Big Data Transforms Education Research

Big Data Transforms Education Research

1. Technology can do more than just keep students engage

   • Transformative power of education technology is most evident when it comes to something old-fashioned: basic education research.
     • A Challenging Research Subject
       • The most respected approach involves putting lots of trained observers in the back of classrooms
         • It costs gobs of money, and thus may not be practical.
           • Alternatives to observational studies are much less satisfying
         • What if we didn’t need to have graduate students crouching in the back of classrooms in order to catalog the play-by-play of classroom instruction?
           • What if, instead, we could capture the action with a video camera or, better yet from a privacy perspective, a microphone? And what if we could gather that information not just for an hour or two, but all day, 180 days a year, in a big national sample of schools?
             • And what if we could then use the magic of machine learning to have a computer figure out what the reams of data all mean?
   • Technology can equip teachers, school and district leaders, and policymakers with the sort of insights and analytics that can help them make better decisions for students.
     • “Machine Learning” to Track Student Learning
       • Computer models, which learn to replicate the human coding with enough time and data.
         • Big data alone can be a boon to “hypothesis generation,” but we’ll still need traditional studies in which teachers are asked to adopt new practices to learn whether the practices work.