Matt Bernacki, Ph.D., an associate professor at the UNC School of Education and the Kinnard White Faculty Scholar in Education, will serve as co-principal investigator of a new $1 million Institute of Education Sciences (IES) grant that aims to curb procrastination in American universities.
The 2-year project – “A Multipronged Approach to Small-Teaching Interventions for Reducing Academic Procrastination: A Randomized Control Study via Terracotta” – will leverage CLICKSTREAM, a learning analytics platform developed by a Bernacki-led team that utilizes data students have consented to provide through their use of learning management systems (LMS). Aggregating LMS usage data and additional student data, CLICKSTREAM has the ability to immediately enhance the data students produce when they learn in digital spaces. The team adds key details about the kinds of resources the instructor provided and the kinds of strategies and techniques the resource might afford to learners who use it. Researchers use these enriched data to more accurately and descriptively understand how students learn.
“Connecting students’ click data in an LMS with additional attributes students share about themselves also helps us understand how the same resource can benefit different learners in unique ways. For example, if the student is a first-generation college student or didn’t take similar courses in high school, they may encounter challenges that more experienced students don’t. This gives us critical insight into individual students’ learning and brings powerful meaning to learning analytics,” Bernacki said.
The project team – led by Akira Miyake, Ph.D., a psychology professor at the University of Colorado Boulder – will develop and test interventions for postsecondary academic procrastination, equipping students with strategies to circumvent two predicted causes of procrastination: (1) experiencing negative mood caused by aversion toward an academic task and (2) choosing an immediately pleasurable activity over the academic task. The interventions will be delivered through the Canvas LMS using Terracotta, a platform used to conduct educational research with randomized controlled trials.
By pairing CLICKSTREAM with Terracotta, the research team can not only run experiments to determine which procrastination interventions benefit students, but also how those benefits are achieved, and how they vary from learner to learner.
Over two years, the project team seeks to enroll 10,000 college students from across the U.S. who are enrolled in large lecture-based psychology and biology classes. Currently, data agreements are being finalized with institutions in Colorado, North Carolina, and additional states. Three of those schools are part of the UNC System.
“Bringing CLICKSTREAM to life was and is a ton of work, and few, if any, have developed a data pipeline that can enrich data to reflect important details about the learner, the course context instructors build for their students, and the ways the learning opportunities instructors provide align with psychological theories of learning the way ours does,” Bernacki said.
“Offering learning analytics services to other universities and intervention developers is a new venture for our team, but I am confident our platform can accurately describe participating students’ learning processes, tell a richer story about their learning, and provide researchers with better evidence about why their intervention works,” he continued, noting that this project marks the first time CLICKSTREAM (and the systems it replaces) has been used to support research outside of his team’s learning analytics research focused on student success in STEM and developing students’ learning skills.
When asked about the future potential of CLICKSTREAM, Bernacki confirmed: “Beyond our work in higher education, our approach can deliver the same insight and impact in K-12 settings. When we partner with educators who know their courses and their students and can enrich the story that students’ own data tell about their learning, CLICKSTREAM has the ability to meet education in the moment, at every level, and ensure every student’s learning is both seen and maximized.”
In addition to Bernacki, Michael Kane, Ph.D., a psychology professor at UNC Greensboro, and Hannah Snyder, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychology at Brandeis University, serve as co-PIs.
CLICKSTREAM builds upon IES- and NSF-funded research conducted since 2014 by Bernacki and colleagues at UNC-Chapel Hill and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Recently, CLICKSTREAM has received critical seed funding from the UNC Office of Research and the UNC School of Education.