The National Science Foundation has awarded grants of $4.8 million to several prominent research universities to advance the use of Big Data in the schools.
Benjamin Herold writes in Education Week:
“The National Science Foundation earlier this month awarded a $4.8 million grant to a coalition of prominent research universities aiming to build a massive repository for storing, sharing, and analyzing the information students generate when using digital learning tools.
“The project, dubbed “LearnSphere,” highlights the continued optimism that “big” educational data might be used to dramatically transform K-12 schooling.
“It also raises new questions in the highly charged debate over student-data privacy.
“The federally funded initiative will be led by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, who propose to construct a new data-sharing infrastructure that is distributed across multiple institutions, include third-party and for-profit vendors. When complete, LearnSphere is likely to hold a massive amount of anonymous information, including:
“Clickstream” and other digital-interaction data generated by students using digital software provided to schools by LearnSphere participants;
“Chat-window dialogue sent by students participating in some online courses and tutoring programs;
“Potentially, “affect” and biometric data, including information generated from classroom observations, computerized analysis of students’ posture, and sensors placed on students’ skin.
“Proponents say that facilitating the sharing and analysis of such information for research purposes can lead to new insights about how humans learn, as well as rapid improvements to the digital learning software flooding now flooding schools.”
Whoa! The Gates-funded “galvanic skin response monitors” are back! Two years ago, it seemed to be a joke but it’s no joke. Researchers are still trying to gauge biometric reactions with sensors placed on students’ skin.
This really is Brave New World stuff.
Just think: Your tax dollars will help to fund a project to mine your children’s data and turn that data over to for-profit vendors to sell things to the children and their schools.
What can we do about it? Refuse to use digital learning tools in school. Don’t give them the data. Use pencils and pens. Now we understand why the two federally-funded Common Core testing consortia must be tested online and online only. This is the means of producing the data that will be mined.
This is all very sick. It has nothing to do with education and everything to do with violating the rights of families and children. No child will be better educated by mining their data, observing their posture, and monitoring their skin responses. this NOT ABOUT LEARNING. This is about money. Greed. Profits. And we are paying for it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’ve said it before, but the recipe that ed reformers, ed tech companies and those who wish to destroy teachers and their unions is: Standardized Curriculum + Standardized Testing + Ed Tech + Constructivist Pedagogy.
I think that very often the various pieces are viewed independently, but what the ed reformers want to do is to McDonadlize our profession, by by having us be “facilitators” of a common curriculum aimed at doing well on standardized tests and with machines doing the actual teaching.
Hum, Phrenology all over again? But this time Big Brother, 666, “The Man”, and every other form of State control wants to use test scores, instead of cranial formations, to predict one’s value and worth??? Do I hear Pink Floyd singing “Welcome, my son, to the Machine”? Does the State believe they can “tell heaven from hell, blue sky from pain,..”?
All this data is meaningless without it being coupled with data from the affective domain too, like work-ethic, perseverance, morality, altruism, prone-ness to substance abuse, likelihood to get divorced multiple times, etc, etc.
Even then, such data would be useless, for I do not believe in, or advocate, “predicting” someone’s worth based on data. God says a human soul is more valuable than all the riches in the world; but I guess capitalism and the market says you’re only as good as your contribution to the GDP.
Who is to make these value judgments? What if a high-school drop out works in fast food for several decades, earns enough money to buy a few acres and starts to farm them, and makes a decent living doing so. So, the data predicted they would be failures? To whom and for what?????????
“God says a human soul is more valuable than all the riches in the world”
To paraphrase the infamous author/proponent of CCSS “god doesn’t give a shit about the human soul and/or test scores.”
katiewilliamson@sevier.org
Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE smartphone
Actually, I think more can be done. Write to the NSF and the relevant research foundations, internal review boards, administrators, and research team members themselves explaining the concerns. I wouldn’t focus on the skin sensors, but on the ethical issues involving for-profit companies. Explain that there will be a campaign against this on research-ethical grounds. Scientists and IRBs are allergic to controversy, and most want to do the right thing. Most also do not particularly like for profit companies.
Yes, there is money flowing to those involved, but the potential for controversy will make at least a few think twice.
So it looks like we parents might be able to give our kids lessons and games that are better designed to promote student learning, and that are better able to notice when our kids have difficulty and need extra coaching on a given topic, etc.
The horror.
If you want InBloom (or its latest re-incarnation) and the government to know every single shred of data about your child, I guess I don’t have a problem with that. But why shouldn’t it be an opt-in system, rather than a mandatory, nearly impossible to opt out of system?
BTW, research shows that games are really a very poor substitute for actual teaching.
I’m not sure why very many informed parents would object to a school system and university researchers trying to figure out better ways to teach kids. Apart from rampant scaremongering and conspiracy hysteria, few parents are going to say, “I demand outdated textbooks and inefficient teaching methods. No one is going to use my kid’s data to figure out better ways to teach math.”
I guess that factors into what you actually think it means to be educated. Being a skeptic by nature, I would ask the following question: How easy is it to game such a system?
Some people genuinely love learning and could do well in that or any other environment. But many could knowingly manipulate a system such as this to give the impression of learning. I’ve had students who have done online classes and they report that it’s basically a video game mentality. You just keep doing it until you level up. They don’t necessarily learn much except how to beat the system.
Also, as a gamer, I can tell you that games are good for problem-solving but not necessarily a substitute for anything truly educational. And ultimately, everything gets measured. With this assumption is that data can solve the problem. Of course the real question is: How reliable is the data?
State tests and CCSS tests at the high school level are incredibly unreliable because the students don’t care about them. It isn’t reliable or even useful data.
And by the way, per your original comment, if a parent can’t already do those things, well, not much of a parent.
Why do we even have schools then, if everyone is already so perfectly capable of teaching their kids in the best possible way?
Let’s just get to the main point, WT. You don’t like teachers. You don’t like schools. You’d be in all your glory if the profession disappeared and computers replaced us all.
Digital technology is a wonderful tool but it can’t fully replicated a school experience which extends far beyond reading, writing and math skills.
Don’t worry, you’ll get the depersonalized circumstance you want. It seems a matter of time.
That is stupid. I’ve said nothing of the sort.
If you try to keep to the topic — whether researchers should be able to do sophisticated research about how kids learn — you’ll find that the following two statements are equivalent.
1) Textbooks and worksheets aren’t necessarily the best they could be. We should have researchers look at a number of questions about how textbooks should be designed, what sorts of problems they should offer, whether long worksheets help kids more than short worksheets on interspersed topics, etc. To do this, researchers will need access to how well the kids do when given different types of worksheets, different types of textbooks, and so forth.
2) Computer programs and software aren’t necessarily the best they could be. We should have researchers look at a number of questions about how software should be used, how its lessons should be structured, how much repetition and drill they should use, how much “gamification” should be used, etc. To do this, researchers will need access to computerized data about how the students use the software.
The careful reader will notice that both of the above statements are perfectly reasonable, that there is no need for conspiracy theorizing about them, and most importantly that NEITHER ONE even remotely implies disliking or replacing teachers.
WT, I’m just going by the general tone of your posts.
To address your points, researchers can do that work but you realize the idea, in its final form, is designed to create pure online education.
And, seriously, as a high school teacher, worksheets and software programs are the things that least interest me. I’ll only speak for the age group that I teach. The last and least helpful thing for high school juniors and seniors is yet another simple identification style worksheet or multiple choice computer program that asks them to identify things. They need synthesis, analysis and evaluation questions. My students are in a regular mode of doing more than reading a passage and answering questions.
I teach AP Euro and regular World History. Over the last week my students have held discussion and written arguments on: the accuracy Condorcet’s 1794 predictions, the role of religious leaders in affecting the work of scientists in the 16th and 17th Century, passages from “Wealth of Nations” and their applications to today’s economics, the role of the Vikings in changing the political structures of Western Europe and a comparison of Justinian’s Code to today’s legal rights.
I don’t know that computer simulations can measure answers like that with accuracy since they won’t be adaptive to long, thoughtful answers that occur after small group discussions.
And that’s kind of my point. The non-academic skills that employers like (collaboration, reflection, evaluation of ideas, and so on) are hard to measure through “keystroke analysis.” I have some kids who express ideas brilliantly in verbal communication but struggle with writing.
Also, I’m a huge gamer. Board games (Euro games) and card games. I teach intro to chess to any interested students after school on Fridays for 90 minutes. But here’s a little something about gamification. Everything is a game.
The research will inform data on younger kids. But as they get older and figure out what the research has determined, they’ll game it in a way to produce the results or data that intentionally deceives researchers. One thing nearly every kid figures out by the time they’re high school juniors is how to game systems.
So, if you honestly think that researchers are doing this to measure how people learn and nothing more, I’d suggest that you’re either naive or willfully foolish. The endgame is to create platforms that don’t just inform but provide something approximating an education. If you’re saying it would be helpful to know these things, cool, I can’t argue that. But there’s going to be policy makers that see this as a way to circumvent teachers, cut costs and provide that miraculous platform that serves students in a way that produces test scores. Test scores which only measure basic proficiency in a very narrow way. So when one links together the ways in which this can be used and propagated, yes, I consider it to be something that goes far beyond “how kids learn.”
Here is a report of some of this kind of research: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/upshot/heavier-babies-do-better-in-school.html?_r=0&abt=0002&abg=1
The article suggests that we might want to rethink how we approach childbirth. We could always ignore it I suppose.
Maybe the onus should be on the people collecting the data and doing the research to show parents what ethical protocols and rules are in place and enforceable.
Just dismissing their concerns probably isn’t productive.
When do “ethics” apply when the only morality that drives the market is profit and the possibility to create new markets? Capitalism is amoral, unless one’s economics is premised upon some higher metaphysic than capital and “dollar worship”. So, only a “higher frame of reference”, ex. the Bible, is used the market will only go where the money leads it. Even oppression, unjust wages, unjust gains, fraud are all possible without some grounding of our concepts of values and justice in something more than currency.
Rick
What is the difference between ethics and morals?
Duane
In research, subjects have to give informed consent. Can parents opt out of this research?
Right – and there’s no way we could have known any of that without massive data mining without parental consent.
Keep trying, TE.
Dienne,
How do you propose to get a large enough number of observations of birth weights and save them for 17 years so that they can be compared to SAT test scores without doing something like “big data”?
Wow, silly me. I didn’t realize that follow-along studies were only made possible with the advent of big data. Could have sworn I read about a number of such studies in college. Guess I was hallucinating.
Dienne,
These studies are “big data”. Every child born in Florida for 11 years is in the data set. How big do you think a study has to be before it is “big data”?
What do we know from following every child in Florida that we didn’t know from previous studies following hundreds or thousands of kids?
Apparently what we didn’t know was that lower birth weights are correlated with lower scores on standardized exams much later in life.
We learned a lot by experimenting on the Jews without their consent. Guess that was justified too.
Dienne,
If you can not see any important differences between these two things, there is little hope for a rational conversation.
Rick Lapworth
October 13, 2014 at 12:46 pm
When do “ethics” apply when the only morality that drives the market is profit and the possibility to create new markets?
I agree. My only point is that there’s not some duty or obligation for parents to turn over their childrens’ “data” to researchers, just on faith.
Maybe researchers could make their case on why they need it and what they’re planning on doing with it? Just yelling “science!” over and over probably won’t cut it. They’re asking for something. It’s their job to persuade parents to give it to them.
I don’t know why “university researchers” would be beyond question. Children have always been a special case. They always get special protections. They’re not adults.
Data mining is barely a topic of discussion in Los Angeles. As many of us have been clamoring for a computerized system that actually works to schedule students properly, provide class rosters to teachers, allow the tracking and reporting of grades and produce high school transcripts so students can apply for college. Readers of this blog are surely aware that a judge had to direct the school district to solve the problem at Jefferson High School so that students would not be sitting in auditoriums all day rather than learning. These are just some of the problems with the latest technological fiasco in LAUSD.
But as we push for this system to do what it is supposed to do, I hope we will not end up creating an even bigger problem resulting from data mining.
The LA Times tweeted this over the weekend for their article as if they were testing the canary in the coal mine: “LAUSD system was to contain a student’s entire school history from kindergarten to high school graduation.” http://lat.ms/1tl6vPn
Can anyone help me list the right questions to ask so that parents in Los Angeles can vet the system and the process in our infamous school district?
It’s all so insidious – our major (respected???) universities brokering against K-12 education in the area of data-mining. In CA, our public universities – the UCs – particularly UCLA are banking on collecting this data from minors via their recent agreement with SBAC – CA’s testing corporation. Ironic, isn’t it – when our universities are questioning their reliance on standardized testing for admittance – they stand to profit (BIG TIME!) by data mining K-12 underage kids who participate in compulsory testing. Parents should have to sign waivers before private and public institutions can collect student data.
‘It’s all so insidious – our major (respected???) universities brokering against K-12 education in the area of data-mining.”
Despite strict requirements for publicly funded institutions to get consent before doing human research, Cornell University recently did a massive study on Facebook without consent of those they were experimenting on.
Of course, they just made up an excuse that they didn’t actually do the study, just analyzed the data after it was collected, so (of course) they had no responsibility to tell anyone beforehand (even though Cornell researchers had actually worked with Facebook on the experimental design)
Many of our major “respected” Universities (eg, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Stanford, MIT) have become obsessed with $$$.
Integrity does not even enter into it.
There’s just so much money to be made on this – what we are witnessing is a new form of land grab or mineral mining.
“A mine is a terrible thing to waste”
A mine is a terrible thing to waste
Especially when it’s data
Especially when it’s n’er erased
There’s really nothing greata
“A mine is a terrible thing to waste” (2)
A mine is a terrible thing to waste
Especially when kids’ data
Especially when it’s n’er erased
There’s really nothing greata
Diane. I highly value the research and information you continually provide parents about our education system. You are a true champion of children, parents and local control. Can you tell me why you sit on the Board of the Gordon Commission whose mission is to: “advance technology to improve educational measurement and student achievement”? They also say they that the “Common Core standards give us an opportunity to challenge the belief in local control” of education. Former Governor, Bob Wise sits on this commission and his joint venture with Jeb Bush, called Digital Learning Now, is advancing the very things you are fighting. They have joined forces with Obama’s ConnectEd Initiative to replace textbooks and any trace of paper and pencil work. And, as you describe, it’s all about big-data and profit for crony-capitalists joined at the hip with big government. I urge you to expose this and resign your position on the Commission?
I joined the commission, never attended a single meeting, had no role in writing its report. My mistake. I take no credit or responsibility for the report. Stuff happens. My views are expressed daily in this blog.
>Potentially, “affect” and biometric data, including information generated from classroom observations, computerized analysis of students’ posture, and sensors placed on students’ skin.
Gosh! This is the same kind of RFID technology installed in a memory card to scan the personal data remotely. It’s already used in several countries–including Japan, which has a really nasty reputation for checking foreign residents for ID on a daily basis.
This is really dangerous because it will encourage racial profiling and/or data mining.
I suggest that everyone really concerned about the NSF grants look at the grant proposals and the projects that have been initiated, completed, and are still underway.
I did a little of that with the Carnegie-Mellon grants from NSF. Some of the lead researchers have been working on predictive algorithms for getting students through a course. Patents for the algorithms are often assigned to Carnegie -Mellon some to the individual researchers.
Some of the big data programs are a souped-up version of 1960s programmed instruction for learning subjects where the end-game is getting the right answer, meaning the subject matters are formally structured and various paths and prompts can be given to students so they get to the right destination.
The aim is to improve the programs and prompts so students get to that answer by the most efficient path….a version of rat running.
Other big data projects are more game like, with quests and challenges and assessments of what attracts and sustains attention, functions as a motivator, and so on.
I think the most troublesome part of the grants is the difficulty in finding information about who is contributing the chunks of big data, privacy clearances, data storage, and the disclosures for human research as well as potential for conflicts of interest.
I am not a technophile and I understand that the NSF grants are leveraging a bunch of other concerns.
I share these concerns , and think that Ken is on target that these new systems of surveillance will enable, and are intended to enable, unparalleled profiling of students and teachers and for reasons that cannot be made legitimate by simply claiming these inquiries are ” to improve student learning.”
As a parent, I opt-out my children of every type of tech program in a k-5 school. Also, I don’t allow ‘data entry’ for any of the tests given. It is a struggle to discover every data mining item in schools now!