Big Data for Education plans to host big-data competitions! The possibility of personalizing digital learning environments has generated lots of excitement, including lots of news coverage. However, there is still much to be studied. In order to encourage new researchers to pick up this task, we will be sponsoring annual competitions

Year 1 , Predicting Long-Term Student Outcomes: Educational technology has provided us with rich educational data that was previously impossible to gather. For example, by building detectors of students' affective states, researchers have been better able to predict performance on state exams as well as outcomes like college enrollment and college major. This competition has build on these previous studies, which have followed a cohort of students from the time in which they used ASSISTments as part of their regular, middle-school mathematics instruction through to the present, as they are graduating from college. In this competition, researchers have developed means of predicting which students enter STEM careers and STEM graduate school programs. Additional details on the winners of the 2017 competition are available here.

To learn more about this competition, please visit our ASSISTment's competition home page.

Year 2, Big Data in Education at a national scale: We are running a competition about the US National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), otherwise known as our "Nation's Report Card.

Year 3, Personalizing Tutoring Systems: Personalized algorithms, such as those being pioneered in medicine by the Mayo Clinic, are becoming more feasible in education, but more work is needed to determine which students will benefit from which interventions. In our third year (2020), competitors will try to learn which student should get which type of feedback.

If you would like to be added to the mailing list for these competitions, please fill out this form.