Analytics in teaching & learning

?“There are two main categories of analytics used for educational purposes.?Teaching Analytics?analyses the teaching design by looking at your lesson plans and reflecting on how effective that is for the student learning experience.?Learning Analytics?collects and measures student data and analyses how you can refine the learning experience to make it more effective for the?student”, (Classtime, 2019, p.1)

“Historically, some of the most common uses of learning analytics is prediction of student academic success…”, (Research, 2020, p.1). However, learning analytics has more uses such as (a) reflecting on the teaching methods used, (b) helping students reflect on their results (c) supporting critical thinking skills and (d) get a bigger picture of the students by identifying their strengths and gaps in a wider way. Analytics answer the burning question asked by Buckingham-Shum, & Crim (2016, p.6), “did we make a difference?” ?I like to gather data on maths and life skills. Hence, my main methods have been:

An immersive experience

I set a task to be done in a group, hand to the students the rubric for the same and leave them to it. I step back and observe the class. I have some criteria for assessing the life skills employed by the students such as (a) capacity to work independently (b) group work (c) conflict resolution (d) time management and (e) honesty of effort. For example, in groups of 3, students work on a problem in the form of a story. The groups are chosen in such a way that each has students good in maths, language and leadership. They have access to internet to search for information, thereby the possibility of cheating. They are assessed using a rubric which is shared with them.

?Variety in assessments

It is a must to have an “Ongoing assessment, both formal and informal, and formative and summative, informed instruction…”, (Beecher and Sweeny, 2008, p.20) to measure student performance on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis. This is where I get the data about skills in maths chiefly. I have regular assessments. Daily assessment may include 1 or 2 problems to be done in a few minutes. Formative may include longer tests or integrated assignment such as ‘write a story using all 4 operations of decimal’. These usually last for a lesson. There are also the routine assessments under summative.

?Conclusion

I believe that both – maths and life skills - feed into each other. A student, unable to perform in maths, might be struggling because of an inability to ask for help. Or a student might get better in maths by gaining confidence in differentiated activities which would affect the results in maths. Hence gathering an all-round data helps develop better spaces for students to learn.

?HumaneMaths

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