Browsing by Subject "analytics"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Editorial Judgment in an Age of Data: How Audience Analytics and Metrics are Influencing the Placement of News Products
    (2015-05) Zamith, Rodrigo
    In recent years, audience analytics (systems that collect and analyze digital trace data from users) and audience metrics (quantified measures of how content is consumed and interacted with) have gained currency within newsrooms, enabling them to influence editorial newsworkers' constructions of their audiences and, consequently, the shapes that news products take. The extent of that influence, however, remains largely unknown, with few studies examining the direct relationship between metrics and news content. The present work addresses this shortcoming by offering methodological guidance and an empirical assessment of the extent to which one particularly salient metric, page views, influences the prominence and de-selection of news items on the homepages of several news organizations. It demonstrates that algorithms can be leveraged to computationally analyze particular aesthetics of a large volume of homepages; that the�most viewed' list can serve as a useful indicator of the popularity of news items, though such lists are not always comparable across organizations and introduce important limitations; and that the effect of an item's popularity on its subsequent placement on the homepage is fairly muted in the process of selection, though it is greater in the process of de-selection. In short, the present research indicates that the current content-related effects of audience metrics--at least as it pertains to a particular editorial function and metric-- may be overstated in the literature, and offers pathways for further studying similar relationships.
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    Exploring Student Engagement in an Augmented Reality Game
    (2017-06) VanMeerten, Nicolaas
    It has been argued that approaches to education should embed learning in activities that reflect the social and physical environments in which the knowledge is relevant. Only recently, did it become possible to situate learning in a variety of novel contexts using augmented reality (AR) games. This study investigates the behaviors of middle school students during their participation in an AR game called Play the Past. The findings of this study show that engagement differed during discrete activities in the game environment and that there was a relationship between the roles that students were assigned and their engagement.
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    A Game-Based Solution to the Lack of Training and Assessment Opportunities for Spatial Reasoning
    (2023-01) VanMeerten, Nicolaas
    Spatial reasoning is an important skill that people use on a daily basis. There is also strong evidence that people with enhanced spatial reasoning skills are more likely to pursue successful careers related to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). Spatial reasoning skills are also malleable, which suggests that spatial reasoning training and assessment could be used to enhance academic outcomes in STEM. However, there are relatively few readily accessible training or assessment opportunities for spatial reasoning. Commercial video games should be adapted to create more spatial reasoning training environments. Video games provide unique affordances that support training and learning, including: (1) delivering the appropriate level of challenge and (2) the ease of assessment integration. I found evidence that there is a relationship between performance in Optica, a mobile-puzzle game, and spatial reasoning skills among middle-school students. Specifically, I discovered a relationship between the number of levels completed in Optica and score on the PSVT: R by comparing multiple linear regression models with Akaike Information Criteria. Thus, Optica has shown potential as a suitable virtual environment for training and assessing spatial reasoning skills. Although there were limitations to this study, they can be remedied by updates to the design of the game, telemetry collection, and enhanced experimental design. I believe that Optica should be iterated upon to develop it into a fully-fledged game environment for training and assessing spatial reasoning skills, which will benefit many areas of STEM simultaneously.