Bresciani Ludvik, M.J., Anderson, H., Clinton Powers, E., Smith, P., Schellenberg, S., Kahn, S., Potter, N., Robert, C., Olsen, A., Guarcello, M., Strahlman, M., Subedi, N., Zhang, S., Klein, D., Albart, M. (Accepted for 2022). Amplifying the Signal: Exploring the Usefulness of Natural Language Processing to Inform Student Success Decision-Making.
ABSTRACT: As COVID-19 recovery efforts continue, universities are faced with thousands of students whose on-campus experience was delayed by stay-at-home orders and other pandemic-related precautions and obstacles. Research conducted during the pandemic demonstrated early indications of equity gaps intensifying among various student identities. Responding to students’ needs, and working to ensure their paths to healthy, equitable, and ultimately academically successful college experiences is a time-sensitive and often indistinctive undertaking. With a deluge of available data, even sophisticated data analysis models struggle to cut through multitudinous variables and the noise that might otherwise broadcast a clear signal of students’ needs. However, the first-person voices of students, specifically those responding to prompts soliciting first year experience descriptions provides timely and actionable data but are unwieldy to collect and time-consuming to analyze. The study observed the viability of using open-ended student responses to inform just-in-time interventions. Using various NLP analysis related to amplifying students’ first-person voices during and after COVID-19 remote learning took place, open-ended response results from students enrolled in a first-year university seminar at an urban Hispanic Serving Institution prior to COVID and during COVID were compared for usefulness in informing just-in-time interventions to decrease academic achievement gaps.
Keywords: student success, natural language processing, equity gaps, COVID-19, remote learning
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Marilee Bresciani Ludvik, Ph.D. serves as chair and professor of the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies department at the University of Texas Arlington. Prior to that, she served as professor of postsecondary educational leadership at San Diego State University, Assistant Vice President of Institutional Assessment at Texas A&M University and in a variety of student affairs, academic affairs, and alumni relations leadership roles at various types of institutions. Bresciani Ludvik also served as a Faculty Fellow within the Office of Curriculum, Assessment, and Accreditation as well as the Office of Analytic Studies and Institutional Research at San Diego State where she assisted in connecting student learning and development outcomes to equity performance indicators in a manner that can inform improvements in in-class, out-of-class, and program design and delivery.
Marilee has written 12 books, published over 200 scholarly articles, and empowered over 200 institutions and their leaders on organizational learning assessment and accountability decision-making processes. In addition, Marilee assists organizational leaders identify and leverage opportunities to collaborate across division lines, using mindfulness-based inquiry practices, nonviolent communication, difficult conversation practices, paradigm busting processes, compassion practices, restorative justice, and design thinking.
Furthermore, Marilee is a certified meditation and yoga instructor, certified Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute teacher (the program developed at Google), and a Qualified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction teacher on the certification path. Marilee is also a certified transformational life coach who uses the evocative method. Marilee’s research focuses on using translational neuroscience and mindful compassion practices to inform the design and evaluation of workshops, curriculum, and coaching practices to decrease students’, faculty, and administrators’ stress and anxiety while also increasing their attention and emotion regulation, cognitive flexibility, and enhancing compassion towards self and other, inquiry, creativity, overall well-being, and career readiness.
Dr. Bresciani Ludvik’s work has been honored with awards such as the International Association for Student Personnel Pillar of the Profession Award in 2012, the International Association for Student Personnel George Kuh Award for Outstanding Contribution to Literature/Research in Higher Education in 2013, the American College Personnel Administrators Diamond Honoree in 2016, the UNESCO/MGIEP Senior Research Fellow in 2017, and the International Association for Student Personnel Robert H. Shaffer Award for Academic Excellence as a Graduate Faculty Member in 2019.
Marilee is thrilled that she gets to empower educators, staff, administrators, and student leaders to get in touch with their passions so they can positively transform their lives and the lives of those they serve!
