Cate MacLeod

Learning analytics for improved student learning

Research description:

Learning analytics involves the collection and analysis of student and course data, including interactions with educational technology such as a learning management system (LMS), for the purposes of better understanding and optimizing student learning and learning environments. This research project will involve identifying, visualizing and analyzing LMS data from the University of Toronto to investigate how the data might effectively be used to identify student patterns of activity and their association with student success and how it might inform practices in learning design that can benefit all students. The particular question to be considered in this project will be determined based on available data and the interests and background of the research student. Possible questions that could be considered include: How do students interact with their instructor and each other in online discussion forums? How does student engagement with digital resources differ for courses presented in online and in-person delivery modes? Are there patterns of student activity that appear to be productive and patterns that do not? How can student LMS activity data be used as a proxy for student engagement and how might course design decisions affect the suitability of the data to effectively capture meaningful measures of engagement?

Year: 2022

Researcher:
Alison Gibbs, Statistical Sciences, Faculty of Arts & Science, University of Toronto

Student: 
Yupeng Zhang, University of Toronto

Through SUDS, undergraduate students engage in hands-on research focused on data sciences and AI methodology applications.

Investigating how the brain encodes memory

Research description:

This research lab is focused on understanding how the brain encodes memories. To this end, we study memory formation and recall in mice while imaging the activity of individual neurons using genetically-encoded activity markers. This is a powerful approach that allows us to “see” a memory being made in a behaving mouse. We image the activity of thousands of neurons using our in-house build miniature microscopes. Once the data has been collected, we use advanced math and statistics to analyze the activity patterns of neurons to extract general principles about memory. The summer student will be involved in all aspects of this project. The student will help collect the imaging data and then, with the mentoring of senior graduate students and postdocs in the lab, help analyze this interesting dataset using a variety of different techniques.

Year: 2022

Researcher:
Sheena Josselyn, The Hospital for Sick Children

Student: 
Andrew Gritsevskiy, University of Toronto

Through SUDS, undergraduate students engage in hands-on research focused on data sciences and AI methodology applications.

Investigating the effects of cystic fibrosis drug treatments on human stem cell-derived lung models using single-cell RNA sequencing

Research description:

Year: 2022

Researcher:
Amy Wong, Developmental & Stem Cell Biology, SKH

Student: 
Dien Nguyen, University of Toronto

Through SUDS, undergraduate students engage in hands-on research focused on data sciences and AI methodology applications.

Investigating Data Features for Reproducibility of Robust Educational Data Models

Research description:

Several metareviews in the area of educational data mining have highlighted challenges to reproducing results in the field. Differences in an educational context and student population make it difficult to determine whether or not a particular result is generalizable and transferable. I propose to develop a standard for processing and reporting data from educational discussion/Q&A boards to support the comparison of results between sites and to enable multi-institutional studies of student behaviour on Q&A boards. The proposed student will investigate literature in the area of modelling data from discussion/Q&A boards to identify features of the data that are important to interpreting the data. The goal is to create a robust data pipeline for collecting, cleaning, storing, and packaging data from a singular source. In this case, we will build tools to collect and package data from Piazza discussion/Q&A boards as it is utilized at numerous institutions internationally. In addition, the student will collect multiple datasets from UofT to produce a baseline of “standard student usage” for comparison.

Year: 2022

Researcher:
Michael Liut, Mathematical & Computational Science, University of Toronto Mississauga

Student: 
Pan Chen, University of Toronto

Through SUDS, undergraduate students engage in hands-on research focused on data sciences and AI methodology applications.

Interactive approaches to automatic source code summarization using deep learning

Research description:

Automatic source code summarization is the task of generating a readable summary that describes the functionality of the code in natural language. In recent years, the use of deep learning-based approaches has led to significant improvement in the performance of automatic code summarization, e.g., using Transformers and Graph Neural Networks. However, the performance is still far from optimal and developers that are unsatisfied with a given summary are not able to provide feedback or additional information that can be used to refine the output. In this research project, the goal is to investigate ways in which additional input from the developer can further improve the performance of automatic code summarization. Specifically, the main tasks in the project are: 1) Investigating existing failures of state-of-the-art source code summarization solutions 2) Developing new computational approaches and interactive schemes for incorporating developer input or feedback in order to improve the performance of deep learning-based solutions for source code summarization 3) Evaluating the performance of the new approaches using existing large code summarization datasets.

Year: 2022

Researcher:
Eldan Cohen, Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering, University of Toronto

Student: 
Ava Oveisi, University of Toronto

Through SUDS, undergraduate students engage in hands-on research focused on data sciences and AI methodology applications.