Dive Brief:
- The National Science Foundation awarded Carnegie Mellon University $5M to study the science of education over the next five-years.
- With the grant money the university will develop LearnSphere, a space to store and analyze over 550 data sets from interactive tutoring systems, educational apps, and MOOCs.
- Examining the data will help the university — and its partners MIT, Stanford University, and the University of Memphis — determine how people learn best, and, in turn, inform course creations.
Dive Insight:
A teacher gives her students a quiz and the average is a 60%. "I don't get it!" she exclaims exasperated. "But I taught all of this! Look at my lesson plans!" While she may think she taught the material, if the students didn't retain it, then she didn't teach it. Teaching only works when there is learning. Placing the emphasis on how people learn best is a smart step in figuring out how to create better lesson plans and design courses for the best results.
Education data is often after the fact, looking at the test scores to figure out what needs to be re-taught. Why not look at data before the tests? Before the teaching, really. As Ken Koedinger, the CMU human-computer interaction and psychology professor spearheading the project, explains to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "We’ve seen the power that data has to improve performance in many fields, from medicine to movie recommendations. Educational data holds the same potential to guide the development of courses that enhance learning. Gathering more of this data also promises to give us a deeper understanding of the learning process.”
