Principal Ryan Etheridge found his hotpot dinner with fellow LASER BEAM scholars this summer yielded more than a good meal. During his meal, he communed with scholars about research, data and higher education, including his conversation with Assistant Professor Catherine Manly about navigating barriers to research publishing within the higher education space.

“I am the unicorn here, but everyone in the higher ed space has been so generous and curious with each other, but especially with me, as they ask the questions about my school, about the problem of practice I’m hoping to solve through supervised machine learning…I’ve asked questions, they’ve been so encouraging and loving,” said Etheridge, principal at Fallston Elementary School in Cleveland County Schools. “I already feel like I have long-term friends that I’ll be able to reach out to in moments of distress or frustration with code or something like that, and that’s been really beneficial.”

Community is one of the largest benefits Learning Analytics in STEM Education Research (LASER) scholars receive as part of the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded LASER BEAM (Broadening Education in Advanced Methods) project hosted at the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation. LASER hosted its kickoff workshop this summer that starts the learning for the year and helps scholars build connections with others in their cohort. 

In addition to supporting scholars in developing the knowledge and skills necessary to incorporate new methods into their education research, LASER BEAM aims to broaden the program’s impact by supporting scholars in developing an instructional plan to incorporate LASER curriculum modules into graduate-level programs, courses or workshops at their home university or research institution. This is the final year of the two-year project. LASER is a collaborative partnership between education faculty from NC State University and the University of Pennsylvania, with additional support from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

“Working with NC State has been an excellent experience,” said Ryan Baker, LASER BEAM principal investigator (PI), professor of artificial intelligence and education in the Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning at Adelaide University and adjunct professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. “We have such complementary strengths in methods, in teaching and dissemination! It will be sad to conclude this partnership in a year, but I feel very happy about the learning resources we’ve been able to develop together.”

Catherine Manly, assistant professor of higher education and data analytics at Fairleigh Dickinson University, has spent the last three years participating in the program, building her skills in learning analytics, developing curriculum for her students and exploring ways to share content from the LASER program with the larger learning analytics community.

“By coming to LASER and learning about these more advanced learning analytics techniques, I’m now in a better position to teach a pantheon of possibilities to my students, because I knew the statistics side of things, but I didn’t know the data science things, and now I have experience in both,” said Manly. “I feel like I’m in a much better position to teach and to draw on that experience and the knowledge that I’ve gained and the materials that LASER has developed.”

As the most seasoned LASER scholar at this summer’s workshop, Manly helped other scholars use the materials and answered questions when she could, preparing her for teaching learning analytics modules again in the upcoming school year. She hopes to share the LASER materials more widely at conferences in the global learning analytics community.

Another way LASER materials are being applied directly into practice are in North Carolina schools. Etheridge, principal at Fallston Elementary School in Fallston, North Carolina, is the first K-12 educator to participate in the program and wants to use machine learning to assess student performance in kindergarten to determine performance up to third grade. After his participation in the LASER program, he hopes to offer a training on how to use structured machine learning in elementary settings for administrators across North Carolina.

“This is an opportunity to both further my statistical analysis, my data analysis skills and study and also start taking this knowledge and applying it back to the physical place where I work with the students who I work with day in and day out,” said Etheridge. “I am going to be sharing this with people in the field and practitioners. I think there are always barriers of entry, like data and data use, and some of what I’m pushing through now to get access to. I wonder if that will help inform how I communicate with teachers and administrators and district leaders about how they can better use data…so I hope that I can take some of this and be a guide for others.”

LASER scholars not only learn ways to bring their learning into practice during the program sessions but also through each other. LASER scholar Fay Shaw, data scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, learned from a fellow scholar how to build a good module for her LASER work, from developing a best practices presentation to share with her network to building activities for the module.

“Attending the institute has really helped me learn the content to do my job better as a data scientist,” said Shaw. “Additionally, it has given me a cohort of people who I can ask questions, and these fall sessions will hold me accountable to the learning. Now I feel like I have a place to ask questions and receive feedback and encouragement.”

Since the summer workshop ended, ongoing support is provided to participants during the academic year to continue their professional learning and ensure they can successfully carry out instructional plans at their home institutions. The project team facilitates a range of activities designed to support participants, provide a successful online community and inform curriculum refinement throughout the year. These include monthly check-ins, virtual module sessions to learn about research methods, resource repositories and informal discussions.

“It has been very rewarding to see the enthusiasm from our LASER BEAM scholars as they have built on their knowledge and skills to learn more advanced learning analytics approaches,” said Gemma Mojica, co-PI on the project and director of the Hub for Innovation and Research in Statistics and Data Science Education [HI-RiSE] at the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation. “It has been exciting to see this community grow and to see the scholars also supporting and learning from one another. I have been so impressed by the ways that the scholars are incorporating what they learned from LASER into their own instructional contexts, whether it be in their courses with their students or in supporting colleagues’ professional development through presentations and webinars. While the project is in its final year, the commitment of the scholars to continue to integrate LASER materials, tools and experiences into their instructional practice will keep the project’s legacy alive.”