Unit information: Exploring and Visualising Data in Education in 2018/19

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	Professor. Browne
Open unit status	Not open
Pre-requisites	None
Co-requisites	None
School/department	School of Education
Faculty	Faculty of Social Sciences and Law

Description including Unit Aims

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:

• introduce data interpretation and visualisation techniques to the students within the context of real educational examples;
• provide students with an understanding of what data can and cannot show and how to critically interpret data summaries, visualisations and league tables;
• allow students to critically evaluate the impact of the use of data on educational systems and the positive and negative effects it has on the different actors within the system;
• provide students with practical opportunities to use data to evaluate how different approaches to data selection and presentation impact on systems;
• enable students to see how the same techniques can be used in different contexts within the field of education;
• introduce to students the many secondary data resources available to them for use in their own research.

Intended Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of the unit students will be able to:

1. critically evaluate how education related data is presented in various formats including summary statistics, visualisation and tables and how each should be interpreted;
2. demonstrate how to present and summarise data in a variety of appropriate formats;
3. construct summary measures from data that might be produced for comparisons purposes, and demonstrate understanding of how such measures might influence the many actors that the use of the data affects;
4. evaluate the difference between secondary data and primary data and apply the techniques in research;
5. demonstrate how to locate and use secondary data to appropriately answer specific research questions.

Teaching Information

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.

Assessment Information

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:

1. Data summary: the students will be supplied with some examples of data used in education and will be asked to give alternative summaries of the data to make a 3 page report for a particular audience. [3 pages (approximately 1000 words) 30%] ILOs 1-2
2. League tables: students will work in groups to construct a summary from a given collection of data. This will typically involve constructing an indicator that summarises the data (for each unit) that can then be used in unit comparison. Students will then critique how their chosen summary might influence the various actors affected by their measure and answer some related questions provided by the tutor. [1500 words 35%] ILO 3
3. Evidence synthesis: students will be given access to sources of secondary data and working individually use these sources and the techniques learned in the course (along with finding additional literature where necessary) to write an essay that summarises evidence about a particular question or hypothesis. (1500 words 35%) ILOs 4-5

Reading and References