Update

Author Offers Insights to the Mixed View of Data in the Classroom

Anne Murphy Paul examined what can be learned from Virginia's effort to open up its educational data.

Anne Murphy Paul examined what can be learned from Virginia’s effort to open up its educational data.

Author and journalist Annie Murphy Paul spends a lot of time talking with teachers and reporting on education and a recent piece about how Virginia is letting students and the public access educational data may offer some interesting insights to those dealing with games and learning.

“The state’s department of education, along with a nonprofit organization called the Center for Innovative Technology, created Apps4VA: an initiative promoting the development of software apps that make it easy to explore Virginia’s trove of educational data,” she wrote, adding the data includes “average scores in English, history, math and science; dropout and graduation rates; the number of students with disabilities receiving special education; and percentages of high school graduates enrolled in college and other ‘postsecondary institutions.’”

Apps4VA allows anyone to create tools to sort and organize the reams of data that the educational system generates.

“The interesting thing about the Apps for Virginia program I wrote about it is it made students themselves stakeholders in the use of educational data because so often what we hear about student data is tales of it being abused or used for someone else’s gain or profit or used as a kind of weapon against teachers,” Annie Murphy Paul told gamesandlearning.org recently.

I really like that is said to students and the general public, ‘Look, we have all this data. What do you think we should do with it?’ You know, to involve them in coming up with ways to use the date productively.

It’s an approach to data that she said game developers could consider when creating assessment tools — that these tools need not only be produced for teachers, administrators or parents.

“I imagine game developers could approach data that games produce the same way and say, ‘Look, every time you play a game you are generating this information about yourself. What do you think we should do with this information?’” she said.

Central to this approach is a vision of data that she argued could have more benefits for students, saying giving students access to their own data would allow them to “see how they are improving over time or how greater effort can yield better results then that’s a really effective way of using data that doesn’t always occur to teachers or administrators who have their own uses for that data.”

“It goes back to this sense of ownership. Is data something that is kept on you or about you that you don’t really have access to or is it something that you own and you use,” she said.

 

Data’s Mixed Reception

Another point she highlighted was the need for people to recognize parents and teachers often have concerns about educational data.

“People who are excited about data are excited about all of the possibilities that it offers they are not always as sensitive to other people’s concerns and worries about how data will be used,” she said.

Parents have concerns about privacy and teachers often worry that data is used to unfairly judge a teacher’s performance.

One group she said seems less concerned is the students.

“My impression is that … younger people have grown up with data as a part of their world and being aware that data is being collected on them with every keystroke that they make and they are not as bothered by that because they live their lives online,” she said.

One way to make students more aware of this reality, she said, could be letting the students access some of the data games generate about them.

“We can be told that everything you do online or in a game leaves a trace and can be tracked and to see that happening would make it much more vivid and real,” she said, adding that, “Letting the kids see the mechanics of how a game works would be of a lot of interest to many students.”