Use_case

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Use Case

Research Questions

Question #	Question Text	Analysis	Data Sources	How user might query
1	Have my course grades declined over the years?	ANOVA of course grades, individual exam grades	Faculty uploaded spreadsheet with records of student grades for each year	Log-in as myself, check-off my courses that I am interested in analyzing
2	Why are my course grades declining? Are more students taking AP (bio) and placing out of this course?	Relationship among ACT/SAT scores, AP bio scores, course grades	Registrar demographic data: ACT/SAT scores, AP Bio scores; course grades; Faculty uploaded spreadsheet with records of student grades for each year	Log-in as myself, check-off my courses that I am interested in analyzing
3	Has the use of clickers improved student learning in my course?	Correlation (regression) between clicker use, clicker score(s) and exam scores	Registrar demographic data; Faculty uploaded exams, tagged by topic; Faculty uploaded clicker questions, tagged by topic; Faculty uploaded spreadsheet with: Annual records of student grades, Student grades on individual assessment items, Student grades or responses on individual clicker items	Log-in as myself, check-off my courses that I am interested in analyzing. Within courses, I will mark assessment items of interest (clicker questions on topic a, assessment questions on topic a)
4	What is the impact of multiple attempts at online homework on exam scores in my course?	Correlation between number of tries and exam scores Regression/partial regression using GPA or other control variables	Registrar demographic data Registrar GPA data Faculty uploaded exams, tagged by topic Faculty uploaded spreadsheet with: Student exam scores Student grades on individual items	Log-in as myself, check-off my courses that I am interested in analyzing With-in each course, I will mark assessment items of interest (homework questions on topic a, assessment questions on topic a)
5	How are my students performing on a particular topic? Are they doing better on evolution this year (versus last year)?	Pre-test/post-test analysis ANOVA of grades on specific assessment items	Registrar demographic data Faculty uploaded assessments and rubric for each year, tagged by topic Faculty uploaded spreadsheet with: Student exam scores for each year, Student grades on individual assessment items for each year	Log-in as myself, check-off my courses that I am interested in analyzing Within each course, I will mark assessment items of interest
6	How are my students performing on questions that are of a higher Bloom’s level?	Descriptive statistics on questions based on classifications – correlation Cluster analysis (PCA) of outcomes based on classification, topic, and the interaction of those two	Registrar demographic data Faculty uploaded assessments and rubric, tagged with Bloom’s data Faculty uploaded spreadsheet with: Student exam scores for each year; Student grades on individual assessment items for each year	Log-in as myself, check-off my courses that I am interested in analyzing Within each course, I will mark assessment items of interest to me, based on Bloom’s levels
7	Does a particular teaching innovation (i.e. Avida-ED) impact student learning of a particular topic (i.e. Evolution) in my course?	Correlation between innovation and exam score (or score on particular assessment items on exam) over time	Registrar demographic data Faculty uploaded assessments and rubric for each year, tagged by topic Faculty uploaded spreadsheet with: Student exam scores for each year; Student grades on individual assessment items for each year	Log-in as myself, check-off my courses that I am interested in analyzing Within each course, I will mark assessment items of interest to me, based on keywords or tags\Demographic data Rubric for exam or assessment items Student response data for exam or assessment items (at T0 and T1) Student scores for exam or assessment items (at T0 and T1)
8	Is there a difference in course grades between sections? (e.g. Different sections could be taught by different TAs, at different times, etc)	Correlation between section and individual assessment (or assessment items)/course grades (or between TA and section grades)	Registrar demographic data Faculty uploaded assessments and rubric for each year, tagged by topic Faculty uploaded spreadsheet with: Student exam scores; Student grades on individual assessment items	Log-in as myself, check-off my courses that I am interested in analyzing
9	How do my students compare with students from another school on topic x?	Correlation between institution and grade on topic x.	Registrar demographic data Faculty uploaded assessments and rubrics, tagged by topic Faculty uploaded spreadsheet with: Student exam scores; Student grades on individual assessment items Metadata linking course to a particular type/sized institution	Log-in as myself, check off my courses that I am interested in analyzing Select my assessment items from topic x Search database for additional school to analyze that are similar in Carnegie categorization, similar in course size, all schools Search these assessments for items on topic x
10	For accreditation, I would like to show that our students have learned y.	Comparison of student performance at T0 and T1.	Registrar demographic data Faculty uploaded assessments and rubric, tagged with topic and Bloom’s data Faculty uploaded spreadsheet with: Student exam scores for each year; Student grades on individual assessment items for each year	Log-in as myself, check off my courses that I am interested in analyzing Select my assessment items from topic x
11	What levels of understanding are typically targeted by assessments in introductory (or upper) level biology courses at my institution/at institutions similar to mine/at all institutions?	Proportion of lower-level Bloom’s items to higher-level Bloom’s items Histogram of data	Faculty uploaded assessments, tagged by Bloom’s data Metadata form tagging course level, institution information (size, type)	Search for all assessment items in courses at the 100-level
12	What misconceptions do students generally hold about topic d?	Qualitative analysis of student responses and scores to parse out misconceptions	Registrar demographic data Faculty uploaded assessments tagged with topic and Bloom’s data	Search for all assessment items on topic d
13	What is the impact of course size on the assessments used?	Correlation between course size and Bloom’s taxonomy level	Registrar demographic data Faculty uploaded assessments tagged with topic and Bloom’s data Metadata form indicating course size	Search for courses of a particular size
14	Are low performers in my course also struggling in other courses?	Correlation between course grade or individual assessment grade and university GPA, major GPA	Registrar demographic data Registrar GPA data Faculty uploaded spreadsheet with student course grades	Log-in as myself, check off my courses that I am interested in analyzing
15	How reliable is my exam question taxonomy?
May 18, 2007	What areas or concepts in biology/chemistry/physics are students having difficulty with?
May 18, 2007	How did students do on all questions of a given topic? -within a class -within a course -within an institution -across the database
May 18, 2007	How did students do on a question that required a certain level of thinking?
May 18, 2007	I would like to find those questions on topic X where students did particularly well or poorly (depending on my own criteria of good and bad)
May 18, 2007	Compare performance of two (or more) groups of students on an item or set of items -over time (this year versus last year) -gender or ethnic background -majors or non-majors

The following use cases and database requirements come from weekly meetings of the Database Development Team.

No.	Meeting Date	Use Case Description	Decision Made?	dBase as Test Bank	User training/ documentation	Content metadata	Course Metadata	Query related	System Requirement	Must/Should/Nice to Have
1	June 19, 2007 KBS	I would like to consolidate and archive my data and metadata.	n/a			x	x			Must
2	April 13, 2007 September 18, 2007 June 19, 2007	Tagging assessment items: with Blooms data, concept categories, learning objective, some other taxonomy	yes - will support			x				Must
3	July 3, 2007	Assessment items will be tagged according to an ontology	yes	x		x		x		Must
4	November 27, 2007	Database will use the NBII Biocomplexity thesaurus as the Biology ontology.	yes	x		x				Must
5	November 27, 2007	User will be able to search nbii thesaurus and with a mouse click, add that concept tag to their assessment item(s).	yes?	x		x				Should
6	November 27, 2007	Ontology for a discipline must not be rigid - additions must be possible.	yes?	x		x			x	Must
7	February 4, 2008 MU-L	Must be able to use different content metadata by discipline. While we can use the NBII thesaurus for biology, we need to have an API that can be used to define other metadata for other disciplines.	yes - will support			x			x	Must
8	April 13, 2007 May 22, 2007	Rubric: I would like to upload or download a rubric for this assessment item(s)	yes - will support	x		x				Must
9	February 4, 2007 MU-L JLM	This assessment (or assessment item) has multiple rubrics)	yes - will support	x		x				Must
10	February 4, 2008 MU-L JLM	This assessment has been scored in multiple ways (see above).	yes - will support			x				Must
11	February 4, 2008 MU-L JLM	This assessment has multiple and different raters on two (or more) different rubrics	yes - will support			x				Must
12	April 13, 2007	I would like to see the raw response data for an assessment item(s) I would like to see the points assigned to a particular response	yes - will support			x				Must
13	May 18, 2007 June 19, 2007	I would like to find assessment items that address a particular misconception	n/a	x		x				Must
14	May 18, 2007 October 9, 2007	I would like to upload my non-MC exams and student responses. Student responses are a scanned image -or- electronic.	yes - will support							Must
15	February 7, 2008	Faculty who upload data must agree that any identifying information in student responses has been removed	yes - will support -- how?						x	Must
16	July 3, 2007 November 6, 2007	I have additional data/metadata I would like to upload. -or- I made a mistake. Where can I do that?	n/a	x	x	x	x			Must
17	April 13, 2007 May 4, 2007	Identifying information of students, faculty and universities must be removed	yes - will support				x			Must
18	April 13, 2007	I would like to import data directly from my course management software (e.g. Angel, Blackboard, WebCT, etc)	outside current scope						x	Should
19	May 4, 2007	I would like to import student response data directly from my excel workbook	yes - will support						x	Must
20	April 13, 2007 September 18, 2007 KBS	There must be a minimum level of data/metadata included for a submission to be accepted into the database	Must define minimum metadata standards						x	Must
21	May 18, 2007	Find questions based on format (clicker, mc, short answer, etc)	pending -- can this information be gleaned from the parsing software?	x		x		x		Nice
22	May 18, 2007	Find questions that include a particular format element (i.e. graph, particular model or image, etc).	outside current scope							Nice
23	June 12, 2007	I would like to query across data levels (i.e. query for particular assessment items at an institution over time and courses	yes - will support			x	x	x
24	June 19, 2007	I would like demographic data returned.	yes - will support				x			Must
25	June 19, 2007	I would like to see what concepts are considered difficult across disciplines. Are we going to compute dynamic meta data such as the difficulty of an item that would change based on the data from the students? Difficulty and other performance metrics should be dynamic, rather than asking faculty to upload them.	pending - will we provide simple analysis?	x		x		x		Nice
26	July 31, 2007	I would like to upload my scientific reasoning instrument. Questions do not fit a discipline-based ontology This instrument is administered at multiple institutions.	yes	x	x	x		x		Must
27	August 30, 2007	Each student, class, course, institution, faculty member must have a unique identifier.	yes - will support					x	x	Must
28	August 30, 2007	Faculty members must be able to indicate pages on an exam that are blank, devoted to a figure, picture or formula	yes - completed?						x	Must
29	August 30, 2007	Who can access the database? -- One solution: Two levels of data: Personal data (visible only to the individual who uploaded) and Public (visible to everyone)	pending	x	x					Should
30	August 30, 2007	The database must handle multiple instructors for a class -and- visiting instructors (i.e. faculty who are not officially on staff at an institution)	no				x	x		Should
31	September 11, 2007	Database must deal with multiple sections of a single course.	yes				x	x		Must
32	October 9, 2007	Data is returned completely anonymized/partially anonymized/not anonymized.	yes - completely anonymized				x		x	Must
33	October 9, 2007	I would like to track a cohort of students over time.	yes - will support				x	x		Must
34	November 6, 2007	Query returns must be constrained so as not to return a limited dataset that could result in the identification of a student.	yes - will support				x	x		Must
35	November 6, 2007	I would like to find assessment items tagged as 'good' - search quality tags by a professional society.	yes - will support	x		x		x		Should
36	November 6, 2007	I have no idea how to classify my assessment items.	no		x					Must - user documentation
37	December 4, 2007	I would like data returned in a simple, rectangular format.	yes - will support						x	Must
38	December 4, 2007	I would like data returned in some other format (what might those be?)	pending						x	Must?
39	December 4, 2007	I would like to query all R1 institutions, based on the Carnegie classification system.	pending					x		Should
40	December 4, 2007	I would like a simple analysis of change over time returned with the data.	pending				x	x		Nice
41	December 4, 2007	I would like my search history saved. Are we saving the query syntax or are we expecting to be able to reproduce the exact dataset? Can probably reproduce the dataset if the date that the data were uploaded is stored in the database and can be made part of the query.	pending					x	x	Should
42	December 4, 2007	I would like the details of my query returned with the results.	pending						x	Should
43	January 10, 2008	Instead of answering a litany of questions, I will upload my course syllabus.	pending				x		x	Must
44	January 10, 2008	I would like my syllabus to be anonymized when uploaded.	pending				x			Nice
45	February 7, 2008	User uploading data takes responsibility for anonymizing their syllabus.	yes - will support		x					Must
46	February 4, 2008 MU-L JLM	Will the syllabus be query-able? Doesn't seem likely. Need to revisit minimum metadata standards.	pending							Nice
47	KBS	I would like to filter out low-level Bloom questions, multiple choice questions, essay questions, etc.	pending	x				x		Should
48	KBS	I would like to find other faculty who are similar to me in teaching approach/assessment items/Bloom's level/etc.	pending			x	x	x		Should
49	KBS	I would like to upload a published assessment (e.g. Concept Inventory).	pending	x	x	x				Must
50	KBS	Database must store unconventional assessments (models, pictures, diagrams, etc).	yes - will support	x					x	Must
51	Purdue	I am an administrator and would like to use the database.	pending							Nice
52	Purdue	Administrator: would like to compare faculty based on: -student scores -average Bloom level per exam -average number of students taught a semester -course level taught	n/a			x	x	x		Nice
53	February 4, 2008 MU-L JLM	Administrator would like to show their program has met specific accreditation standards.	n/a			x	x	x		Should
54	February 4, 2008	How will assessment items be returned? Will users pick out one question at a time, or will they check off those questions they are interested in downloading? What format will questions be returned - xml, QTI, etc?	pending	x			x			Must
55	February 11, 2008 MU-L JLM	Demographic data - as uploaded by a faculty member - needs to be tagged with the date the data were current	pending						x	Must

How will users query?

Assessment item (individual question)
Student responses

On individual items
On a group of items (i.e. an exam or user-defined number of questions)

Concept category

Functional requirements (based on use cases) can be found on the Functional_requirements page

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This particular version was published on 13-Feb-2008 13:29:22 PST by uid=momsenj,o=MSU.