April 22, 2015

Mining Tweets for College Decision, Performance Cues

SMITH BRAIN TRUST -- High school seniors choosing a college typically deal with such unknowns as whether a target school will accept them and be affordable, and whether they will be happy once enrolled and plugged into the campus community. Understanding students’ personal, underlying influencers in this process likewise challenges academic counselors.

The Center for Complexity in Business at the University of Maryland’s Robert School of Business has turned to social media for college decision and performance cues in a project with Vibeffect, a Washington, D.C.-based education technology startup.

“There’s been a lot of retrospective study into how students fit into universities and why and how they've succeeded or failed,” says Bill Rand, director of the Smith center and assistant professor of marketing and computer science. “But we’re developing a model based on real-time data that will help school administrators to better support students to make the best choices and complete their degree programs.”

The effort involves analyzing social media messages for behavioral patterns between and among students entering and acclimating to college. Rand helped introduce the initiative April 13, 2015, in an #EduAnalyticsDC conference to more than 30 education leaders and data experts — primarily from the Washington region.

Twitter is an initial focus. “The work is preliminary,” Rand says. “We started collecting the data this spring. We’re analyzing a massive amount of tweeting right now to see if we can identify some interesting correlations.”

Anxiety is a primary indicator. “We’ll look, for example, to measure the effect of stress in the decision making and look for and compare stress indicators in tweets by students enrolled in their college of choice to that of students attending secondary choices,” Rand says.

The work builds on learning analytics, an investigative field focused on measuring and responding to real-time student performance in the classroom, Rand says. “Our education analytics work is a broader investigation, extending to social economics. For example, we can look at whether a students’ academic performance is affected by interacting with peers and classmates who can afford more expensive meals and luxury items.”

In the conference, Rand and Anamaria Berea, a research associate with Smith’s Center for Complexity in Business, discussed the potential impact of non-traditional data sources for education, such as social media, in a broader context: :

  • Colleges could use dining hall data to examine the health- and nutritional-based habits of individual students, potentially correlating with socioeconomic status and class performance. 
  • High schools could use social media to identify potential security concerns. 
  • Schools at all levels could use analytics to examine patterns of behavior both within and across classrooms. 
  • Both high schools and colleges could examine publicly available data  about the decision process. 

Other #EduAnalytics presenters were Ben Bederson, UMD professor of computer science; Marcelo Worsley, a post-doctoral scholar of education and engineering at the University of Southern California; and a representative of Matthew Greenwald & Associates. The market research firm surveyed students to provide groundwork for the social media analysis.

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About the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business

The Robert H. Smith School of Business is an internationally recognized leader in management education and research. One of 12 colleges and schools at the University of Maryland, College Park, the Smith School offers undergraduate, full-time and flex MBA, executive MBA, online MBA, business master’s, PhD and executive education programs, as well as outreach services to the corporate community. The school offers its degree, custom and certification programs in learning locations in North America and Asia.

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