Curriculum Pacing: A New Approach To Discover Instructional Practices In Classrooms

This paper examines the use of "pacing plots" to represent variations in student learning sequences within a digital curriculum. Pacing plots are an intuitive and flexible data visualizations that have a potential for revealing the diversity of blended classroom instructional models. By using curriculum pacing plots, we identified several common implementation patterns in real-world classrooms. After analyzing two years' worth of data from over 150,000 students in a digital math curriculum, we found that a PCA and K-Means clustering approach was able to discover pedagogically relevant instructional practices.