Development of a Curriculum Analysis and Simulation Library with Applications in Curricular Analytics
Michael Hickman · UNM’s Digital Repository (University of New Mexico) · 2017
Higher education institutions are currently investing significant resources in attempts to improve student success by improving instruction quality, implementing tutoring programs, and providing other services to help students. While these are all worth- while, one area that tends to be overlooked is the structure of the curricula that are offered. When viewing curricula as data, or more specifically, a graph, it is intuitive to see how its structure can influence a student’s ability to move through it. How- ever, there are currently no tools to analyze a curriculum’s structural properties and how they might affect student success. This thesis describes a software library that was developed to address this issue by providing the ability to represent curricula in a programming environment as well as a set of tools to evaluate the complexity of curricula and simulate students moving through them. Furthermore, the application of these tools are shown through several experiments that demonstrate a negative correlation between a curriculum’s complexity and student success.