This Week in Student Privacy: 11/18
Using Data for Both Personalized Learning and Large-Scale Evaluation
According to US News, “students can make big academic gains if enrolled in schools that offer personalized ways to learn, especially when teachers have access to effective technology and digital tools that make personalized learning possible.” But student data can also be used “to better figure out school-wide patterns in order to implement change”
In New York, schools are taking the wider approach: “they plan to use [big data] tools to identify subjects that are tripping up many students.” This way, they can “target students who need tutoring.” But a personalized approach has been shown to also be highly effective.
Vicki Phillips, the director of education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, believes that personalized learning “is going to be powerful in the next four or five years.” A study by the Gates Foundation “showed that students in schools using personalized learning strategies made greater academic progress over the course of two years than a comparative group of students whose initial performance was similar academically and who came from schools with similar demographic profiles.”
Read more about using data to target students who need help: “Google Tools Help Struggling Schools Collect and Analyze Student Data” (Education World).
Read more about developments in personalized learning: “The Digital Revolution Is Coming to the Classroom” (US News).
Articles/Resources
- The Washington Post: “The astonishing amount of data being collected about your children”
- Times Higher Education: “The Green Paper needs big data”
- Glens Falls Post-Star: “Family questions student privacy”
- Sentinel & Enterprise: “Senate renews student privacy”
- THE Journal: “Tech Firms Partner To Give Teachers More Student Data More Quickly”
- Games and Learning: “Flood of State Student Privacy Laws Complicate Game Development”
- Global News: “B.C.’s privacy and children’s watchdogs urge province to add cyberbullying to curriculum”
- Huffington Post College: “‘Is National Security More Important Than Individual Right To Privacy?’ A Student Debate”
- FierceGovernmentIT: “Education Department CIO says FITARA Scorecard is bogus”
- The Enquirer Journal (Monroe, NC): “Ellis, Educatrx target of two investigations”
- Northwest Missourian: “Police continue to hide behind false FERPA protection”
- Topeka Capital-Journal: “Silver Lake seeking more individualized student data in new testing package”
- Union-Bulletin: “Op-Ed: Setting the record straight on Common Core, student data”
- Pensacola News Journal: “Viewpoint: Schools must protect student privacy”
This update was compiled by Jeremiah Milbauer, with help from Paulina Haduong. Jeremiah is a first year at the University of Chicago and an intern for the Student Privacy Initiative at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
