Data-Analysis Skills: What and How Are Students Learning?

The question of how to improve student learning is usually approached from one of two perspectives. The applied perspective focuses on what happens in the classroom in one particular domain and on what specific practices lead to better performance. The theoretical perspective embeds the domain under study in the larger context of general learning mechanisms and aims to understand student performance in terms of these mechanisms. Although this dichotomy is admittedly a caricature, there is still a commonly held view that applied and theoretical goals are in conflict. Stokes (1997) aptly describes this view: To be highly theoretical, work must give up on applied goals and vice versa.