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Big Data Comes to School: Challenges the Learning Sciences
William Cope, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Project: UIUC Department College of Education
Abstract
This brief presentation will provide an overview of emerging “big data” challenges in education, including the range of data sources, data types and data collection technologies, and the problem for meta-analysis presented by variant data models. Successfully addressing these challenges could reap significant dividends for education, not only transforming the methodologies and processes of educational research, but also for the development of a new generation of student assessments. I will conclude by proposing in outline form a ‘National Data Dictionary’ that might support the federation of datasets that are at this point semantically incommensurable.