Data Analytics for Linking Institutional Context and Individual Outcomes in Higher Education: A Nested Structuration Perspective

• In Event: Learning Analytics in Higher Education: Exploring Big Data on Campus

Abstract

Research within higher education often focuses either exclusively on institutional/organizational factors or on learning with very little attention paid to the interaction of institutional and individual factors. Understanding the effect of institutional context on the individual is important since students are never fully removed from the impacts of the classroom or institution during their educational experience. In this study we first present a field study that examined how different aspects of the institutional context associated with an educational setting impacted student learning. We specifically leverage the theoretical framework of Nested Structuration (Perlow, Gittell, & Katz, 2004) as it integrates both the inhibiting yet enabling feature of context and outlines ways in which individuals interact as part of this context or social system. We follow-up the empirical study by discussing how new forms of data and analytical techniques can help us better understand the effect of institutional context shapes learning and how we can design applications to leverage learning analytics.

Perlow, L.A., Gittell, J.H., Katz, N. (2004). Contextualizing patterns of work group interaction: Toward a nested theory of structuration. Organization Science, 15(5), 520-536

Author

• Aditya Johri, George Mason University