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In recent years, educational data mining has emerged as a burgeoning new area for scientific investigation. One reason for the emerging excitement about educational data mining (EDM) is the increasing availability of fine-grained, extensive, and longitudinal data on student learning. These data come from many sources, including standardized tests combined with student demographic data (for instance, www. icpsr. umich. edu/IAED), and videos of classroom interactions [22]. Extensive new data sources have been transformational in science [5] and business (being a major part of the success of key businesses such as Google, FedEx, and Wal-Mart).

In this chapter, we present an open data repository of learning data—the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center DataShop (http://pslcdatashop. org)—which we have designed to have characteristics that make it particularly useful for EDM. We discuss the ways in …