The promise of simulation-based science assessment: the Calipers project

Abstract: The Calipers project developed and studied a new generation of simulation-based assessment systems. The project aimed to demonstrate the potential of technology-and simulation-based assessments to provide high-quality evidence of complex performances for science tests that address accountability or formative goals. End-of-unit, benchmark assessments for the topics of ecosystems and for forces and motion were developed to test national science standards at the middle school and secondary levels. Technical quality evidence documented the alignment of the assessments with national science standards, expert reviews of content and item quality, cognitive analyses of students thinking-aloud, and analyses of teacher and student data gathered from classroom pilot testing. The project broke new ground in harnessing the affordances of technology to transform what, how, when and where science learning is assessed and to gather evidence of students' connected science knowledge and extended inquiry not well measured by traditional paper-based tests

Exploratory Analysis in Learning Analytics

This article summarizes the methods, observations, challenges and implications for exploratory analysis drawn from two learning analytics research projects. The cases include an analysis of a games-based virtual performance assessment and an analysis of data from 52,000 students over a 5-year period at a large Australian university. The complex datasets were analyzed and iteratively modeled with a variety of computationally intensive methods to provide the most effective outcomes for learning assessment, performance management and learner tracking. The article presents the research contexts, the tools and methods used in the exploratory phases of analysis, the major findings and the implications for learning analytics research methods

Continuous wavelet frames on the sphere: The group-theoretic approach revisited

In [3], Antoine and Vandergheynst propose a group-theoretic approach to continuous wavelet frames on the sphere. The frame is constructed from a single so-called admissible function by applying the unitary operators associated to a representation of the Lorentz group, which is square-integrable modulo the nilpotent factor of the Iwasawa decomposition. We prove necessary and sufficient conditions for functions on the sphere, which ensure that the corresponding system is a frame. We strengthen a similar result in [3] by providing a complete and detailed proof