By LAWRENCE BIEMILLER
At the University of Iowa, “General Chemistry I” enrolls as many as 1,500 students a semester. They can go to the lectures in person—8 a.m. Tues-days and Thursdays in a Chemistry Building auditorium that seats 395—or watch recordings through the university’s course-management system. In addition to attending a weekly discussion section led by a teaching assistant, students are told to plan on spending six hours a week online doing homework using Mastering Chemistry, a text-book publisher’s product.
The chemistry students are among the first students at Iowa to benefit from a home-grown predictive-analytics project that aims to help make sure they pass the course. The three-year-old project, called Elements of Success, combines data about students who have already taken the course with information about current students’ backgrounds, how long they’re spending on homework, and how
well they’re understanding it. Then it offers each student a dashboard with visualizations that show how he or she is doing relative to others in the class, and also forecasts the student’s final grade.
For students who aren’t doing well, it suggests what help is available from the Academic Support and Retention office.
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https://www.chronicle.com/article/Big-Data-for-Student-Success/239713
