The PSLC DataShop provides two main services to the learning science community:
- a central repository to secure and store research data
- a set of analysis and reporting tools
Researchers can rapidly access standard reports such as learning curves, as well as browse data using the interactive web application. To support other analyses, the DataShop can export data to a tab-delimited format that can then be used in statistical software and other analysis packages.
Case Studies
Watch a video on how DataShop was used to discover a better knowledge component model of student learning. Read more ...
Guide to the Tutor Message format
Read the “Guide to the Tutor Message format”,
which describes the data format that DataShop accepts.
Read more ...
DataShop News
Thursday, 19 August 2010
DataShop 4.2 Released
Metrics Report
This release includes the new Metrics Report, which provides an overview of the quantity of data in DataShop, organized by domain and PSLC LearnLab.
All of the fields in this report are shown on the Dataset Info / Overview page for each dataset. From the Dataset Info / Overview and Papers and Files pages, you can set the Domain/Learnlab and add files or papers. The rest of the fields are calculated by examining the data contained in each dataset.
If a dataset does not have a Domain/LearnLab set for it, then it is excluded from this report.
Tuesday, 25 May 2010
DataShop 4.1 Released
Bug fix release.
This release consists of several bug fixes. See the fixed issues link below to find out more.
Wednesday, 17 February 2010
DataShop 4.0 Released
New DataShop Web Services features, plus more
There seemed to be a lot of interest in DataShop Web Services at the DataShop User Meeting in November. At the time of the meeting, we could only demo what was in development. We're now happy to release the services we previewed. We hope these two new features—Get Transactions and Get Student-Step Records—will make Web Services a useful approach for researchers who want to automate data retrieval and analysis.
Get Transactions
https://pslcdatashop.web.cmu.edu/services/datasets/[id]/[?samples/id]/transactions
- Get a tab-delimited response (can be zipped as well) of transactions for a given dataset or sample and your request parameters
- If a sample ID is not provided, transactions for the "All Data" sample will be returned.
Get Student-Step Records
https://pslcdatashop.web.cmu.edu/services/datasets/[id]/samples/[?id]/steps
- Get a tab-delimited response (can be zipped as well) of student-step records for a given dataset or sample and your request parameters.
- If a sample ID is not provided, student-step records for the "All Data" sample will be returned.
Learn more about these new services on the Web Services page.
We've also released the following tweaks and improvements:
- Project announcements. On the home page that lists the datasets in DataShop, you'll see a small box with the title "Announcements" that shows recent news about the project, with links to the full news posts.
- Learning curve point info "Obs" column. When clicking on points in a learning curve, you can now see the frequency of items going into the breakdown by KCs/Problems/Steps/Students. For example, before you could only tell that data for 13 steps contributed to an aggregate point in the learning curve, and you could see error rate values (for example) for each, but you didn't know how much each step contributed to the aggregate. Now, an "Obs" (Observation) column displays the frequency of each item in the aggregate, so you can tell which step is contributing most to that error rate.
- "#" column header renamed to "Row, "Total # Hints" renamed to "Total Num Hints". In all of the export formats, the "#" symbol, which appeared in the column header of the first column to represent the number of the row, is now the text "Row". In the transaction export format, the column header "Total # Hints" is now "Total Num Hints". We made these changes because the "#" character is a comment character in analysis programs such as R, so directly opening a DataShop export file was problematic.
- The DataShop import file verification tool was also changed to expect a column with the title "Row" instead of "#" and "Total Num Hints" instead of "Total # Hints". If you plan on importing data into DataShop, you will need to make these changes to your file(s).
- Study "Condition" in student-step export. You'll now see a "Condition" column in the student-step rollup. This new column appears as the last column in the table. In the case of a student assigned to multiple conditions (factors in a factorial design), condition names are separated by a comma and space. This differs from the transaction format, which optionally has "Condition Name" and "Condition Type" columns.
- Cached export file status. With the DataShop release in April 2009, we started caching transaction export files, resulting in less wait time and faster downloading of these files. Caching, however, is done on a sample-by-sample basis, and it wasn't clear from the DataShop interface which samples were cached or when they were created. We're now displaying a small table on the transaction export page that shows the cache status of each sample and when that cached file was created. This will tell you which samples can be downloaded most quickly and those that will take longer (but will be cached when you request them). The date and time of the cached file tells you the cutoff for data included in the file, useful if you're running a study that's logging to DataShop. To learn more about the various states of a cached export file, visit our help topic on exporting.