Toward a New Approach to the Evaluation of a Digital Curriculum Using Learning Analytics

AbstractUnderstanding how an educational intervention is implemented is essential to evaluating its effectiveness. With the increased use of digital tools in classrooms, however, traditional methods of measuring implementation fall short. Fortunately, there is a way to learn about the interactions that users have with digital tools that are embedded into the technologies themselves: user data. The purpose of this article is to outline ways in which researchers can harness learning analytics and user data to gain a deeper understanding of the implementation of digital innovations and their impact on teaching and learning. We discuss four considerations for the integration of learning analytics and user data in implementation research, and we provide an example of integration from an evaluation of a digital science curriculum, STEMscopes.