Bridging The Transition Gap: Student Perceptions Of Middle To High School Transition Practices And School Connectedness

The purpose of this study was two-fold: first, to understand perceptions of high school students regarding their transition from middle school into high school. Grounded theory research methods were used to construct theory from data obtained from the study. Secondly, the researcher wished to advocate for North Dakota high schools for implementing school-wide transition programs to bridge the transition gap during a period of pivotal importance in the lives of our students. A review of North Dakota Century Code 15.1 revealed no statute has been developed requiring North Dakota schools to implement school-wide programs or activities focusing on students transitioning from middle to high school.The researcher conducted a grounded theory mixed methods study by collecting online survey responses (both quantitative and qualitative) from 513 currently enrolled high school (10th-12th grade) students from three participating high schools within one public school district in North Dakota. Grounded theory is employed to understand a situation (student’s perceptions of transitioning into high school) and to identify the cause of a problem (possible reasons/motivations behind students perceptions of school connectedness). The integration of Schlossberg’s Transition Theory and School Connectedness frameworks were critical in understanding how student participants experienced their transition into high school as well as unearthing aspects of school life that may have contributed to the overall transition itself. Findings of this study suggested that students within the participating school district had a need for connections with others, believed there are multiple benefits of joining extracurriculars, and had a need to learn more about the “unknowns” about high school prior to their arrival. The results of this study included recommendations for educators, state educational departments, students, and for implementation of a school-wide transition program for incoming high school students to bridge the transition gap between middle school and high schoo

Predicting Paid Certification in Massive Open Online Courses

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have been proliferating because of the free or low-cost offering of content for learners, attracting the attention of many stakeholders across the entire educational landscape. Since 2012, coined as “the Year of the MOOCs”, several platforms have gathered millions of learners in just a decade. Nevertheless, the certification rate of both free and paid courses has been low, and only about 4.5–13% and 1–3%, respectively, of the total number of enrolled learners obtain a certificate at the end of their courses. Still, most research concentrates on completion, ignoring the certification problem, and especially its financial aspects. Thus, the research described in the present thesis aimed to investigate paid certification in MOOCs, for the first time, in a comprehensive way, and as early as the first week of the course, by exploring its various levels. First, the latent correlation between learner activities and their paid certification decisions was examined by (1) statistically comparing the activities of non-paying learners with course purchasers and (2) predicting paid certification using different machine learning (ML) techniques. Our temporal (weekly) analysis showed statistical significance at various levels when comparing the activities of non-paying learners with those of the certificate purchasers across the five courses analysed. Furthermore, we used the learner’s activities (number of step accesses, attempts, correct and wrong answers, and time spent on learning steps) to build our paid certification predictor, which achieved promising balanced accuracies (BAs), ranging from 0.77 to 0.95. Having employed simple predictions based on a few clickstream variables, we then analysed more in-depth what other information can be extracted from MOOC interaction (namely discussion forums) for paid certification prediction. However, to better explore the learners’ discussion forums, we built, as an original contribution, MOOCSent, a cross- platform review-based sentiment classifier, using over 1.2 million MOOC sentiment-labelled reviews. MOOCSent addresses various limitations of the current sentiment classifiers including (1) using one single source of data (previous literature on sentiment classification in MOOCs was based on single platforms only, and hence less generalisable, with relatively low number of instances compared to our obtained dataset;) (2) lower model outputs, where most of the current models are based on 2-polar iii iv classifier (positive or negative only); (3) disregarding important sentiment indicators, such as emojis and emoticons, during text embedding; and (4) reporting average performance metrics only, preventing the evaluation of model performance at the level of class (sentiment). Finally, and with the help of MOOCSent, we used the learners’ discussion forums to predict paid certification after annotating learners’ comments and replies with the sentiment using MOOCSent. This multi-input model contains raw data (learner textual inputs), sentiment classification generated by MOOCSent, computed features (number of likes received for each textual input), and several features extracted from the texts (character counts, word counts, and part of speech (POS) tags for each textual instance). This experiment adopted various deep predictive approaches – specifically that allow multi-input architecture - to early (i.e., weekly) investigate if data obtained from MOOC learners’ interaction in discussion forums can predict learners’ purchase decisions (certification). Considering the staggeringly low rate of paid certification in MOOCs, this present thesis contributes to the knowledge and field of MOOC learner analytics with predicting paid certification, for the first time, at such a comprehensive (with data from over 200 thousand learners from 5 different discipline courses), actionable (analysing learners decision from the first week of the course) and longitudinal (with 23 runs from 2013 to 2017) scale. The present thesis contributes with (1) investigating various conventional and deep ML approaches for predicting paid certification in MOOCs using learner clickstreams (Chapter 5) and course discussion forums (Chapter 7), (2) building the largest MOOC sentiment classifier (MOOCSent) based on learners’ reviews of the courses from the leading MOOC platforms, namely Coursera, FutureLearn and Udemy, and handles emojis and emoticons using dedicated lexicons that contain over three thousand corresponding explanatory words/phrases, (3) proposing and developing, for the first time, multi-input model for predicting certification based on the data from discussion forums which synchronously processes the textual (comments and replies) and numerical (number of likes posted and received, sentiments) data from the forums, adapting the suitable classifier for each type of data as explained in detail in Chapter 7

A Transparency Index Framework for Machine Learning powered AI in Education

The increase in the use of AI systems in our daily lives, brings calls for more ethical AI development from different sectors including, finance, the judiciary and to an increasing extent education. A number of AI ethics checklists and frameworks have been proposed focusing on different dimensions of ethical AI, such as fairness, explainability and safety. However, the abstract nature of these existing ethical AI guidelines often makes them difficult to operationalise in real-world contexts. The inadequacy of the existing situation with respect to ethical guidance is further complicated by the paucity of work to develop transparent machine learning powered AI systems for real-world. This is particularly true for AI applied in education and training. In this thesis, a Transparency Index Framework is presented as a tool to forefront the importance of transparency and aid the contextualisation of ethical guidance for the education and training sector. The transparency index framework presented here has been developed in three iterative phases. In phase one, an extensive literature review of the real-world AI development pipelines was conducted. In phase two, an AI-powered tool for use in an educational and training setting was developed. The initial version of the Transparency Index Framework was prepared after phase two. And in phase three, a revised version of the Transparency Index Framework was co- designed that integrates learning from phases one and two. The co-design process engaged a range of different AI in education stakeholders, including educators, ed-tech experts and AI practitioners. The Transparency Index Framework presented in this thesis maps the requirements of transparency for different categories of AI in education stakeholders, and shows how transparency considerations can be ingrained throughout the AI development process, from initial data collection to deployment in the world, including continuing iterative improvements. Transparency is shown to enable the implementation of other ethical AI dimensions, such as interpretability, accountability and safety. The 3 optimisation of transparency from the perspective of end-users and ed-tech companies who are developing AI systems is discussed and the importance of conceptualising transparency in developing AI powered ed-tech products is highlighted. In particular, the potential for transparency to bridge the gap between the machine learning and learning science communities is noted. For example, through the use of datasheets, model cards and factsheets adapted and contextualised for education through a range of stakeholder perspectives, including educators, ed-tech experts and AI practitioners

Exploring a Generalizable Machine Learned Solution for Early Prediction of Student At-Risk Status

Determining which students are at-risk of poorer outcomes -- such as dropping out, failing classes, or decreasing standardized examination scores -- has become an important area of both research and practice in K-12 education. The models produced from this type of predictive modeling research are increasingly used by high schools in Early Warning Systems to identify which students are at risk and intervene to support better outcomes. It has become common practice to re-build and validate these detectors, district-by-district, due to different data semantics and various risk factors for students in different districts. As these detectors become more widely used, however, a new challenge emerges in applying these detectors across a broad spectrum of school districts with varying availability of past student data. Some districts have insufficient high-quality past data for building an effective detector. Novel approaches that can address the complex data challenges a new district presents are critical for advancing the field. Using an ensemble-based algorithm, I develop a modeling approach that can generate a useful model for a previously unseen district. During the ensembling process, my approach, District Similarity Ensemble Extrapolation (DSEE), weights districts that are more similar to the Target district more strongly during ensembling than less similar districts. Using this approach, I can predict student-at-risk status effectively for unseen districts, across a range of grade ranges, and achieve prediction goodness but ultimately fails to perform better than the previously published Knowles (2015) and Bowers (2012) EWS models proposed for use across districts