The American School of Bombay has a distinct advantage over many top international schools: they have a robust R&D department with a talented Data Scientist.
Each year, they publish Future Forwards, a compendium of the work done by the R&D team available online to all who have the link. And I’m here to share the link with you. Of course, I gravitate to the Data Science and Learning Analytics chapters, but the whole pdf is a fantastic read for any school looking to innovate and design.
Highlights:
Impact of a School R & D Department: an entire chapter dedicated on how to have a successful R&D team, just like ASB. From design thinking to prototyping, R&D changes the paradigm. This section gives advice and success and is conveniently followed by a chapter on core competencies of a successful R&D program.
Using Visual Analytics to Support Student Learning: a great read about what you can glean from years of standardized testing data. Much of our test data is in different hands and in different databases, but a talented data-wrangler can shape it into striking visuals that tell the story of your school and derive knew insights that were previously ignored.
Learning Analytics and Data Visualization in a 4th Grade Classroom: a great read about how a Data Scientist can partner with a teacher to enhance their classroom experience. ASB’s data scientist created a data visualization app where the 4th graders enter in their moods, what they ate, and answer to 6 other questions. When the kids answer the questions each day, the visualization changes and they can see relationships in the data anonymously. The students then got to do what young minds do best: explore! This is the power of classroom analytics in the hands of a capable data scientist. Truly transformative learning!
You can read the entire volume here: Future Forwards Vol.3 (2014)
Disclaimer: The data and graphics used on this site are simulated re-creations intended to protect the privacy of the original data sources.