Principal Investigator: Cindy Hmelo-Silver
CoPrincipal Investigator(s):
Organization: Indiana University

Abstract:
Building Interdisciplinary Capacity for Understanding and Supporting Computer Supported Collaborative Learning

Data science techniques have revolutionized many academic fields and led to terrific gains in the commercial sector. They have to date been underutilized in solving critical problems in the US educational system, particularly in understanding Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) learning and learning environments, broadening participation in STEM, and increasing retention for students traditionally underserved in STEM. The goals of the Directorate for Education and Human Resources through the Critical Techniques and Technologies for Advancing Foundations and Applications of Big Data Science & Engineering (BIGDATA) program are to advance fundamental understanding of key questions in the field, and catalyze the use of data science in Education Research. Collaboration has a long history of research and a solid research base. However, the work is hampered by the difficulty of replicating or aggregating results due to the standard research methods used in the field. The current standard practice in collaboration research is to record student activity on audio or video, create qualitative coding schemes, and code the data by hand. This is labor intensive and prone to personal judgment and error. This project will investigate the use of data mining and learning analytics to overcome this challenge of aggregation and accuracy.

The main goal of the proposal is to conduct a series of workshops to catalyze the community of researchers investigating the effects of collaboration by introducing and investigating the best uses of learning analytics and data mining techniques.