Paths of inquiry
Pathways Lab leverages scientific rigor and peer review to inform improvement of learning opportunities across the life course.
Pathways Lab leverages scientific rigor and peer review to inform improvement of learning opportunities across the life course.
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Using computational, qualitative and archival techniques to understand how learning paths unfold.
1/5
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.
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2/5
This project investigates how students use the Carta platform to browse and select courses by extracting multi-stage screening rules from student activity.
3/5
We use novel archival transcript data and computational methods to identify how students navigate elective curriculums and commit to majors.
4/5
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.
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5/5
This project investigates how students move through science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors and careers.
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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.
1/2
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.
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2/2
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.
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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.
1/3
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.
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2/3
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
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3/3
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought spectacular new challenges for educators and learners. Digital platforms have become essential tools in meeting that challenge.
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Powerful, user-friendly tools to aid in course search and path discovery.
1/2
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.
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2/2
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 onlineWhat works, what doesn't, and what the future of online learning might be.
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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.
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2/2
Massively open online courses (MOOCs) generated extraordinary scientific insight. Here are just a few things we are learning.
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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 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.