Identifying factors that influence outcomes
From The Learning Engineer's Knowledgebase
The evaluation and identification of factors or relationships that influence outcomes is a category of research questions for evaluation and assessment that focuses on the alternative factors, aspects, psychological concepts, or outside forces that can influence a person's participation, learning processes, and achievement.
Definition
Identifying influential factors or relationships is a category of research questions that, when focused on individual participants, identifies and tests the impact of independent factors or variables that can influence a participant's achievement or other outcomes. Alternatively, when focused on the product, it is the identification and analysis of independent factors or variables that influence how a product is designed or used.
Common Research Questions
In this category of research questions, the actual questions typically take one or more of the following general forms:
- How does a factor or outside thing influence a person's learning (achievement)?
- How does a person's psychological state influence how they behave?
- How is a person's test scores influenced by their prior knowledge or experience?
- How is a person's behavior or performance get affected by a person's history, background, or experiences?
Some specific examples include:
- What kinds of at-home or socioeconomic factors influence a person's learning?
- What factors, relationships, or outside forces might influence a person's achievement?
- How does a person's social life and social skills influence their learning?
- How does prior knowledge influence a person's achievement of learning objectives?
- What environmental factors in the classroom might influence a person's learning?
- How does a person's everyday behaviors with technology influence their learning outcomes?
- How does exposure and access to technology influence a person's learning?
Common Instruments and Data
There are a variety of instruments and data sources that are commonly used for this category of research questions:
- Tests and quizzes, which provide evidence of people's knowledge (which can be an indicator of learning and learning objective achievement)
- Surveys, interviews, and focus groups, to identify and measure different factors that influence people's behavior, knowledge, and affect. These instruments can also be used to measure a person's perceptions of how things are influencing them, or how they regularly feel (for example, in psychological factors)
- Work products and projects, including the different stages of the project's development (drafts) to see how a person's work changes over time
- Narrative accounts and stories, which allow researchers to identify factors that influence how people behave, interact, and learn, or how a product is influenced by outside forces.
- Checklists and observations, which can document and account for the presence or absence of certain environmental factors, influences, and other types of interactions with the learner that could influence learning.
- Learning analytics in digital learning environments, which can measure the behavior of learners with the product
Related Concepts
Examples
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