the Common…

Dealing with the vast quantities of text that students generate in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other large-scale online learning environments is a daunting challenge. Computational tools are needed to help instructional teams uncover themes and patterns as students write in forums, assignments, and surveys. This paper introduces to the…

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 article introduces the special issue from the 2015 Learning Analytics and Knowledge conference. We describe the current state of the field and identify some of the trends in recent research. As the field continues to expand, there seem to be at least three directions of vigorous growth: (1) the inclusion of multimodal data (gesture,…