Truth be told, this is blog about learning analytics. Data and statistics are often considered dull but one only need look at the popularity of the many Fitbit-style products available to see otherwise. These products are enabling individuals to collect unprecedented amounts of information and make data driven decisions about their health objectives. Learning analytics will enable educators to collect unprecedented amounts of information on learners to make data driven decisions about learning objectives. While it lacks the excitement of virtual reality, learning analytics has the potential to drastically minimize the labor-intensive, time-consuming channels of traditional feedback while maximizing student learning in the 21st century.Learning Analytics Infographic
Feedback and assessment are powerful components of an overall instructional strategy and meaningful feedback requires prompt and balanced delivery. (Dick, 2009) This can be extremely challenging to do considering the realities of teaching. Learning analytics has the potential to reduce many of these roadblocks and enable teachers to deliver more personalized instruction.
One of my favorite learning analytics tools is www.vocabulary.com. This program enables teachers to quickly and easily track traditional assessment data such as percentage of commonly missed words but more importantly the program is adaptive. This means that the program adapts to the learner. For example, if Student A answers the questions correctly, Student A will complete the activity relatively quickly because they're demonstrating mastery of the content. If Student B answers the question incorrectly, the program will continue asking various questions until the student demonstrates. This personalizes learning to the individual in a way that no individual teacher could ever do for an entire class simultaneously. This also eliminates the frequent problem of less motivated students mindlessly clicking their way to the end. A terrific technology that is here today.
The Future of Big Data and Analytics in K-12 Education
What technology do you use to gather data for instructional decision-making?
David-
ReplyDeleteI like your comparison of learner feedback to that which we get from our Fitbit devices. It's immediate and helps us adapt our goals.
In my classroom, my students complete their textbook readings with an e-book and questions via a LearnSmart Module from McGraw-Hill. But it's not just about answering the questions correctly in order to advance to the next question. That's part of it. But tey also have select how confident they are that they know the right answer. If they answer incorrectly or if they select "I think I know" or "I'm not sure," the system keeps feeding the question back to them until they get it right with confidence. I also like that it doesn't give them the question with the exact same wording on the next click. It will feed it back to them a few questions later in a different format. My students have found this very helpful.
Thank you for your comment and your technical advice. Thank goodness the digital resources textbooks provide are improving. Learning is a process and it is important for students to be able to really work with the content. A program such as LearnSmart that adapts to learners also help to take the pass/fail feelings out of learning and emphasizes the trial and error process which is important.
ReplyDeleteThanks again for your comment. Have a nice day.