Graduation Year

2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ph.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Degree Granting Department

Leadership, Policy, and Lifelong Learning

Major Professor

Amber Dumford, Ph.D.

Committee Member

John Ferron, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Yi-Hsin Chen, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Michelle Bombaugh, Ph.D.

Keywords

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Predictive Learning Analytics, Regression Discontinuity Analysis, Quantitative Method, Race/Ethnicity, Gender

Abstract

Higher education institutions (HEIs) have embarked on a journey of innovation by adopting learning analytics (LA) in their operation, offering a more sustainable and innovative technological tool to increase student retention and graduation rates in US HEIs. LA, an emerging academic and technological tool, equips HEIs to gather, analyze, and interpret their students’ data. Since the publication of the first (conceptual) framework by Burke (2019), LA has matured into a research focus and practice, implemented in several institutional contexts at different scales and disciplinary/pedagogical contexts. This study explored the impact of the use of LA on student retention and graduation rates. The study was focused on individual demographic characteristics, gender, and race/ethnicity to explore the trends in the data for student retention and six-year graduation rates of a sample of 20 US HEIs collected from IPEDS from 2009 to 2022. This study is relevant to the higher education institution (HEI) research field because it is one of the few research projects that provided quantitative and scientific methods as evidence of LA’s success in helping HEIs increase student retention and graduation rates. When conducting the regression discontinuity for these HEIs, it was found that most variables that showed positive trends after implementing LA/PLA were not statistically significant. The line graphs for 8 of the 20 US HEIs in the sample for this study showed statistically significant changes in six-year graduation rates by gender and race/ethnicity: Bowling Green State University, Virginia Commonwealth University, University of South Alabama, Robert Morris University, Salisbury University, University at Albany, Washburn University, and Auburn University.

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