This paper investigates iteration and fixation in design by mining digital footprints left by designers. High school students used computer-aided design software to create buildings in an urban area, with the goal of applying passive solar design techniques to ensure optimal solar gains of the buildings throughout a year. Students were required to…

Publicly-available datasets, though useful for education, are often constructed for purposes that are quite different from students' own. To investigate and model phenomena, then, students must learn how to repurpose the data. This paper reports on an emerging line of research that builds on work in data modeling, exploratory data analysis, and…

Model evaluation -- the process of making inferences about the performance of predictive models -- is a critical component of predictive modelling research in learning analytics. We survey the state of the practice with respect to model evaluation in learning analytics, which overwhelmingly uses only naïve methods for model evaluation or…

The National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) has available for research a large data warehouse of enrollment and graduation information from 1993 to the present for nearly all postsecondary students in the United States. In this most recent academic year, 18 million currently enrolled students alone were added to the database. Some of the following…

There is increasing momentum behind the idea that curriculum materials, including textbooks, represent a powerful lever for education reform. As funders are lining up and state leaders are increasing their policy attention on curriculum materials, this report discusses the very real challenges of this effort. The report draws on my experience over…

Many students have difficulty performing well in Calculus 1. Since Calculus 1 is often the first math course that people take in college, these difficulties can set a precedent of failure for these students. Using tools from data mining and interviews with Precalculus and Calculus 1 students, this work seeks to identify the different types of…

Investment in technological subsystems to support the activity of teaching and learning and the various areas of the life of Higher Education Institutions (HEI) is of increasing importance in the implementation of the policy and strategy of these organizations. Each of these subsystems collects a huge amount of data that, if properly organized,…

In this article, we suggest that using R, a statistical software environment, is advantageous for quantitative researchers in applied linguistics. We first provide a brief overview of the reasons why R is popular among researchers in other fields and why we recommend its use for analyses in applied linguistics. In order to illustrate these…

Over the years, a number of institutions have systematically deployed new technologies to support learning and teaching. Lately, institutions have begun to explore new forms of data in order to understand and effectively address its systemic challenges, and help support effective decision-making. This paper describes the dynamic changes in the…

Among the approaches that have been used to balance the demand for services with the agency's service resources is to limit the number of visits available to clients. Such limits have been introduced, however, without any empirical basis for estimating the impact of a limit on the overall demand for services or the proportion of clients. The…

Innovation and knowledge creation call for high-level epistemic agency and design-mode thinking, two competencies beyond the traditional scopes of schooling. In this paper, we discuss the need for learning analytics to support these two competencies, and more broadly, the demand for education for innovation. We ground these arguments on a…

The Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) assesses key information processing skills and collects information on how often people undertake a range of activities at work and in everyday life. We are exploring what secondary analysis of online anonymised PIAAC data can tell us about adults' numeracy practices. In…

The purpose of this article is to introduce readers to phenomenological inquiry, an inductive qualitative research approach that is rooted in the philosophical proposition that researchers can gain valuable insight into the structure of how people understand their experiences. It is assumed that there is a structure or essence to the meaning…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to present normative data of tympanometric measurements of wideband acoustic immittance and to characterize wideband tympanograms. Method: Data were collected in 84 young adults with strictly defined normal hearing and middle ear status. Energy absorbance (EA) was measured using clicks for 1/12-octave…

The "performance movement" has been a subject of enthusiasm and frustration for evaluators. Performance measurement, data analytics, and program evaluation have been treated as different tasks, and those addressing them speak their own languages in their own circles. We suggest that situating performance measurement and data analytics…