Data Seminar

"Data Analytics in Business and Social Sciences seminar: Dawn of the Age of "Quantity" in the Behavioral and Social Sciences, and Data Integration from a Missing Data Perspective"1. Title: Dawn of the Age of ¿Quantity¿ in the Behavioral and Social SciencesAbstract: The education assessment landscape has evolved over time. Next generation assessments will leverage large datasets of student data and will require probabilistic interpretations of student-centric, longitudinal assessments that lie on unified scales. Such assessments can be adaptive and blend assessment with instruction by "mining the exhaust" of everyday activities and a connection can be made to higher-stakes assessments. We will illustrate how one critical variable (reading ability/text complexity) has been unified across hundreds of assessments and briefly discuss the educational and policy implications of being able to place readers and text on the same scale. Further, we will present state-of-the-art research in predictive analytics using reading and writing data from EdSphere®, a personalized learning platform that provides learners with differentiated reading, writing, and vocabulary activities, and is built on the science of the Lexile® Framework for Reading.2. Title: Data Integration from a Missing Data PerspectiveAbstract: Many settings involve integrating datasets with non-overlapping or differentia