Optimizing Parameters for Accurate Position Data Mining in Diverse Classrooms Layouts

Spatial analytics receive increased attention in educational data mining. A critical issue in stop detection (i.e., the automatic extraction of timestamped and located stops in the movement of individuals) is a lack of validation of stop accuracy to represent phenomena of interest. Next to a radius that an actor does not exceed for a certain duration to establish a stop, this study presents a reproducible procedure to optimize a range parameter for K-12 classrooms where students sitting within a certain vicinity of an inferred stop are tagged as being visited. This extension is motivated by adapting parameters to infer teacher visits (i.e., on-task and off-task conversations between the teacher and one or more students) in an intelligent tutoring system classroom with a dense layout. We evaluate the accuracy of our algorithm and highlight a tradeoff between precision and recall in teacher visit detection, which favors recall. We recommend that future research adjust their parameter search based on stop detection precision thresholds. This adjustment led to better cross-validation accuracy than maximizing parameters for an average of precision and recall (F1 = 0.18 compared to 0.09). As stop sample size shrinks with higher precision cutoffs, thresholds can be informed by ensuring sufficient statistical power in offline analyses. We share avenues for future research to refine our procedure further. Detecting teacher visits may benefit from additional spatial features (e.g., teacher movement trajectory) and can facilitate studying the interplay of teacher behavior and student learning. [For the complete proceedings, see ED630829.]