I was a bit surprised myself. I never expected to be selected… It is a very narrow gate, with an acceptance rate said to be in the single digits. Even the “Exploratory” category is said to be in the low 10% range. I would like to thank the reviewers. I am very grateful. Although the application was for four years (I actually thought I had submitted it for three… oops), I hope to conduct research that will become a major seed for development into various studies within “Pedagogy and its peripheral fields.”

The trigger was a question I had while conducting Learning Analytics research, and I wrote the proposal because I wanted to explore it. Learning Analytics is often considered a field of study in Educational Technology, cognitive science, and cognitive psychology, even though it is a combination of information science and education. I realized that what can be seen and understood through Learning Analytics ultimately comes down to how people think and feel about what they see as a result of Learning Analytics.

I have been conducting Learning Analytics research with my collaborators, Prof. Shimada, Prof. Yuta Taniguchi, and Prof. Lu Min. We have developed Learning Analytics infrastructure by utilizing highly advanced information technology created by a team of intelligent informatics researchers, with the expectation that it would lead to improvements in learning. In particular, Prof. Yuta Taniguchi and Prof. Lu considered the implementation based on the designs I conceived and handled the development. I have various expectations, such as hoping that such tools will be used in actual classes and improve students’ understanding of the lessons, but I suddenly wondered, “What do students think when they see their own learning behavior data? What will they do?”

In considering this, one keyword is “Educational Data Literacy.” You may be familiar with the term “data literacy” as it appears frequently in the news, but educational data literacy includes not only the ability to analyze data, the perspective to interpret data, or programming skills for analysis, but also the ability to think about and act on how to improve the learning environment by utilizing that data. This means that simply applying existing data literacy to education is insufficient. I discussed educational data literacy in the Learning Analytics group at the UNESCO EduSummit in Quebec, Canada, in October 2019, but we were unable to discuss it in great depth. Because the topics covered were so diverse, it was difficult to delve into a single theme. Please see the paper published in the ETRD journal for that discussion and more.

I believe Learning Analytics research can contribute significantly to this area, but when I think about what education and society will look like once this educational data literacy is cultivated, I realized that it is not enough to discuss it only within the fields of information science and Educational Technology. Furthermore, I suspect that research in this area is not being conducted much either domestically or internationally, and that the research itself has hardly progressed.

This time, I would like to proceed with the research under the title “Challenge to Construct an Educational Data Literacy Acquisition Model through the Fusion of Pedagogy and Informatics.” For the informatics side, I have invited Prof. Keishi Shimada from our university. For the Educational Technology side, in addition to myself, I have asked Prof. Goda (Kumamoto University) to join, and from the field of sociology of education, I have asked Prof. Takuya Kimura, a former colleague at the Faculty of Arts and Science who is now at the Graduate School of Human-Environment Studies at our university, and from the field of philosophy of education, Prof. Yuhi Fujita from the same graduate school, to participate. Even if I had not been selected, I am interested in how data-driven educational and learning environments appear from the perspectives of sociology of education and philosophy of education.

I am very grateful to have been selected this time. With the GIGA School Program progressing in elementary and junior high schools, we are entering an era where every child has their own terminal. Opportunities to interact with learning support systems will also increase. I believe that educational data literacy will be necessary at that time. I hope to further develop this research.

Thank you for your continued support.