Unit name | Exploring and Visualising Data in Education |
---|---|
Unit code | EDUCM0066 |
Credit points | 20 |
Level of study | M/7 |
Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24) |
Unit director | Dr. Baker |
Open unit status | Not open |
Pre-requisites |
None |
Co-requisites |
None |
School/department | School of Education |
Faculty | Faculty of Social Sciences and Law |
Advances in computing have led to a reliance of society on digital technology and devices to live our daily lives and an educator working 50 years ago would be amazed at the transformation this has had on all aspects of education. One particular feature of the new digital age is the easy, often automatic collection of vastly more data on individuals and use of this data has impacted in many ways on education.
In this unit we will consider how data is collected, summarised, interpreted and visualised and the impact that use of such data has had on many different educational arenas. Our approach will include teaching good practice in terms of presenting and visualising data by critically evaluating examples both good and bad from the education sphere. We will discuss the use of league tables to compare different educational units (schools, universities, countries) and the impact that this culture of comparison has on educational decision making.
We will cover examples of data used in different educational contexts including school governance and leadership and inspection, international comparison, higher education and research carried out in a school context. We will also talk about available educational data resources that can be used by researchers for secondary data analysis and contrast this approach to primary data collection.
This course is open to all Masters students and we will assume no previous training in statistics.
The aims for this unit are to:
Upon successful completion of the unit students will be able to:
There will be 10x2 hour teaching sessions which will include lectures, seminar style discussions, peer group work, and tutor support for assignment planning and writing.
The formative assessment will consist of class exercises and group work around the various different topics covered in the unit. These will include computer software-based exercises to assess understanding of the material with solutions provided to check progress. There will also be group discussions of particular topics to check understanding of material.
The unit will be summatively assessed by three pieces of coursework:
Diamond, I and Jefferies, J (2000) Beginning Statistics - An Introduction for Social Sciences.
Articles in the area including:
Goldstein, H and Leckie, G (2008) School league tables: What can they really tell us? Significance pgs 67-69
Goldstein, H and Leckie, G (2011) Understanding Uncertainty in School League Tables. Fiscal Studies pgs 207-224
Ozga, J (2009) Governing Education through Data in England: from Regulation to Self-Evaluation. Journal of Educational Policy pgs 149-162
Williamson, B (2016) Digital Methodologies of Education Governance: Pearson plc and the Remediation of Methods.
European Educational Research Journal pgs 34-53