Charting New Directions in Educational Research
Abstract: This panel will review key ideas that may chart a new direction for educational research. The ideas will be selected from a group of papers written in the last five years that are concerned with the role of data analytics in the modern era of big data and digital learning environments. The paper asserts that the predicted game-changing role of ‘dynamical systems understanding’ wedded to ‘data science methods’ has yet to emerge into mainstream educational research on teacher education; but evidence from game-based learning and learning analytics research projects continues to mount in support of the prediction of a sea-change in research. The panel will discuss a ‘third way’ of conducting educational research, which is neither pure nor a mixture of quantitative or qualitative methods but is instead grounded in operationalizing data models with the aide of computationally intensive mixed methods.