Education Data Mining in practice: How researchers are uncovering new ground.
Research
Improvement in post-secondary education will require converting teaching from a ‘solo sport’ to a community-based research activity. - Herb Simon, in 1998
To that end, over the past ten years LearnLab has focused on building the community of learning scientists. As of September 2013, our researchers have over 1668 publications, including 233 journal articles, 7 books, 101 book chapters and 175 invited talks. Below are highlights from the work they've been creating.
Success Stories: Connecting Research to the Classroom
IMPROVING OUTCOMES
Accelerating student learning with data-driven instruction.
Students in a data-driven, college-level “Introduction to Statistics” course learned a full semester’s worth of material in half as much time as those in a traditional course and performed as well or better than students learning from traditional instruction.
NEW INSTRUCTIONAL METHODS
Teaching Fractions: Sense-Making Before Fluency
In learning fractions, students who make sense of a fractions concept using a graphical representation before demonstrating fluency in using graphical representations produced significantly enhanced learning gains over students who first demonstrated fluency using graphical representations.
COURSE DESIGN
Improved outcomes with redesigned course
The redesign of an introductory course required for all CMU students, using learner interaction data and an iterative improvement cycle, has brought about a dramatically improved success rate and allowed both students and faculty to spend more time focused on core courses.