Abstract
Research in learning analytics and educational data mining has sometimes failed to distinguish between wheel-spinning and more productive forms of persistence, when students are working in online learning system. This work has, in cases, treated any student who completes more than ten items on a topic without mastering it as being in need of intervention. By contrast, the broader fields of education and human development have recognized the value of grit and persistence for long-term outcomes. In this paper, we compare the longitudinal impact of wheel-spinning and productive persistence (completing many items but eventually mastering the topic) in online learning, utilizing a publicly available data set. We connect behavior during learning in middle school mathematics to a student’s eventual enrollment (or failure to enroll) in college. We find that productive persistence during middle school mathematics is associated with a higher probability of college enrollment, and that wheel-spinning during middle school mathematics is not statistically significantly associated with college enrollment in either direction. The findings around productive persistence remain statistically significant even when controlling for affect and disengaged behavior.
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Adjei, S.A., Baker, R.S., Bahel, V. (2021). Seven-Year Longitudinal Implications of Wheel Spinning and Productive Persistence. In: Roll, I., McNamara, D., Sosnovsky, S., Luckin, R., Dimitrova, V. (eds) Artificial Intelligence in Education. AIED 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12748. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78292-4_2
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