Using Educational Data From Teaching And Learning To Inform Teachers’ Reflective Educational Design In Inquiry-Based STEM Education

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education is recognized as a top priority for school education worldwide and Inquiry-based teaching and learning is identified as one of the most dominant approaches. To effectively engage individual students in Inquiry tasks, appropriate guidance needs to be provided, usually by combining different digital tools such online labs, data analysis tools and modelling tools. This is a cumbersome task for teachers to perform manually since it involves (a) assessing during the education design, the type and level of tool-supported guidance to be provided to students and (b) potentially refining this level and types to meet the guidance needs of individual students based on educational data from the delivery of the educational design. Thus, in our research we target to investigate how to support this process with educational data analytics methods and tools from both the design and the delivery of educational designs, that inform teachers’ decision making for systematic reflection. To this end, the contribution of this paper is the design and evaluation of a novel “Teaching and Learning” Analytics method and supporting research prototype tool, extending the scope of purely learning analytics methods, to (a) analyze inquiry-based educational designs in terms of the tool-supported guidance they offer and (b) relate these analyses to students' educational data that are already being collected by existing learning analytics systems, so as to increase teachers’ awareness and understanding and scaffold their reflection. A two-layer evaluation methodology was adopted to evaluate both the capacity of our method to analyze educational designs in terms of appropriate guidance as well as to investigate whether the insights generated by the method offer statistically significant indicators that impact students' activity during the delivery of these educational designs. The results obtained, based on real-life educational data, argue that the proposed method and tool can support teachers to accurately analyse Inquiry-based educational designs and receive meaningful insights to improve and tailor students' learning experiences. The insights of this work aim to contribute in the research field of cognitive data analytics for teaching and learning, by investigating new ways to combine analyses of the educational design and the students’ activity, so as to inform teachers’ reflective decision making from a holistic perspective