August  2020

In collaboration with Stanford University Professor Daniel A. McFarland and other scholars, AERA is co-hosting the Online Conference on Educational Data Science on September 18, 8:00 a.m.–12:45 p.m. PDT. Experienced and emerging scholars who apply data science approaches to education and learning problems are invited to convene virtually over Zoom to have a series  of discussions on topics ranging from early education to workforce development. 

The conference is co-sponsored by AERA, Educational Testing Service (ETS), the Stanford Graduate School of Education, and the Stanford Institute for Research in the Social Sciences. Its co-organizers are Daniel McFarland (Stanford University), Ben Domingue (Stanford University), Zachary Pardos (University of California, Berkeley), Joanna Gorin (ETS), and Felice J. Levine (AERA).

The conference will start with a broad stroke on data science and education, followed by more specific topics, including learning analytics and online learning, computer science and AI approaches to education, data science and educational measurement, and computational linguistic approaches. More than 60 presenters will introduce and discuss their papers and posters at the conference.

Conference participants are encouraged to review the conference presenters’ talks, papers, and posters ahead of time and then join on September 18 for live discussions of the talks and an interactive poster session. The discussion sessions will each be moderated by a discussant, who will ask presenters questions posted by webinar attendees in the chat feed.

Participation is encouraged across fields and disciplines, including education research, other fields of social science, engineering, information science, and statistics, among others. 

“Data science is increasingly applied to the field of education, and as domain experts, education researchers need to play an important role in how those applications develop and progress,” said McFarland. “We’re excited to work with AERA to create a space for such interdisciplinary conversations between the education and data science fields.”

“We are very pleased to be involved in this important effort to find new approaches to using data to address education problems,” said AERA Executive Director Felice J. Levine. “This conference helps connect researchers across disciplines and career stages and brings innovative new ideas to the field. Such activities and dialogues are at the center of advancing knowledge and using knowledge to serve the public good.”

For more information on the conference, and to register, visit https://iriss.stanford.edu/css/conferences/conference-educational-data-science.