“Learning and Assessment Analytics in STEM Education” (LAA-STEM’15) Special Session
Organized in conjunction with
18th International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning
20-24 September 2015, Palazzo dei Congressi, Florence, Italy
http://www.icl-conference.org/icl2015/index.php

Education in Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) is becoming an increasingly important part of basic literacy in today’s knowledge economy. The reason is that STEM creates critical thinkers, increases science literacy, and enables the next generation of innovators. However, there is a diminished interest of young people to STEM disciplines along with the growing demand of STEM professionals.

Towards aligning the essential innovation in STEM education with today’s compulsory digital literacy, ICT-enhanced learning could facilitate the transition to an equilibrium point where economies and students’ needs intersect. In specific, Learning Analytics (LA) and Educational Data Mining (EDM) could act as a facilitator that provides new opportunities for tracking and analysing learners’ behavioural data and interpreting them in an educationally meaningful way.

The goal of the 2015 Learning and Assessment Analytics in STEM Education (LAA-STEM’15) Special Session - within the 18th International Conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning (ICL2015) - is to bring together internationally leading academic and industrial researchers in an effort to promote the discussion on the major educational, pedagogical, conceptual and technical challenges and recent results aimed at addressing all aspects of Learning and Assessment Analytics in STEM education. The objective is to uncover and discuss emerging trends and technologies, sound research and successful services, as well as to identify and share best practices, within an international and interdisciplinary community. It will provide the opportunity for researchers and practitioners to present their latest work on exploring more complex and more information rich data sources, identifying new suitable measures of learning and success, focusing on theoretical concepts for understanding learning, and proposing sophisticated learning environments and applications to appropriately support STEM-learners and instructors.

To ensure complete coverage of the advances in this field, the LAA-STEM’15 workshop solicits original contributions in, but not limited to, the following topic areas:

• Analytic methods and tools for behavior modeling in STEM education,
• Measures of motivation, participation, dropout and satisfaction in STEM education,
• Measures of affect, attention, and expectations in STEM education,
• Measures of attendance and retention (as predictors of learning), attitudes, degree of competence and educational assessment and performance in STEM education,
• Detecting and addressing STEM-learners' affective and emotional states,
• Analytics for Serious and Adaptive Games and Gamification for enhancing STEM education,
• Emerging STEM-oriented learning and pedagogical environments enhanced with analytics: mobile platforms, wearable computing and immersive learning environments, intelligent tutoring systems, shared workspaces, social networking media, multi-modal learning environments, MOOCs, etc.,
• Analytic approaches for collaborative learning and assessment in STEM education,
• Methods and approaches for automated reasoning and recommendation strategies for personalization of learning environments to STEM-learners characteristics,
• Learning activities, applications, and interventions in STEM education,
• Best practices for adaptation of analytic techniques to information retrieval, opinion mining and auto scoring in STEM education,
• Privacy and ethics for Learning and Assessment Analytics in STEM education.

LAA-STEM’15 Special Session Chairs

Anastasios A. Economides, University of Macedonia, Greece, Email: economid@uom.gr
Zacharoula Papamitsiou, University of Macedonia, Greece, Email: papamits@uom.edu.gr

Submission:
Articles submitted to LAA-STEM’15 will follow the Conference Submission System: (https://www.conftool.com/icl-conference/). Before preparing your paper, please read carefully the instructions for authors, then submit it to the Conference Submission System. Presented papers will be published in the ICL2015 Proceedings and submitted to IEEE Explore (more details at http://icl-conference.org/icl2015/proceedings.php).
The Special Session LAA-STEM’15 Organizers will look for possibilities of later submissions of reworked papers in International Journals.

Contacts:
Zacharoula Papamitsiou: papamits@uom.edu.gr
Anastasios A. Economides: economid@uom.gr