replicate.education: A Workshop on Large Scale Education Replication

Call for Participation, in conjunction with Educational Data Mining 2018, July 15-18, Buffalo NY

The big data revolution in education has led to many shifts and advances in the field, including better prediction of student outcomes and better modeling of student knowledge and engagement. However, many findings appear to contradict each other across datasets, differ from each other in subtle ways, or are hindered by methodological shortcomings (e.g., uncorrected multiple testing for statistical significance). As such, the issues of replication and research synthesis across studies facing the community now loom large, and there is increasing worry about spurious studies being accepted as true, often referred to as the “replication crisis” in other areas of science. This issue is particularly critical in the field of educational data mining, where the sharing of datasets for replication purposes is restricted by educational privacy laws (e.g., FERPA) and many studies evaluate novel educational domains with no clear scientific consensus to guide the interpretation of novel methods and results (e.g., MOOCs). This workshop is intended to build working capital up within the EDM community, focusing on the challenges, opportunities, and best practices for reproducibility, replication, and generalization of EDM findings.

The workshop will be organized as a half day event immediately preceding the main EDM conference. This will include invited discussions on work done in the field to date, as well as a poster session. Participants interested in presenting posters are requested to provide a brief (500-1,000 words) abstract of their interests, work, or positions in the area, and may include topics broadly about education and replication including:

Important Dates

June 1, 2018 – Submission of Abstracts (send to replicate.education@umich.edu)

July 15, 2018 – Workshop

Preliminary Schedule

(Times to be confirmed closer to date of event)

Organizers