Paths of inquiry
Pathways Lab leverages scientific rigor and peer review to inform improvement of learning opportunities across the life course.
anchor insight
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from pipelines to pathways in the study of academic progress
This brief essay frames our scientific ambition.
sequences and forecasts
Using computational, qualitative and archival techniques to understand how learning paths unfold.
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undergraduate cohort study
How do students’ aspirations and choices evolve over the course of their undergraduate careers?
We are following eighty students pursuing their undergraduate careers at a private research university with a comprehensive curriculum. We interview participants each term to learn about their academic predilections and choices. The goal is to understand how students’ identities and adult aspirations co-evolve with their academic experiences.
Leads
- Monique Harrison
- Phillip Hernandez
More
- Choices, identities, paths: Understanding college students’ academic decisions
- Studying undergraduate course consideration at scale
- Should I start at MATH 101? Content repetition as an academic strategy in elective curriculums
- Supporting interviews with technology: How software integration can benefit participants and interviewers
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course consideration
What matters to students as they consider college classes?
This project investigates how students use the Carta platform to browse and select courses by extracting multi-stage screening rules from student activity.
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observing major selection
Given seemingly limitless options, how do students select their majors?
We use novel archival transcript data and computational methods to identify how students navigate elective curriculums and commit to majors.
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course evaluations and peer review
How do students use course reviews to make choices?
Students rely on advice from their peers in navigating academic coursework and choice points. This project leverages a large cache of student-authored course reviews to understand how students make sense of learning experiences and give help to one another.
Leads
- David Lang
5/5
STEM pathways
How do students' STEM pathways emerge?
This project investigates how students move through science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors and careers.
Leads
- Marissa Thompson
- Phillip Hernandez
- Monique Harrison
- Shima Salehi
More
- The confidence gap predicts the gender pay gap among STEM graduates
- Should I start at MATH 101? Content repetition as an academic strategy in elective curriculums
- Signaled or suppressed? How gender informs women’s undergraduate applications in biology and engineering
- Forecasting undergraduate majors: A natural language approach
student narratives
Utilizing a cache of hundreds of thousands of essays submitted with applications to a large public university system, the student narratives team is exploring how young people make sense of their life experiences and represent their accomplishments to others.
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the production of merit
How do young people make sense of their life experiences and explain them to others?
Merit is a complex idea in American culture. This project examines how admissions professionals and college hopefuls collaborate to sustain the merit idea in routine acts of soliciting, writing and reading applications.
Leads
- AJ Alvero
- Sonia Giebel
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fairness and ethics in computational assessment
How can AI inform academic evaluation?
This project leverages a corpus of over 800,000 college applications to determine how education data science might inform norms and practices of fairness and ethics in educational evaluation.
Lead
- AJ Alvero
paths to work
The relationship between schools and workplaces is complex and changing rapidly. Our work informs public discourse on how best to scaffold education and learning opportunities over the entire life course.
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an applied science to support working learners
Blending the worlds of school and work
Working learners simultaneously pursue paid employment and postsecondary education. They are the majority of Americans in college, yet a full understanding of their assets and needs has been limited by the tendency for educators, employers, and researchers alike to presume that work and school are separate worlds.
This project is part of a national effort to correct this presumption and build tractable knowledge to improve opportunities for working learners.
moreLeads
- Mitchell Stevens
- Melanie Shimano
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universities and the future of work
US research universities are vital engines of scientific knowledge and inter-institutional relationships that can help the nation anticipate — and shape — the future of work
Leads
- Mitchell Stevens
- John Mitchell
- Melanie Shimano
3/3
pandemic response
How is COVID-19 influencing learning pathways? How might the pandemic shape the future of learning?
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought spectacular new challenges for educators and learners. Digital platforms have become essential tools in meeting that challenge.
Leads
- John Mitchell
- Mitchell Stevens
platforms and toolkits
Powerful, user-friendly tools to aid in course search and path discovery.
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Via sequence visualization tool
Which courses, and why?
The processes through which course selections accumulate into college pathways in US higher education is poorly instrumented for observation at scale. We offer an analytic toolkit, called Via, which transforms commonly available enrollment data into formal graphs that are amenable to interactive visualizations and computational exploration. We explain the procedures required to project enrollment records onto graphs, and then demonstrate the toolkit utilizing eighteen years of enrollment data at a large private research university. Findings complement prior research on academic search and offer powerful new means for making pathway navigation more efficient.
Lead
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Carta platform
What courses should I take next term?
Carta is a web-based tool that supports informed academic decision-making at Stanford University. Carta integrates information from multiple intramural sources to make course comparisons and academic planning easy for students. Designed and built by students to serve students, Carta also scaffolds Pathways Lab research projects.
view project onlineonline learning
What works, what doesn't, and what the future of online learning might be.
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ambiguous credentials
How do people make sense of learning credentials that are not college degrees?
Badges and alternative credentials of wide variety are proliferating in the global postsecondary ecosystem. This project investigates how learners and employers make sense of novel educational certifications.
Lead
- Mitchell Stevens
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learning from MOOCs
What good is massive?
Massively open online courses (MOOCs) generated extraordinary scientific insight. Here are just a few things we are learning.
Leads
- David Lang
- John Mitchell
- Mitchell Stevens
- René Kizilcec
- Andy Saltarelli
responsible use
The ubiquity, detail and fidelity of data describing learning interactions brings extraordinary opportunity to improve education -- but also obliges educators to share and deploy data responsibly. Pathways Lab takes these responsibilities seriously and continuously.
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responsible use
What is responsible use?
responsible use describes an approach to data utilization that balances concerns about assent, equity and privacy with the imperative to use data in the service of human well-being and institutional improvement. Members of the Pathways Lab have been at the forefront of developing and articulating this approach.