Effective Evaluation of Online Learning Interventions with Surrogate Measures

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Bibliographic Details
Title: Effective Evaluation of Online Learning Interventions with Surrogate Measures
Language: English
Authors: Prihar, Ethan, Vanacore, Kirk, Sales, Adam, Heffernan, Neil
Source: International Educational Data Mining Society. 2023.
Availability: International Educational Data Mining Society. e-mail: admin@educationaldatamining.org; Web site: https://educationaldatamining.org/conferences/
Peer Reviewed: Y
Page Count: 7
Publication Date: 2023
Sponsoring Agency: National Science Foundation (NSF)
Institute of Education Sciences (ED)
Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE) (ED), Education Innovation and Research (EIR)
Office of Naval Research (ONR) (DOD)
Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), National Highway Institute (NHI)
Contract Number: 2118725
2118904
1950683
1917808
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1940236
1917713
1903304
1822830
1759229
1724889
1636782
1535428
R305N210049
R305D210031
R305A170137
R305A170243
R305A180401
R305A120125
U411B190024
S411B210024
N000141812768
R44GM146483
Document Type: Speeches/Meeting Papers
Reports - Research
Descriptors: Electronic Learning, Intervention, Instructional Effectiveness, Data Collection, Models, Measurement
Abstract: There is a growing need to empirically evaluate the quality of online instructional interventions at scale. In response, some online learning platforms have begun to implement rapid A/B testing of instructional interventions. In these scenarios, students participate in series of randomized experiments that evaluate problem-level interventions in quick succession, which makes it difficult to discern the effect of any particular intervention on their learning. Therefore, distal measures of learning such as posttests may not provide a clear understanding of which interventions are effective, which can lead to slow adoption of new instructional methods. To help discern the effectiveness of instructional interventions, this work uses data from 26,060 clickstream sequences of students across 31 different online educational experiments exploring 51 different research questions and the students' posttest scores to create and analyze different proximal surrogate measures of learning that can be used at the problem level. Through feature engineering and deep learning approaches, next-problem correctness was determined to be the best surrogate measure. As more data from online educational experiments are collected, model based surrogate measures can be improved, but for now, next-problem correctness is an empirically effective proximal surrogate measure of learning for analyzing rapid problem-level experiments. [For the complete proceedings, see ED630829. Additional funding for this paper was provided by the U.S. Department of Education's Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need (GAANN).]
Abstractor: As Provided
Notes: https://osf.io/uj48v
IES Funded: Yes
Entry Date: 2023
Accession Number: ED630844
Database: ERIC
Description
Abstract:There is a growing need to empirically evaluate the quality of online instructional interventions at scale. In response, some online learning platforms have begun to implement rapid A/B testing of instructional interventions. In these scenarios, students participate in series of randomized experiments that evaluate problem-level interventions in quick succession, which makes it difficult to discern the effect of any particular intervention on their learning. Therefore, distal measures of learning such as posttests may not provide a clear understanding of which interventions are effective, which can lead to slow adoption of new instructional methods. To help discern the effectiveness of instructional interventions, this work uses data from 26,060 clickstream sequences of students across 31 different online educational experiments exploring 51 different research questions and the students' posttest scores to create and analyze different proximal surrogate measures of learning that can be used at the problem level. Through feature engineering and deep learning approaches, next-problem correctness was determined to be the best surrogate measure. As more data from online educational experiments are collected, model based surrogate measures can be improved, but for now, next-problem correctness is an empirically effective proximal surrogate measure of learning for analyzing rapid problem-level experiments. [For the complete proceedings, see ED630829. Additional funding for this paper was provided by the U.S. Department of Education's Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need (GAANN).]