Co-sponsored by Big Data for Education Spoke of the NSF Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub and Educational Testing Service.

Technical Directors: Thanaporn “March” Patikorn,¹ Neil Heffernan¹

Organizers: Ryan Baker,² Beverly Woolf,³ Irvin Katz⁴

Carol Forsyth,⁴ and Jaclyn Ocumpaugh²

¹ Worcester Polytechnic Institute, ² University of Pennsylvania

³University of Massachusetts-Amherst, ⁴ Educational Testing Service

We are pleased to announce a worldwide competition to use data science tools to analyze educational events in a large national test. The goal of this competition is to engage leading researchers and promising doctoral students in a Grand Challenge that pushes the field of educational data mining forward, develops metrics for measuring students’ test taking activities, and helps develop and test evaluation methods for educational analysis. Competition participants are invited to assess data produced by students early in a test to predict students’ future activities later in the test. Thus, competition participants will try to understand effective and ineffective test-taking behaviors, and to determine how quickly these behaviors can be detected.

We will be using a dataset provided by Educational Testing Service, with permission from The Nation's Report Card, also known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The NAEP is the only assessment that measures U.S. student knowledge nationwide across academic subjects. The NAEP has collected data since 1969 and measures student success in urban, suburban and rural areas.

The goal of this competition is to understand effective and ineffective test-taking behaviors, and to determine how quickly these behaviors can be detected. We hope this competition will contribute to knowledge about human learning and test taking processes.

This competition will conclude on December 15, 2019 at 11:59 p.m. EST. The five winners will be featured at an AIED/EDM2020 conference workshop. Additionally, the winners' findings will be highlighted in an invited special issue of the Journal of Educational Data Mining, anticipated for publication in 2021.

In 2017, the Big Data for Education spoke of the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub released its first data mining competition. Participants used student logged actions to predict which students would later pursue a STEM career over a decade later. Winners of that competition published papers and discussed their results at EDM2018 and in an upcoming special issue of the Journal of Educational Data Mining.

Questions about this competition? Please contact our technical director: Thanaporn "March" Patikorn (tpatikorn [at] gmail [dot] com, or assistments.data.mining.team [at] gmail [dot] com)

We are trying to store papers that came out of this data release here.

[This has been the second annual competition that Dr Heffernan has helped run. Dr Heffernan's plans that this will be an annual event. The first was on ASSISTments Data.]