Practitioner Track Proceedings of the 6th International Learning Analytics & Knowledge Conference (LAK16)

Practitioners spearhead a significant portion of learning analytics, relying on implementation and experimentation rather than on traditional academic research. Both approaches help to improve the state of the art. The LAK conference has created a practitioner track for submissions, which first ran in 2015 as an alternative to the researcher track. The primary goal of the practitioner track is to share thoughts and findings that stem from learning analytics project implementations. While both large and small implementations are considered, all practitioner track submissions are required to relate to initiatives that are designed for large-scale and/or long-term use (as opposed to research-focused initiatives). Other guidelines include: • Implementation track record The project should have been used by an institution or have been deployed on a learning site. There are no hard guidelines about user numbers or how long the project has been running. • Learning/education related Submissions have to describe work that addresses learning/academic analytics, either at an educational institution or in an area (such as corporate training, health care or informal learning) where the goal is to improve the learning environment or learning outcomes. • Institutional involvement Neither submissions nor presentations have to include a named person from an academic institution. However, all submissions have to include information collected from people who have used the tool or initiative in a learning environment (such as faculty, students, administrators and trainees). • No sales pitches While submissions from commercial suppliers are welcome; reviewers do not accept overt (or covert) sales pitches. Reviewers look for evidence that a presentation will take into account challenges faced, problems that have arisen, and/or user feedback that needs to be addressed. Submissions are limited to 1,200 words, including an abstract, a summary of deployment with end users, and a full description. Most papers in the proceedings are therefore short, and often informal, although some authors chose to extend their papers once they had been accepted. Papers accepted in 2016 fell into two categories. • Practitioner Presentations Presentation sessions are designed to focus on deployment of a single learning analytics tool or initiative. • Technology Showcase The Technology Showcase event enables practitioners to demonstrate new and emerging learning analytics technologies that they are piloting or deploying. Both types of paper are included in these proceedings

Overcoming the Poverty Challenge to Enable College and Career Readiness for All: The Crucial Role of Student Supports

This white paper focuses on an important and under-conceptualized thread in the weave of efforts needed to ensure that all students graduate from high school prepared for college and/or career training: enhanced student supports. It argues that in order to overcome the educational impacts of poverty -- the poverty challenge, schools that serve high concentrations of low income students need to be able to provide direct, evidence-based supports that help students attend school regularly, act in a productive manner, believe they will succeed, overcome external obstacles, complete their coursework, and put forth the effort required to graduate college- and career-ready. Next, it highlights the unique role that nonprofits, community volunteers, and full-time national service members can play in the implementation of these direct student supports. It concludes by exploring how federal and state policy and funding can be designed to promote the implementation and spread of evidence-based, direct student supports. The paper draws on the emerging evidence base to examine these topics, and calls upon the insights gleaned through the author's fifteen years of participant-observation in the effort to create schools strong enough to overcome the ramifications of poverty and prepare all students for adult success

Operational Research in Education

Operational Research (OR) techniques have been applied, from the early stages of the discipline, to a wide variety of issues in education. At the government level, these include questions of what resources should be allocated to education as a whole and how these should be divided amongst the individual sectors of education and the institutions within the sectors. Another pertinent issue concerns the efficient operation of institutions, how to measure it, and whether resource allocation can be used to incentivise efficiency savings. Local governments, as well as being concerned with issues of resource allocation, may also need to make decisions regarding, for example, the creation and location of new institutions or closure of existing ones, as well as the day-to-day logistics of getting pupils to schools. Issues of concern for managers within schools and colleges include allocating the budgets, scheduling lessons and the assignment of students to courses. This survey provides an overview of the diverse problems faced by government, managers and consumers of education, and the OR techniques which have typically been applied in an effort to improve operations and provide solutions

Toward a Systematic Evidence-Base for Science in Out-of-School Time: The Role of Assessment

Analyzes the tools used in assessments of afterschool and summer science programs, explores the need for comprehensive tools for comparisons across programs, and discusses the most effective structure and format for such a tool. Includes recommendations

Culturally-Responsive Canadian Postsecondary Performance Measurement

Student success has multiple meanings; however, the postpositivist bias prevalent in Canadian postsecondary education restricts how student success is defined and measured. When we standardize measures of student success we assume that the student experience is homogeneous and risk implementing policies and programs based on insufficient information. Unless new evaluation approaches are adopted, it is unlikely postsecondary institutions will generate the knowledge and wisdom needed to serve their regional, national, and international learners and communities. Postsecondary education leaders must be cognizant of the legacy of colonialism and consider cultural congruency between performance measurement systems and local context. This organizational improvement plan proposes a theory of action model for culturally-responsive postsecondary performance measurement that leverages shared governance through participatory, emergent, and appreciative processes and qualitative evaluation methodologies. Perception and socially constructed norms play a pivotal role in addressing the postsecondary education sector’s quantitative bias; therefore, an interpretivist lens is used to critically examine the cultural appropriateness of quality assurance and measurement processes at a Canadian university. Culturally-responsive performance measurement requires consideration of diverse worldviews and methodologies. Qualitative evaluation can amplify the lived experiences of students and inform complex policy issues through examination of phenomena and local variability. The next generation of quality assurance requires inclusive decision-making structures to generate collective wisdom and cultivate an ethic of community by engaging community members, faculty, staff, and students as change agents

Measuring Youth Program Quality: A Guide to Assessment Tools

Thanks to growing interest in the subject of youth program quality, many tools are now available to help organizations and systems assess and improve quality. Given the size and diversity of the youth-serving sector, it is unrealistic to expect that any one tool or process will fit all programs or circumstances. This report compares the purpose, history, structure, methodology, content and technical properties of nine different program observation tools

Using the Daily Missions Gamification Strategy To Promote Incremental Progress on Programming Assignments

Automatic assessment tools are increasingly utilized in undergraduate programming courses to evaluate software solutions, streamlining the grading process for both students and professors. In spite of their benefits of speed and convenience, such online systems for providing instant feedback have the tendency to draw attention to performance-based outcomes while failing to reliably recognize the effort and hard work a student puts into a solution. For the many struggling students who are new to programming, this type of objective feedback can be discouraging and may decrease their motivation to stay engaged towards success. To address this issue, this paper explores strategies for more effectively recognizing student progress on programming assignments and identifying small tasks for students to complete that will steer them in the right direction. Further, this paper presents the design of a Daily Missions gamification strategy that was added to an automated program grading system. A pilot study shows feasibility of the approach and suitability of the design, indicating a statistically significant increase in the rate of completing tasks assigned as daily missions, and that students believe daily missions reinforce good practices while giving them better ideas on how to improve their work. An evaluation of experiences from using the strategy in the classroom is presented, along with student perceptions from using the system

Empirical Analysis of Agricultural Productivity: Growth in Benin and Mainly Factors which Influence Growth

This study examined changes in agricultural productivity at Benin in the context of diverse institutional arrangements using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA).A time series data which consists of information on agricultural production and means of production were obtained from World Research Institute database, INSAE and rainfall data from AMMA database. The information was for a 43-year period (1961-2003); DEA method was used to measure Malquist index of total factor productivity to evaluate technical change efficiency and technological efficiency change across the country’s 12 provinces. A decomposition of TFP measures revealed whether the performance of factors productivity is due to technological change or technical efficiency change over the reference period. The study further examined the effect of land quality, agriculture labor, and selected governance indicators such as government effectiveness and openness on productivity growth. All the variables included in the model are significant effect on the TPF and the country agriculture growth. They equally performed well in terms of expected relationship with TFP except land quality index which unexpectedly had an inverse relationship with TFP.Data Envelopment Analysis, Efficiency, Productivity, Benin, Agribusiness, N57, C01, C23,