Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Programs in Data Science

The Park City Math Institute (PCMI) 2016 Summer Undergraduate Faculty Program met for the purpose of composing guidelines for undergraduate programs in Data Science. The group consisted of 25 undergraduate faculty from a variety of institutions in the U.S., primarily from the disciplines of mathematics, statistics and computer science. These guidelines are meant to provide some structure for institutions planning for or revising a major in Data Science

Maximising transparency in a doctoral thesis: The complexities of writing about the use of QSR*NVIVO within a grounded theory study

This paper discusses the challenges of how to provide a transparent account of the use of the software programme QSR*NVIVO (QSR 2000) within a Grounded Theory framework (Glaser and Strauss 1967; Strauss and Corbin 1998). Psychology students are increasingly pursuing qualitative research projects such to the extent that the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) advise that students should have skill in the use of computer assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) (Economic and Social Research Council 2001). Unlike quantitative studies, rigid formulae do not exist for writing-up qualitative projects for doctoral theses. Most authors, however, agree that transparency is essential when communicating the findings of qualitative research. Sparkes (2001) recommends that evaluative criteria for qualitative research should be commensurable with the aims, objectives, and epistemological assumptions of the research project. Likewise, the use of CAQDAS should vary according to the research methodology followed, and thus researchers should include a discussion of how CAQDAS was used. This paper describes how the evolving process of coding data, writing memos, categorising, and theorising were integrated into the written thesis. The structure of the written document is described including considerations about restructuring and the difficulties of writing about an iterative process within a linear document

Dynamic Key-Value Memory Networks for Knowledge Tracing

Knowledge Tracing (KT) is a task of tracing evolving knowledge state of students with respect to one or more concepts as they engage in a sequence of learning activities. One important purpose of KT is to personalize the practice sequence to help students learn knowledge concepts efficiently. However, existing methods such as Bayesian Knowledge Tracing and Deep Knowledge Tracing either model knowledge state for each predefined concept separately or fail to pinpoint exactly which concepts a student is good at or unfamiliar with. To solve these problems, this work introduces a new model called Dynamic Key-Value Memory Networks (DKVMN) that can exploit the relationships between underlying concepts and directly output a student's mastery level of each concept. Unlike standard memory-augmented neural networks that facilitate a single memory matrix or two static memory matrices, our model has one static matrix called key, which stores the knowledge concepts and the other dynamic matrix called value, which stores and updates the mastery levels of corresponding concepts. Experiments show that our model consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art model in a range of KT datasets. Moreover, the DKVMN model can automatically discover underlying concepts of exercises typically performed by human annotations and depict the changing knowledge state of a student.Comment: To appear in 26th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW), 201

Methods and Tools for the Microsimulation and Forecasting of Household Expenditure

This paper reviews potential methods and tools for the microsimulation and forecasting of household expenditure. It begins with a discussion of a range of approaches to the forecasting of household populations via agent-based modelling tools. Then it evaluates approaches to the modelling of household expenditure. A prototype implementation is described and the paper concludes with an outline of an approach to be pursued in future work

Methods and Tools for the Microsimulation and Forecasting of Household Expenditure - A Review

This paper reviews potential methods and tools for the microsimulation and forecasting of household expenditure. It begins with a discussion of a range of approaches to the forecasting of household populations via agent-based modelling tools. Then it evaluates approaches to the modelling of household expenditure. A prototype implementation is described and the paper concludes with an outline of an approach to be pursued in future work

Digital communities: context for leading learning into the future?

In 2011, a robust, on-campus, three-element Community of Practice model consisting of growing community, sharing of practice and building domain knowledge was piloted in a digital learning environment. An interim evaluation of the pilot study revealed that the three-element framework, when used in a digital environment, required a fourth element. This element, which appears to happen incidentally in the face-to-face context, is that of reflecting, reporting and revising. This paper outlines the extension of the pilot study to the national tertiary education context in order to explore the implications for the design, leadership roles, and selection of appropriate technologies to support and sustain digital communities using the four-element model

The impact of higher education finance on university participation in the UK (BIS research paper no.11)

In this paper we estimate the separate impacts of upfront fees, grants and maintenance loans on UK higher education participation. We use the panel data element of Labour Force Survey data on the university participation decisions of 18 year olds, covering the period 1992-2007, which saw great variation in HE finance, most importantly the introduction of up-front tuition fees and the abolition of student maintenance grants in 1998 and major reforms of 2004 in which maintenance grants were re-instated and up-front fees were replaced with deferred fees of £3000. To test the robustness of the results, and to help deal with potential measurement error, we create a pseudo-panel of participation by UK region over time and test a number of specifications. Our findings show that the impact of upfront tuition fees in 1998 had a small negative impact on participation among high income groups, while the package of reforms introduced in 2006 had no impact on participation, largely because tuition fees were accompanied by large increases in loans and grants