SBIR Phase I: Asset-Focused Data Mining to Increase Academic Motivation and Achievement

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project studies the feasibility of creating representations of data for teachers and students that are visually compelling, easy to understand, and sharply focused on the goal of identifying and reporting in real time academic accomplishments that are highly positively correlated with meeting important educational goals. Phase I has four goals. First, historical Learning Management System (LMS) usage data are analyzed to identify teacher and student use behaviors positively correlated with high student achievement. Second, prototypes of informational dashboards are designed with the objective of motivating teachers and students to meet teaching and learning goals. Third, functional, executable specifications are designed for the data capture, extraction, and transformation processes to generate information for dashboards. Finally, user studies are conducted to verify that the dashboard design receives positive user responses. Thus, Phase I aims to identify the characteristics of information representations deemed beneficial by experts and potential users; to determine how to represent information to motivate teachers and students by focusing on accomplishments; and to identify the data warehouse requirements for storing, retrieving, and aggregating this information across schools, districts and academic years. The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is significant. The visual representations of data for teachers and students developed in this project advance the positive attributes (assets) of the teaching and learning experience rather than focusing simply on right and wrong answers. With these innovative representations of instructional and performance data, students can see in clear, quantitative terms the power of their effort on their achievement. Teachers can examine their enacted curriculum versus the envisioned curriculum, and see evidence of their successes in engaging the students they work hard to educate. Administrators have an initial rubric for examining learning assets rather than deficits and for supporting work within a positive framework. The project also offers significant commercial potential for Agile Mind. New commercial products could include new or enhanced low-cost reporting tools for students, teachers, schools and districts and for-fee custom reports to schools and districts about student performance with targeted interventions to improve those outcomes.